Bastards glorious and not

Richard Linklater ranks near the top of my favorite directors now in their prime, so I was surprised by my lukewarm response to his latest film, Me and Orson Welles (2009, MC-73), which has a surprising gloss and an equally surprising lack of heart or invention.  Christian McKay is definitely an impressive Orson Welles, odious but enthralling; on the other hand Zac Efron is a very bland Me, in this familiar backstage story of an ambitious teen falling in with the barely-out-of-his-teens (though you wouldn’t know it from this film) Welles, during the Mercury Theater’s inaugural with a stripped-down production of Shakespeare’s Caesar.  Claire Danes graces the film with her presence, as a Vassar grad determined to get connected in show business, and Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, and John Houseman are plausibly incarnated to recreate the Wellesian repertory on and off stage.  There’s really nothing wrong with this film except for the hole at its center, and the overall sense of having seen this story before.  But I expect more of Rick – this is more like his remake of Bad News Bears than breakthroughs such as Waking Life, Tape, and the sublime diptych Before Sunrise/Before Sunset. 

Can a moral midget make a film of worth?  I doubt it.  Knowing the sensibility at work, I surmounted my aversion and watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with a grudging willingness to see past my preemptive dismissal of what some consider one of the best films of 2009 (MC-69).  There was indeed some smooth moviemaking on view (and an Oscar-worthy performance by Christoph Waltz), with many nudges in the ribs of cinephiles, but the extreme ugliness of Tarantino’s temperament kept popping through, and surged in crescendo at the climax, reveling in revenge and essentially endorsing terrorism and torture.  So I got through it, but felt unclean afterwards -- say no more about it.  I will probably run the same experiment with Antichrist, by the equally loathsome Lars von Trier, when it comes out on dvd next month, so I can say I’ve seen all the so-called best films of last year as tabulated on various critics’ polls.