[Movie] Inglourious Basterds

[Far Dareis Mai]

I'm really disappointed by this review--though I'm hoping that I will still be pleasantly surprised when I see it for myself. It does have some spoilers though--so read at your own risk.

 

 

CANNES -- History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino. While his 
"Pulp Fiction" arrived late at the Festival de Cannes and swept away the
 Palme d'Or in 1994, his World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds"
 merely continues the string of disappointments in this year's Competition.

 

The
 film is by no means terrible -- its running time of two hours and 32 minutes 
races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long
 stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized 
characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.


 

Boxoffice expectations for this co-production that will see the Weinstein 
Co. handling domestic and Universal handling international distribution will
 still be considerable, but there isn't much chance of the kind of repeat 
business Tarantino normally attracts.

 


The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari's 1978 World
 War II film. In Tarantino's version, a small group of Jewish-American
 soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine terrorizes Nazi
 soldiers in Occupied France, performing shocking acts of savagery and corpse 
mutilations. How close they come to war crimes is unclear since, in a very
 un-Tarantino manner, he shows little more than a few scalpings that earn
 Aldo the nickname "Apache" from the Germans and one execution by a baseball
 bat.

 


As a matter of fact, for a war movie there is very little action. People 
talk, soldiers scheme, and a German war hero pesters a French woman in Paris. 
Otherwise, the action comes in short bursts such as the machine-gunning of a
 hiding Jewish family through a farmhouse floorboards and a shootout in a
 bistro.


 

Reportedly, Tarantino has been having a go at this script for over a decade, 
and it looks like he never licked the dramatic problems. The "Basterds" are 
formed in 1941, then suddenly it's 1944 and they have firmly established
 their reputation. But only one scene gives the flavor of what they do to
 deserve it.


 

Unlike Tarantino's previous films, "Inglourious Basterds" does not build to 
a climax through a series of ingenuous episodes, each one upping the stakes
 and the tension, but rather it rolls the dice on one major operation.


 

The head of Germany's film business Joseph Goebbels wants to hold the
 premiere of a movie celebrating the exploits of the army's finest
 sharpshooter, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), in Paris. All the top Nazi brass
 will be in attendance, including Hitler. A British lieutenant (Michael
 Fassbender) parachutes behind enemy lines to organize the Basterds to blow 
up the cinema.


 

Unbeknownst to the Allies, however, the cinema's owner, Shosanna (Melanie 
Laurent), a Jew who seeks revenge for the execution of her family, has the 
same general idea only she wants to locks the doors and set the theater on 
fire. Best of all for her, the head of security for the event is none other 
than the villainous Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who killed
 her family.


 

The maneuvering by both groups, the Basterds and Shosanna and her 
lover-assistant Marcel (Jacky Ido), with the Germans always seeming to be 
one step away from discovering the schemes, occupies most of the movie 
leading up to the premiere. Then Tarantino rewrites the end of World War II.

 

There are a few moments of classic Tarantino tension in the farmhouse when 
Col. Landa interrogates the French farmer hiding a Jewish family, in the
 bistro where an SS officer grows suspicious of a Basterd's German accent and 
at the premiere where Col Landa appears to uncover one of the plots.


 

Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where
 actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy
 wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp 
fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B-movies as he
 was with "Grindhouse" nor riffing on cinema as with "Pulp Fiction" and the
 "Kill Bill" films.


 

Tarantino has been quoted as saying of "Inglourious Basterds," "This ain't
your daddy's World War II movie." In fact, it pretty much is. His
 scalp-hunters are any Dirty Dozen on a mission, the bread and butter of war
 movies. The major difference is that some fine European actors simply aren't
 given enough to do.


 

Diane Kruger's role as a German movie star is close to being unnecessary.
 Bruhl does have a key role as the war hero who plays himself in a German
 propaganda movie but Til Schweiger is little more than a dress extra.
 On the other hand, Tarantino can waste time on a scene back in England, 
where the British officer receives his orders, simply for the opportunity to
g et Mike Myers into makeup and prosthetics that make him unrecognizable.

 


Even Pitt, sporting a somewhat overdone Southern accent, and Laurent, the 
film's two leads, don't get a chance to explore their characters in any
 depth. They are who they are the minute they appear on screen and nothing 
much changes through the film.

 


In fact, in your daddy's war movies, men and women often did undergo 
interesting transformations. So perhaps Tarantino is right.




[Dunbar]

I've read a handful of reviews, and they really seem to be split on the middle. Some absolutely love it, some think it okay, and some dislike it strongly. Personally, I've enjoyed just about everything Tarantino's done to a larger or lesser degree, so I can't wait.