The Anti-Blockbuster

Now on DVD, Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" arrives to save cinema as we know it.

It is, in all of its zesty ramshackleness, a model of grown-up, eloquent, unpretentious moviemaking, and the fact that it is also an incurable crowd-pleaser, and that millions loved it despite the absence of attention-deficit super-editing or CGI flash or comic book childishness, makes it a gift, a deliverance via lovable cinemania. (It’s pulled in over $300 mil globally.) I’d hate to see Tarantino get any more messianic than he seems to be already, but he might just be the salvation of movies, as the art form we’ve come to love over the last century and miss so very much.

True to its pedigree, “Basterds” is as invigorating to think about as it is to see. It doesn’t stay in its box, or submit itself to a one-line synopsis, or even linger in the memory as “only a movie,” but, instead, as a moment in your life. Maybe it wasn’t a transcendental or enlightening moment, maybe it wasn’t so long ago that you remember it with meaning, yet maybe it was just a moment where someone grabbed your arm because movies seemed to them to be a matter of life or death. But you were alive, goddammit, and you didn’t forget.

What Pauline Kael used to called “moviemaking fever” (apropos of Brian De Palma, as often as not) is not as common a quantity as you’d think; all I see in the average recycle/sequel blockbuster is a love of money. Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” is an authentic anti-blockbuster — a one-woman, home-computer-fashioned animation that took years to make but may’ve cost nothing at all — and what it’s got at its disposal is visual invention and ardor by the boatload.

Paley tells the story of the Ramayana, an Indian folktale about love and betrayal and mistrust, full of demi-gods and demons, and she does it in over a half-dozen different distinct styles, including the narrative intervention of three ornate silhouette puppets, whose voices belong to three young Indians actually telling the story and deciphering it for gender politics and emotional truth.

Part of Paley’s gambit here is her knack for synthesis — the cartoon myth is carried home by way of 11 old torch songs recorded 80 years ago by Annette Hanshaw, old classics by the likes of Irving Berlin, Fats Waller and Oscar Hammerstein II, each of them adorned with vibrating, loosey-goosey, crayon-box animated dance numbers/music videos that capture something fundamentally fun about movies. But it’s her impish use of movement and iconography that sings. Watch the curvaceous, googly-eyed heroine shimmy across her 2D landscapes, as well as Paley’s background business, a psychedelic explosion of dancing moons and synchronous butterflies and dreamy exaggerations, and you’ll get hit with a fresh dollop of visual wit every 15 seconds or so.

Even the battlefield gore is turned into an elaborate and hilarious dance routine. Though it has popped up around the country in spurts (as it will at New York’s IFC Center next week), “Sita” never enjoyed a traditional theatrical release, but became something of an online sensation, perhaps fitting for a movie both out of sync with its moment — so modest, so handmade — and yet absolutely timely in its DIY aesthetic and reliance on nothing except its artist’s eye and sensibility.

“Inglourious Basterds” (Universal Studios) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; “Sita Sings the Blues” (IndiePix) is now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: "Sita Sings the Blues," IndiePix, 2008]

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