Because of its immediacy, I'll talk about SHUTTER ISLAND first.
SI is a strange movie experience, perhaps a bit frustrating. It's not the same kind of strange/frustrating mixture as a David Lynch flick, but it's an odd combination of Pulp heart and obsessive direction by Hall of Famer Martin Scorcese. When two Boston cops in 1954 proceed to investigate a patient disappearance on a fortified island insane asylum, we're assaulted by some very stylized Hitchcock themes and muscular acting by a bunch of talented people. Which is all great.
Without spoiling the thing, SI belongs in a movie sub-genre that could be called "psychovestigation", which I've just coined here. This means the mysteries behind the events you're seeing are psychologically layered to deceive and ultimately to reveal a crushing truth. This psychovestigation begins with broad strokes and eventually peels away until all that is left is a single, quavering musical string. This one note will devastate everything that has come before. This is nothing new to anyone who has read a novel since the mid-1950s, let's say around the time Jim Thompson got the idea to turn a small-town deputy sheriff into a psychopathic killer in THE KILLER INSIDE ME (1952).
The narration slews reality all over the place, and is often much more subtle than in the movies. Novels get it right by virtue of hard work. Movies just set up flimsy cut-outs of various symbology like targets at a shooting range, knocking them down one by one until nothing is left. It's the timing and execution of the targets which gives the audience the satisfaction of a psychological tale well told, or a complete fabrication forcing them to bleat for their money back.Examples of "psychovestigation" in movies are widely varied, and has become more prominent since the iconic USUAL SUSPECTS circa 1995, when Keyser Soze revealed himself as a devil of inordinate imagination. This sub-genre has surrealistic elements which play to the strengths of the visual medium. JACOB'S LADDER pre-dated USUAL SUSPECTS by five years, yet works half as well and doesn't reinvigorate the psychological drama. The two movies represent, to me, opposites of measured success where the psychovestigation is concerned; SUSPECTS works, even though its revelation is sloppy, while LADDER is tightly-wound but pretentious. The psychological drama is hard enough without an overexertion of earnestness.
Other movies have played in this arena: the excellent IDENTITY (2003), the classic MEMENTO (2000), and the horrid THE VILLAGE (2004). If you're looking for older experiments of the same kind, you can find a grim Gregory Peck in MIRAGE (1965), or a masticating Michael Caine in Oliver Stone's THE HAND (1981). Both are great films, whether you can agree with their final revelations or not.
Often, it isn't what the revelation is so much how it's pulled off. Because the audience viewing the movie, "sucked in" by the psychological layering which often gets right to the heart of being human, can feel betrayed if not played "fair" with. This has been true of most "mystery"-type genres, but in this particular movieland sub-genre, the audience backlash is instant electrocution for those responsible. M. Night and THE VILLAGE being a prime example, as no one can trust that guy ever again. Not only did the revelation suck, but the way it was handled had hackneyed pecked into it by crows.
Getting back to SHUTTER ISLAND, it's hard to argue that Scorcese and Co succeed with their psychovestigation. And yet the movie is deft, precise, and superb. Watching SHUTTER ISLAND is like watching a girl in a parade juggling a flaming baton: the feat is nothing new, but you still marvel over the execution. You know what you're getting, but it isn't something you get every day. Least not all of us are lucky enough to have flaming baton twirlers in our mundane lives, anyway.
Oh, and don't forget that the inimitable Max Von Sydow has a role in SHUTTER ISLAND. That's right, the same man who starred in all those fantastic Ingmar Bergman movies in the 1960s. Great great man.
Speaking of movies with surreality at their core, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS starts off with director Tarantino's usual flair for alluringly silky-smooth genre-play and turns into a superior revenge fantasy that makes no apologies whatsoever. It's impossible to describe the movie, other than to say there is a World War Two combat unit of killer Jews running around Europe disguising themselves as Nazis and slaughtering unsuspecting Nazi troops. And then they scalp them and perform other horrendous actions to the bodies, to create utter fear among the Germans. There's a Nazi detective/officer nicknamed "the Jew Hunter." All of the Nazi high command ends up in this flick, along with a German war hero known as the "German Sgt. York." Tarantino doesn't even begin to worry about whether you have any inkling of who the Basterds are, as people.
Because they aren't people, they are the rage of the murdered Jews led by a Tennessee-born hardcase named Aldo Ray (after the actor
from BATTLE CRY and THE GREEN BERETS, among many movies War and otherwise) with a hanging noose rope-burn on his throat. Or perhaps a near-strangulation scar or knife slice. The thing is, you don't know, but it's fun to speculate on exactly how Captain Ray got his scar. Because in between what we see and what we think is the truth. And no matter how critical we get of Tarantino, the man knows how to provide just enough detail to create a scarecrow worth getting excited over. And INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS turns out to be a very well-made scarecrow indeed.
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