WANTED: GOOD DESIGN

Dear Switzerland,

Please help.

Sincerely,
New York

VINYL VINO

The brilliance of this vinyl sticker is the pleasing way in which a real object that you already own becomes the star of the art work. Kind of makes Duchamp a lot less exciting.

ABSOLUT WORLD

Absolut wild posting. Houston Street, New York.

While the simplicity and unity of the colour palette and typography make for a beautiful poster, I really don't care about some absolut fantasy world I know nothing about that is the basis of this campaign. I am in this world and I will live, die and drink my vodka here.

EVEN HITLER HATES COMIC SANS

Arial? Mistral? Papyrus? Schweine!

Watch it here

GUERNICA

Picasso, Pablo. Guernica. 1937. Oil on canvas. 25' 6" x 11' 5"

In 1884 a serious earthquake struck Malaga. A three year old was whisked through the town, his eyes wide in awe and horror at the contorted and screaming faces, bodies lying in the street, and collapsed horses and other farm animals left half-dead. This highly observant child plunged deep into the chaos and looked on at the scene around him, confused and disoriented, but curious. The boy's mother, writhing and screaming in pain amidst the destruction and turmoil, gave birth to his sister that very night before him.

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

OBJECTS OF CO-DEPENDENCY

Just Between You and Me

Just Keeping an Eye on You

From a series by Keetra Dean Dixon. Let the imagination fill in the blanks.

GLORIOUS INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Don't call it a movie. This is a film.

Much of the brilliance of this film arises from the ways in which writer and director Quentin Tarantino playfully toys with what audiences and film theorists expect in a genre film. Inglourious Basterds is technically a contemporary western, however Tarantino sets out to either break or modify all of the traditional codes inherent in the genre. Check it out:

Code: Good guy wears a white hat
Modified Code: Good guy wears a white tuxedo

Code: Takes place in the American West
Modified Code: Features lead character from American West
Modified Code: Opening scene is in the country that visually resembles the American Great Plains

Code: There's a saloon or bar where both hero and villain drink hard liquor
Modified Code: The villain drinks a glass of milk

Code: There's a big shoot out at the end
Modified Code: The film is one big shoot out -- Pvt. Fredrick Zoller's film, which carries the plot along, is entirely a shoot out

We're all used to the same formula wrapped up in a happy little package: the set-up, the conflict, the tease of a resolution, and finally the resolution. Tarantino distorts multiple macro and micro aspects of the film so that it first violates our schema for genre; and then he distorts the narrative by breaking the rules of history in a pleasantly unexpected way. Cinematically, his attention to detail through words and mise-en-scene imprints certain images and moments in our minds. The result is a real auteur film right up there with Truffaut, Renoir and Hitchcock that derives its strength from the director also being at the helm of the screenplay.

The Characters
They're incredibly well-developed. Many of the characters get their own songs as they are introduced in the film and they each have such individual quirks that they become complex and memorable. For example, "White Lightning" by Charles Bernstein for Lt. Aldo; "Slaughter" by Billy Preston for Stiglitz; and "The Surrender" by Ennio Morricone for Sgt. Donowitz. Another detail that gets images and scenes to stick in viewers' minds is the use of a memorable nick-name. Inglourious Basterds is loaded with good ones: "The Bear Jew" and "The Jew Hunter". Even the characters' actual names are deliberately one of a kind: Shosanna, Aldo, Landa, von Hammersmark, Zoller, Wilhelm Wicki.

The Soundtrack
Just because we're in WWII doesn't mean we have to listen to the same old WWII swing music. Tarantino pops out of the period by including non-diegetic music like a song by David Bowie. And really, why the hell should we absolutely have to transport our mindsets to the 1940s when we're viewing right now in the 2000s? As mentioned above, to give his characters more depth and weight Tarantino bestows some with an entrance theme song, each being appropriate not only in terms of title and lyrics, but actual mood and feel of the song. The use of music simply for relevant lyrics is the mark of a true simpleton director.

Language
Throughout the film Tarantino outwardly plays with the roles of viewer and director so that our existing expectations of language are jostled. In the first scene in which Col. Landa is introduced the exchange is, as expected, in French with English subtitles. But then Landa, the character, says to LaPadite for us, the audience, let's use English; they then resume their conversation in English. It seems to be a snide way of poking fun at the absurdity of other films that use dialogue in other languages just to remain historically and culturally accurate. A film is a creative work of art that doesn't necessarily have to be so accurate. Tarantino comes back to again mock language used for language's sake during the tavern scene in which the Basterds have a meeting with von Hammersmark. Lt. Hicox' German accent is "off" according to one of the enemy SS soldiers, which then sets off one of Tarantino's trademark Mexican stand-off scenes. There is one more stab at language during the climax of the movie premiere. This time Tarantino brings to light the embarrassing truth that Americans only know English and are stupidly limited when a second language is needed.

Let's not forget the title of the film and its intentional misspelling. "Basterds" could refer to the uneducated George Bush-style American stupidity that Aldo represents. "Inglourious" could have simply been misspelled simply to match "Basterds" or it could be, like many of Tarantino's other touches, a way of distinguishing the film as one of a kind to stand out amongst war movies (especially 1977's The Inglorious Bastards). The idea of labeling this renegade group as honorless when they doing what Americans should have done during Hitler's reign seems nonsensical. It was the American public and the government present during WWII that were the actual inglorious ones, as they were too high up on a morality horse to assasinate an evil dictator. Or too inept to do so (but I don't buy that).

The Shot
Auteur directors usually scrutinize every single shot so that frames are staged in artful ways independent of the film's story or plot. The opening scene of Inglourious contains frames that are very unbalanced with many vertical lines striking through the filmic landscape; the way in which the axe is left slicing into the trunk of a tree is at once malicious and violent. The shot of the axe foreshadows not only the violence that is about to come, but it also conveys a feeling of anger that comes to set the backbone of the entire vengeful narrative.

Notice anything especially visually compelling in the opening scene? The colour palette and presence of props and landscape is kept to a minimum for a clean and striking impact. The shots are not cluttered with stuff so that select props stand out very markedly: the axe, the glass of white milk. Many of the scenes are clean by sticking with one predominant colour or similar blend of colours such as the luscious, saturated reds of the movie premiere theater scene: the red Nazi flags sumptuously draped all over Shosanna's theater, the red of Shosanna's plump lips, and the fluttering sensuality of Shosanna's elegant red dress. These deep reds are also function collectively to foreshadow the blood bath that is to come. By exploiting the richness of colour Tarantino gives a level of depth to the film so that it stains our collective consciousness.

Narrative
Finally. A WWII movie in which Hitler actually gets killed. It's about time. For so many years audiences have gotten so accustomed to WWII movies that stay so true to history that it is expected that Hitler lives, at least until his own suicide. Tarantino exploits our deep desire for the evil one to be toppled so that the resolution of the film is intensely satisfying. After all, it is a western.

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