The American film industry was in bad shape in the 60’s, crippled by the breakup of the studios, the arrival of TV, and the fragmentation of the audience.  It was rescued by a new generation of filmmakers we call the Hollywood Renaissance, mostly graduates of film schools who brought along new generational attitudes and aesthetics.  Their aesthetics were much influenced by what they had watched in film school: lots of European films, especially the French New Wave, notably “Breathless,” steeped in the aesthetics of modernism (fragmentation, formalism, difficulty, self-reference, distancing, the license of authorship).  The breakout films of the Hollywood Renaissance (“Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “2001,” “The Wild Bunch,” etc.) were full of modernist aesthetics. “Raging Bull” is their fruition.        

In taking the life of 1940’s middleweight champ Jake LaMotta as its material, “Raging Bull” gained access to multiple layers of self-referencing history; the entire post-WWII era, its films, even personal histories.  As film history, it invokes the prizefight film, a sub-genre of film noir (“Golden Boy,” “Body and Soul,” “Champion,” “The Harder They Fall”) as melodramas of struggle and betrayal, but much more seriously, the gangster genre itself, which through Coppola’s landmark “The Godfather” had become the dominant genre mythology of the 70’s.  Scorsese counters Coppola’s family epic cum pagan opera with a world of busted families and predatory crooks, through which the solitary Jake must pass in his lonely spiritual quest, a thrilling dispute that Coppola would take up in “The Godfather Part III.”  This self-referencing history oscillates, from the deep background of the film medium itself, which signals the arrivals of color film and TV, to a place where Jake stands in for the solitary film artist in the independent production era, to a foreground nod to Scorsese’s family photos, his father as gangster, even himself in the last scene. 

Formally, “Raging Bull” fully accepts the modernist challenge of fighting the war against convention at the front lines.  The use of black and white, hand-held camera, and slow-motion modulate the film’s distancing effects; the Expressionist design and low-key lighting are master classes; the editing brilliant in its breathtaking liberties; and of course the sound.  The great formal contribution of the Hollywood Renaissance was the total reinvention of motion picture sound, technologically and aesthetically, from “American Graffiti” and “The Conversation” on.  “Raging Bull” continues this adventure, editing sound against image, changing speeds of each independently, performing montage purely in audio, and even pursuing the elusive Expressionist soundtrack. 

As if these formal adventures are not enough, “Raging Bull” gives us one of the great meditations on film acting, which after WWII means method acting.  More than the sixty pounds De Niro would put on during production, every single instant of the film is freighted with the testing of method acting for its promised sense of authenticity, as against classical discipline (“though I’m no Olivier…”), even against it’s greatest performances (Brando’s “I could have been a contender” speech). 

The issue of difficulty is tricky.  Boxing, among the earliest of motion pictures subjects, is easy.  It comes right to you in a violent, vulgar way, like popular entertainment.  Opera, from another time in another language, can be difficult, requiring a lot of work by the audience, like high art.  “Raging Bull” begins with both, Jake shadow boxing in slow motion in a dream ring to the Intermezzo of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” now high art but in its day an anti-romantic tale of brutal peasant passion, much like “Raging Bull.”  It’s a shifting frame, inviting us to consider both the fighter and the filmmaker as artists one instant and buffoons the next.  The film continually shifts this frame of violence and beauty, of entertainment and art.  The fights themselves will serve as both Jake’s and Scorsese’s arias, deeply felt songs of pure lyrical passion, but in the end Scorsese is a stagehand and Jake a clown, declaring, “That’s entertainment.” 

If opera is difficult, how about Catholicism?  Scorsese said early on that only two things were important to him, film and religion.  This is a film that insists you take its religious dimension and Jake’s spiritual voyage seriously.  For Scorsese, it is less the ritual, ceremonial Catholicism of Coppola’s films, but more the Jesuit sense of a lonely and painful spiritual journey.  It is appropriate that boxing is essentially solitary.  Jake passes through crystalline moments transgression, guilt, penance, and, perhaps, absolution.  Perhaps Jake achieves some grace at the end. 

