Berner never fails to irk me.  http://www.thetyee.ca/Entertainment/current/ AgainstTarantino.htm" title="http://www.thetyee.ca/Entertainment/current/ AgainstTarantino.htm" target="_blank"http://www.thetyee.ca/Enterta...    He is a man without depth.  In order to make a point he never goes beyond the platitudes, received wisdom, and patent falsehoods received as gospel by 50 something white middle class males.  He does not openly belittle nuance, a la George Bush, but it does not sit well with him.

In stereotypical fashion Berner can not resist the temptation to tar his opponents with some sort of totalitarian brush.  Whether it is painting anti-globalization crowd as a bunch of Maoists or in this case comparing the polymorphous perverse QT with of all people Leni Riefenstahl, Berner is not able to grasp that the rightwing cold war critique of Leftists being in bed with totalitarianism is, well, quaint – akin to a child keeping his security blanket well after other kids have given up theirs.  Did it ever dawn on him and his peers that Marx is dead and that Chomsky the grandfather of the New Left, is, if nothing else, an anarchist.         

“I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. And it’s just, like, Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did, you’re a fucking lair.”  Berner takes the above as proof that QT’s musings are as superficial and as shallow as his films and that the man like his films lack any sort of moral center.  It never occurs to him that QT is spot on with what he says here.  In the wake of Clockwork Orange, there were a few rapes in which the attacker broke out into song.  “I am singing in the rain.”  So, naturally Kubrick was probably a little sensitive about the subject and maybe even convinced himself over the years that he had really made a movie “against violence”.  However, the decision to draw up a scene in which someone is raped to the sounds of I am singing in the rain was a true master stroke; it might have even made a man hard; it was so clever. What the viewer sees before him is so very at odds with what is associated with the song.  Kubrick, of course, did not promote violence – what film maker intentionally does? -- but he made what is a very base and very cruel act seem almost artful and QT thought Kubrick should have owned up to this Frankenstein.    

“Tarantino’s movies are never about anything so much as they are about movies and the history of movies. Now you could say the same thing about Steven Spielberg. But at some point, Mr. Spielberg went beyond his own technical proficiencies and began making movies with content. You know, story, characters, all that silly, old-fashioned stuff.”   Ok let us be frank, as story teller Spielberg is at best average.  What makes Spielberg a great film maker is his “own technical proficiencies” and this goes for his earlier films as well as his later films.  Take Saving Private Ryan.  What makes Saving Private Ryan so memorable is not the story, but the movie’s opening half hour. 

Saving Private Ryan is also memorable in Tarantino type way by intentionally breaking down accumulated Hollywood wisdom as to how certain scenes should play out.  Take the scene where American soldier accidentally brings done a damaged wall of a house and in the process reveals a number of concealed German soldiers. Shown to be but a few feet away from each other, the stand off between the two equally matched sides is made all the more intense by Spielberg switching from a close up of the Germans to a close of Americans. However, rather than having one side throw done their arms to avoid an unnecessary slaughter, as is usual movie protocol, Spielberg has a second group of Americans massacre the Germans before the eyes of the first group.    

Saving Private Ryan also introduced a whole whack of scenes which have found their way into other films.  The landing craft scene is reproduced in the Volga crossing in Enemy at the Gate; the scene were soldiers are shot under water found its way into Pearl Harbour and Solider picking up half bodies, or limbs found its way into Black Hawk Down.  After Saving Private Ryan the way war movies were shot changed for ever and I might add for the better.       

As for Tarantino’s movies being devoid of content, what sort of anti-intellectual fossilized totalitarian mindset would dictate that movies all be narrative and liner and QT’s brand of bringing subconscious movie structures in consciousness worthless.