Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino and Pitt, both great, weird talents, in what sounds like a truly weird World War II flick. Title mispelling apparently is an artistic statement. I’ll watch anything with Brad Pitt in it, and anything made by Tarantino. I’m also partial to movies in which Nazis get splattered. And with Tarantino, you know they’re really going to get splattered, and Pitt’s going to have a good time doing it. So I guess I’ll watch this:
CANNES, France (Reuters) – U.S. director Quentin Tarantino rolls a Western, gangster flick and wartime caper into one in “Inglourious Basterds,” a new film starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a ruthless gang of Nazi-slayers. So fearsome is the band of Jewish-American “bastards” that Adolf Hitler himself comes to hear of them, and the violent and action-packed narrative weaves real life figures into a riotous and fanciful plot that re-writes history.
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Early reviews have been mixed.
Hollywood publication Variety’s Todd McCarthy said the movie improved halfway through, “after which it’s off to the races,” but Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it a “catastrophe” and like “some colossal armor-plated turkey from hell.”
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The narrative opens in the first year of the German occupation of France, where character Shosanna Dreyfus witnesses the execution of her family at the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, flamboyantly played by Christoph Waltz.
Elsewhere in Europe, Pitt’s character Aldo Raine forms a group of soldiers charged with scalping their Nazi victims.
Diane Kruger plays a famous German actress who is also an undercover agent on a mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich. The strands converge on a small Parisian cinema where history is turned on its head in an explosive climax.
Much of the humor in Inglourious Basterds stems from language. Americans’ reputations for speaking nothing other than English is a recurring theme, with Pitt’s limited Italian comically exposed by the polyglot Landa.
Reuters leaves out a lot of critical detail, though there’s some fun chatter about Tarantino and Pitt sounding each other out in an extended drinkfest.
”I got up the next morning and I saw five empty bottles of wine laying on the floor … and something that resembled a smoking apparatus, I don’t know what that was about,” Pitt said.
“And apparently I agreed to do the movie because six weeks later I was in uniform and I was Lieutenant Aldo Raine.”
OK, here’s some critical detail from the Times of London, whose reviewer appears to have a greater appreciation for the genre Tarantino just made up:
Tarantino’s film, which jumps like a needle on a scratchy vinyl record between three languages, bears scant resemblance to Castellari’s Italian original. Here, a small group of bloodthirsty Jewish mercenaries from America, led by Brad Pitt’s redneck, half-Apache Indian leader, land in France with the mission to put the fear of God into the Nazis. The director deploys his unrivalled army of B-movie tricks to light the way
The film starts like a spaghetti western and then accelerates into an old-fashioned wartime thriller, complete with a sumptuous plot to blow a local cinema in Paris to smithereens — and with it most of Germany’s top military brass. Bullets and blood are never far from the screen.
The Basterds, as Pitt’s gang refer to themselves, are introduced like vintage bad-ass cowboys despite the alarmingly incongruous Jewish looks. They ambush German patrols in forests, and proceed to scalp them in lurid close-up. Pitt’s leader revels in this comic and macabre campaign, toying with captives before carving swastikas into their foreheads. While German captives gabble for their lives, Pitt’s calm, Southern drawl is almost comically ruthless.
The fairytale tone of Tarantino’s picture is strikingly obvious from the opening line: “Once upon a time . . . in Nazi-occupied France”.
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On one, thrilling level Tarantino paints a surreal revenge fantasy where some of the most toxic villains in history get their grisly dues. The brief glimpse of Hitler with his bullet-ridden face almost perforated beyond recognition made the Cannes audience gasp. But by measuring his film against that of Goebbels, the director asks whether pulp is any better than propaganda. In this sense it is Tarantino’s most sophisticated film since part one of Kill Bill.
Colossal armor-plated turkey from hell? I dunno, sounds like a romp. Bloody, explosive slash romp. How big a bomb could it possibly be? If it is one sounds like it will be colossal. Bloody colossal.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:58 pm Comments (4) on Thursday, May 21, 2009
4 Responses to “Inglourious Basterds”
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May 21st, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I wish somebody had given me a spoiler warning about the Hitler thing.
May 21st, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Sounds like a winner to me.
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:41 am
Complain to Drudge, Treacher. It was in his TOL hed. Good point, though I see it as more of a tease.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
A redneck Apache leading Jews on a revenge kill spree in France during WW2?
I’m not a movie goer, but I’am gonna go see this’n.