Green Zone v Inglourious Basterds

Q: What connects Inglourious Basterds, Rogue Male, Valkyrie, The Dead Zone?





A: ps would it help if the list also included the 1990 TV movie The Plot to Kill Hitler? Because one way or another they all feature plots or at least the idea to assassinate the fuhrer. Mild spoiler warning here, but in one significant way Inglourious Basterds is the odd one out in this list is to and that is not the only way in which Tarantino's film is an odd work of art or pulp fiction or meta-movie-making or whatever it is. It's a bizarre movie, a deranged hymn to the literally incendiary power of film and, for all its flaws - it's uneven and overlong - is one of the writer-director's most brilliant efforts to date, a fitting companion piece to Pulp Fiction. To say that it plays fast and loose with historical fact is not so much an understatement as to wilfully miss the point of the film. It is a response, whether conscious or not, to the statement, one often made when a given film is shown to be misrepresenting the historical truth it purports to represent, that: "It's only a movie." Tarantino is, aside from serving up a peculiar, singular piece of entertainment, saying that "it's a movie" but there's no such thing as "only" a movie, that a film is powerful and that, whatever a film-maker's obligation to the truth, to facts, to history, whatever the supposed rules of film-making are, a film can be and do whatever its makers want it to be and do. Paul Greengrass, much of whose career has been spent straddling the worlds of movie-making and the relating of politically charged historical events, has come just a little unstuck in his latest attempt to be simultaneously an entertainer and political soothsayer. Green Zone works, to an extent, as a popcorn movie, it's fast-paced in that frenetic, jerky way that has become Greengrass's signature style, but the dialogue is disappointingly cliche-laden and the plot - essentially a one-note WMD conspiracy thriller that rings true on almost no level - is borderline ludicrous. Film-makers don't necessarily have to tell the truth 24 frames a second, but if they are going to lie at least they have to lie openly and honestly.



Who's the odd one out of Rod Taylor, Michael J Fox, Malcolm McDowell and Guy Pearce?



The answer to the last quiz (a while back) is the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar. McKay played Welles playing Brutus in his 1937 Mercury Theatre stage production, Mason appeared as Brutus in the 1953 film and Robards in the 1970 production.