After “Raging Bull” it becomes more and more difficult to bridge the gap between entertainment and art, and motion pictures increasingly veer towards either the surefire pleasures of comic books or the smug elitist pleasures of post-modernism. 

Amazingly “Raging Bull” manages to hold all its aspects and purposes together.  Somehow we know that it is sincere, that it does not speak to us falsely, through silliness or irony.  It’s the real deal.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself. 

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office. 

Tarantino knew it was time to dig deep if he was ever going to recover his relevance, and the result was this summer’s smash “Inglourious Basterds,” which radically re-imagines WWII history with its focus on Brad Pitt leading a team of the US military’s toughest Jews on a mission to kill and scalp as many Nazis as possible – before a series of ingenious plot twists give the team of Basterds a shot at taking down Hitler himself. The film has proved to be a smash hit with critics and audiences alike. Following a smash $38 million opening that was by far Tarantino’s biggest ever, it also proved to have legs, placing in the top 3 a full four weeks after its release – a staggeringly uncommon occurrence that has earned it nearly $110 million with no end in sight. 

Sitting down for a Q&A at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Tarantino offered plenty of insights into the creative process behind “Basterds” and the rich sense of film history that permeates its multi-layered entertainment. Since the film is entering its 5th weekend in theatres, giving people plenty of chances to see the film already, I’m including some of the questions that feature minor spoiler details.  

BIG HOLLYWOOD: It’ll surprise people how little the Basterds are actually in the film. Should we preserve that? 

QUENTIN TARANTINO: If you consider the Basterds the six guys in the background of Pitt, yeah they become incidental to the mission itself once the story goes on. To me, the story has three leads: Aldo (Pitt’s character), Shoshanna (a Jewish woman who escapes a Nazi slaughter) and Landa (the most ruthless Nazi). The first 3 chapters are setting up these leads, and Chapters 4 and 5 are now the adventure begins. You can also say everyone in the movie is an inglourious basterd, not just the little group. 

BH: This is a movie that shows a love for cinema… 

QT: I would definitely say so. One thing that cracked me up when I was first writing the first scene between Zoller (a Nazi who tries to charm Soshanna) and Soshanna and they’re debating (classic film directors) Linder vs. Chaplin, or he’s debating and she’s listening, I thought ‘OK I go make my WWII movie and it becomes a love letter to cinema.’ I guess I cannot not have that love show. 

BH: You’ve done wonders for epic film, can do 2 ½ hours to tell a complex story. Should studios let others do that? 

QT: I don’t see most movies holding to the traditional 90 minute format. Romantic comedies are 100 minutes these days. The new time frame now normally seems to be 2:10, 2:15, for any film trying to do something beyond a little comedy or horror film. But everything needs the time that it needs. I think that my movie is exactly the right length to tell my story and be entertaining. I can cut 20 minutes and make it seem longer because it becomes disjointed or abrupt, and you don’t feel as involved. But here you can say ‘wow that really flew by.’ When I went to Cannes, we hadn’t watched it with an audience. So we did, heard what didn’t work and then spent two days nipping it and it wound up a minute longer – but it feels 12 minutes shorter. 

BH: How long did you work on this film? 

QT: I put pen to paper on this at first in ‘98, around the time of  “Jackie Brown.” People said along the way that Schwarzenegger would be in it, but that was all rumors. I’m not against him, but some said Bruce Willis, Stallone – none of that ever came from me. 

BH: When you started, was it a more traditional war movie? 

QT: It changed, but what gets me to sit down and write something in the first place is something, usually a very thin idea. “Reservoir Dogs” was bam, sit down and write a heist movie. You don’t see the heist, but still it’s a heist movie. Then I hope I get beyond that and it becomes its own thing, but hopefully still developing the pleasures of the genre I’m dipping my toe into. Yet the whole idea is to expand beyond it. How this has changed from what I came up with then is I had a different storyline in mind way back when, I wrote the first two chapters to introduce the characters but the story I had was just too big. I had the opposite of writers’ block, I couldn’t stop writing. And like (his idol, Italian director) Sergio Leone, I couldn’t introduce a character without giving them a 20 minute scene. I had to go back to it, realizing I had to get over myself thinking I can’t work on that puny a canvas of 3 hours. So I did “Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2,” then I came back with a new story, and the new story is one about (Nazi) Frederick Zoller being like a German Audie Murphy (a famed American soldier turned actor) character who gets a movie made about him, and the mission would be the blowing up of the actual premiere of the film. 

