Okay, this is driving me crazy.  Everyone should know this now, but let’s review, anyway.

It’s a cliche to say that making a motion picture is a highly collaborative art, but it’s certainly true.  However, it is generally accepted that the person most responsible for the content, tone, style and details of a film is the film’s director.

Another important role in making a film is the producer.  The producer’s role can be many things, but in general she is the person who gathers the money and other resources necessary so that the director can make the movie.

Lorenzo di Medici was Michelangelo’s patron early in his career.  Without him, we wouldn’t have the David.  But we don’t refer to “Medici’s David, ” do we?  No, we acknowledge that its creator is Michelangelo.

The same is true with film.  Some film directors, like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, become such big stars themselves that putting their name on a movie (even though they’re only the producer) can help sell the movie.  I don’t spite anyone trying to get their movie seen, but it always depresses me when I see marketing folks counting on the intellectual laziness of the American public.

The other day I was at the Arclight Hollywood catching up on my moviegoing and I overheard a gaggle of theater patrons referring to “that new Tim Burton movie.”  They were discussing, of course, the animated feature 9, which is an interesting film, but NOT A TIM BURTON FILM. 

I almost interrupted them to say, “Actually, it’s a Shane Acker film.  Burton just paid for it, ” but as I am the picture of restraint I said nothing.

But Burton has long gotten away with this.  People still think of The Nightmare Before Christmas as a “Tim Burton film, ” when it’s actually a Henry Selick film.  Burton produced it and wrote the story the screenplay is based on.

If you MUST refer to an animated film as a “Tim Burton film, ” you may do so with The Corpse Bride, which he co-directed. 

I’m glad I could straighten this out for everyone.  Carry on.

I finally saw Quentin Tarantino’s new epic Inglourious Basterds. I really admire three of Tarantino’s films. That is, the first three: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. I hated Kill Bill and sort of enjoyed his contribution to Grind House.

 I didn’t love Inglourious Basterds. It’s okay. It’s very long and talky, and even though Tarantino does talky very well, that doesn’t mean he should indulge himself beyond what makes the movie better.

Like everyone else who’s seen the movie, I admired the impressive performance by Christoph Waltz, the quadrilingual Nazi villain.

 But for me the big pleasant surprise of the movie was the performance of Michael Fassbender as Lt. Archie Hicox. Hicox goes behind enemy lines posing as a German in order to help set up an ambitious ambush.

Hicox is only in a couple of scenes, but his last one is quite long. I’ve only seen Fassbender in one other film, 300, in which I admired his abs, but that movie wasn’t really about acting. And the abs were probably CGI, anyway.

Fassbender recently starred as the ill-fated Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands in a movie called Hunger. He was also in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which I tried to watch but had to give up because it was so boring.

Fassbender himself is Irish and German, and his fluent German came in handy for his role in Inglourious Basterds. In the movie Fassbender displays an uncommon degree of charisma and intensity. The fairly sleepy movie really woke up when he walked on screen.

Fassbender has several new films in the works, and I look forward to seeing him do other things.

How’s a moviegoer to keep track?

There are three, count’em, THREE movies with nine in the title either in theaters or coming up.

There’s the newly-released District 9, about illegal aliens in South Africa.

Then there’s the upcoming September release of 9, the animated post-apocalyptic story starring sock puppets.

Finally, there’s the big-budget film adaptation of the Broadway musical Nine, which disappointingly stars Super Thespian Daniel Day-Lewis.

All I can say is it’s a good thing that the underrated Ryan Reynolds existential adventure The Nines has already been released, and so doesn’t add to the confusion!