dante's inferno [2007]
& hell itself is made of strip clubs & strip malls, used car lots, red light districts, gated communities etc. etc. hell is america populated by american bad guys & organizations. for the most part. we get some other early 21st C international bad guys too. remember, this film was made at the height of the War on Terror. so the usual suspects of that war make their appearances here too. & yet, what keeps this film buzzing is the humor. some moments are really very fucking funny. & the characters we meet, such as the poets stuck in purgatory, like ovid & homer, ask their friend virgil to bring them back smokes - menthols! - & wine. i can relate!
did i mention that this is a puppet show? because that fact is what really sells this film. the filmmakers can take liberties with their puppets that might seem exaggerated if it was done live action. i suppose animation would work too. but the puppets allow this film to really hit the gas on its humor while maintaining a kind of horrible gravitas. dante might be a poet but he is also an everyman thrust into the sublime. when he catches glimpses of beatrice [she's the one who organized this tour thru the underworld with virgil] he gets all tongue-tied & silly. cuz dante is crazy ga-ga insane over the woman. indeed, when dante first meets virgil he recognized the roman poet, & admits to the greatness of his work, but when we get a brief flashback of dante during his school days when the teacher calls on dante to discuss virgil our hero was fast asleep, in his chair, in class, slacker that he is. relatable!
at any rate, this movie is based on a graphic novel authored by the filmmakers. it might be a few years old but man when we meet the rascals in the circles of hell they are still so much part of our contemporary american culture & polity. hell, as sartre said, is other people. hell, i say, is hell which we can see right now in all that surrounds us. hell, is even, dare i say it, us.