BH: What would you like us to say about the alternate history of the film? 

QT: I don’t want you to say who gets killed, but you can say there is a point in the movie where history went one way and we went another. My idea was my characters changed the course of the war. It didn’t happen because they didn’t exist, but if they had existed it would all be fairly plausible. 

BH: You have a real passion for cinema and use touchstones from the past in your current films. Out of current films or the past 20 years, anything that inspires you? 

QT: I just wrote down my top 20 movies of the past 17 years that I’ve been directing. I was happy to find it was hard to break it down to 20. There’s a lot of terrific filmmakers out now, like my contemporary Paul Thomas Anderson. I feel I’m Marlon Brando to his Montgomery Clift. But that was an interesting reality. Brando and Clift were better actors because they always knew the other was there. I remember something that when I met Brian DePalma, a hero of mine, he was talking about having a friendly rivalry with Scorsese. While he was doing “Scarface,” a big epic with Pacino, and on a day off went to see “Raging Bull.” And that opening shot of rain, slow-motion, Jake LaMotta dancing and he thought, “Ugh, there’s always Scorsese. No matter how good you are or what you do, he’s always looking back at you.” But in last couple decades, great directors would include Paul, Robert Rodriguez, Richard Linklater – not because we’re friends, but we’re friends because we respond to their aesthetic. I’m not friends with David Fincher but I love his work. To me, some of the best cinema on earth is coming out of Korea. They’re amazing. Just two guys have done five of the best 20 films of the past ten years. 

BH: Are there any good B-movies left nowadays? 

QT: I wanted to see “Get Snow,” that Norwegian Nazi zombie movie. Straight to video, there was something lost by losing the theatrical experience, but now films on DVD with no theatrical release in America will get them overseas.. Who thought overseas fans would all of a sudden get into the horror film in a big way like “High Tension.” Or these Spanish horrors released by Dimension Extreme. These are very extreme movies, very few of Japanese horrors play US theaters, you watch them on DVD. I actually have seen “Kurosawa’s Pulse” at theaters, but most find it on DVD. It’s different than when Roger Corman had Concorde and they just put out their films straight to video. Every month I read Video Watchdog to see if something cool has reared its head. Is there a “Lost Boys 4?” 

BH: Where does (the main Nazi villain) Landa rank among your characters? 

QT: When I wrote him, I knew not only is he one of the best characters I’ve ever written, he’s the best I ever will write. One of the things I felt happy about with that sequence at the opening, I always felt that there’s this weird aspect that my scenes a lot of times are meant to stand alone the way you would listen to a greatest hits album. And in that self-aggrandizing analogy, I’d say the Sicilian scene in “True Romance” [a verbal confrontation between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper] was my best work. I knew I’d come close, but never top that. But when I wrote the opening scene in this movie, with the Jew Hunter and the French farmer, I thought, ‘I did it!’ That’s up to you to decide of course, though. 

BH: On a typical day, what’s your routine on set? What’s your ritual? 

QT: The bar sequence (of “Basterds”) was like a little movie unto itself, or a one-act play – so much so that I had people do the whole sequence in one long run. By the third day of rehearsal we had that scene down. A scene like that, there’s a lot of dexterity going on, because you have one table with Bridget and our boys, and the other table with Nazis and they’re playing a game. It was like a one-act play, so much so that I asked in rehearsals if we could wind up doing it as one long run. The third day of rehearsal we had that thing down, and with one more week I could have taken it to the Berlin stage. What could very well happen is we’re preparing (actress Diane Kruger), working something special for her, but the whole time I’m filming the German soldiers’ game, then I move over to film what bartender is doing. Then I really get into the card game, and there’s so much dialogue in it. So I’d film it but I’d be like, “I’d like to do the other angle the next day.” A sequence like that took two weeks to shoot, it’s like its own little movie, there’s a lot of juggling elements, and when you’re figuring out the directing of it you’re figuring how to juggle and how to keep it going. 

Anybody who’s a director and gets more than 5 hours sleep a night must not be passionate. If you can sleep well, you must not be doing the job right. 

BH: In “Basterds” you bring back old actors like Rod Taylor, or reinvent someone like Mike Myers, yet sometimes you discover someone totally unexpected like Christophe Waltz (the main Nazi Landa, considered an Oscar shoo-in by most critics). Would you say this is your best casting yet? 

QT: It was the toughest, a tough delivery but we had a beautiful baby. I was precious about my casting – that whoever I cast was perfect to play the different facets of a character. Every once in a while I cast an actor who’s not my type. Hopefully, you don’t notice that but I notice that. You have to be both physical and verbal, and obviously you have to have a facility with dialogue if you’re gonna do one of my movies. You’ve gotta be hungry for it – instead of saying “Awww, I gotta learn this three page thing,” but say “Yeah! I’m gonna OWN this! It’s MINE!” and you take it and make it your own. You also gotta be smart to do my stuff. 

BH: In 17 years of doing this, what’s your biggest triumph and your biggest disappointment? 

QT: I guess the career goal that I always go to is winning the Palme d’Or for “Pulp Fiction.” There’s only one list of filmmakers more prestigious than those who’ve won it, and that’s the directors who haven’t. I took it very hard when “Grindhouse” didn’t do well. I like the movie, I’m very happy with that and what we did, and when we had an audience it played like gangbusters. I never had that kind of a flop before and it hurt my feelings, but you get over it and I’m lucky that I’m in a position to follow my muse, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

But, no. Not yet. Can’t stand any one of them. What am I doing wrong?

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2001: A Space Odyssey – Some compare this to watching paint dry, but that’s unfair because when paint dries SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

Kubrick was a genius and his intentional stripping of humanity from many of his later films may have been the point, but not always an appealing one. A film without humanity is nothing more than a cinematic coffee table book, something to flip through with your attention at half-mast during a conversation about your day at the office. “The Killing,” “Lolita,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Paths of Glory,” and “Spartacus…” those are Kubrick’s true masterworks.

“2001” they should loop at Gitmo.

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Raging Bull (1980) -Technically, “Raging Bull” has a lot going for it, but the ugliness is relentless to the point where you become numb to it. A character study should study a character worthy of your time. De Niro’s Jake La Motta just isn’t interesting. For the whole film we watch the same character act the same way. The situations change, but little else.

After 45-minutes, I get it – I get it – I get it…

Many believe “Raging Bull” wuz robbed for Best Picture by Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People.” Personally, I’d rather watch “Ordinary People” while kneeling on marbles, and my opinion of Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” is even lower.

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Vertigo (1958) – A better title might have been “Tedious.” To be fair to Hitchcock, the problem could be as simple as casting. My affection for the Golden Age is deep, but not blind, and Kim Novak wasn’t a very appealing actress. Her “Vertigo” character(s) are blah and her make-up atrocious. Therefore, the James Stewart character’s obsession with her makes little sense, which in turn keeps me at an emotional distance. Change nothing else, but put Deborah Kerr in the Novak role and my opinion might change completely. An obsession with Kerr I can relate to.

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Anything By Wes Anderson without the Word “Rushmore” in the Title – “Rushmore” is a flat out masterpiece, the rest not so much. Sure, “Bottle Rocket” is okay in that subdued indie kinda way we all feel we’re supposed to like, but Anderson’s films have slowly degraded since, starting with “The Royal Tenenbaums.” There’s no denying he’s a talented filmmaker with a unique voice, and it may just be that I hate “quirky” with the heat of a thousand suns, but the genius of “Rushmore” was the affection we felt for Jason Schwartzman’s irrepressible Max Fischer. Everything Anderson’s done since has jettisoned characters you feel something for in favor of a sterile, off-beat tone.

No thanks.

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Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 ) – Huge fan of part 2, kinda dig part 3, but the first one is just too episodic for my taste.

We’ve all got a few of these films we dislike that might get us kicked off the cool kids’ table.

Fess up.