movies: inglorious bastards

Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino, the man knows how to make a statement... even if occasionally he likes to then underline that statement, multiple times.

Inglourious Basterds is a statement... I'm not exactly sure it's a new statement though. As the movie opened, beyond the extremely Tarantino opening titles (containing three different fonts no less), I couldn't help thinking that I'm not really the biggest fan of World War II movies. Yes, the Nazis were very bad, and they did horrible things, and we can only hope that nothing like that happens again... but do we really need ANOTHER movie about it?

Fortunately this movie does divert from the well worn and historically accurate path just enough to keep it interesting... which is another Tarantino trademark, take a genre and twist it just enough to make it fresh.

It's also interesting that for a movie called Inglourious Basterds we spend surprisingly little time with the titular Basterds (and while Tarantino may have said he's never going to reveal why the title of the movie is spelled badly... after seeing the phrase carved into the butt of someone's rifle, I would have said that it was as simple as "The Basterds can't spell"), and even less with the movie's "star", Brad Pitt. I had originally assumed that this was going to be much more of a "team of heroes go Nazi hunting, hijinks ensue" type movie, but it's really not... in fact, beyond four of the Basterds, the others are fairly nondescript and fairly interchangeable.

Oddly, the character that really seems to pull the whole movie into one coherent thread, and who may actually appear in every one of the "chapters", is the SS Officer, Colonel Hans Landa (aka The Jew Hunter), played with no small amount of glee by Christoph Waltz. He's an interesting character actually... he's clearly nuts (or heads that way as the movie progresses), but he's also very rational and intelligent and kinda likeable... even though he's clearly a Nazi psycho.

And the scene where we're introduced to him (the first scene in the movie in fact) is this very long, very still scene that is all about the almost painful anticipation and the fact that you're not sure at the beginning where it's going. But it does show off the character and the intelligence of the man.

Because the movie is broken up into these small chapters (another Tarantino staple... see also Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction) at times it almost feels like six or so (I can't remember now off the top of my head how many chapters there are) short movies, and you're not sure how they all fit together in the beginning even though they clearly exist in the same universe (which is very Pulp Fiction)... then characters and stories start to overlap and it all comes together in the last chapter. In some ways that actually makes the movie feel longer than it's 150 minute running time, although I think I was slightly more fidgety at the beginning than I was towards the end.

As you would expect from a Tarantino movie, there is blood and gore (and, for an added bonus, close-up scalping), but I would put the violence more on a par with the second Kill Bill rather than the first one. And think it says more about me than the movie that (unlike some of the more vocal members of the audience... but we did seem to be surrounded with people who don't know how to shut up) I didn't flinch from any of it... mostly I was just wondering "how in the world did they do that?". Lots of rubber dummies and prosthetics I imagine.

Other than the aforementioned Mr Waltz (who did remind me of Marc from time to time which was odd), I would have to say that the acting stand-outs pretty much went to the women... more Mélanie Laurent, but Diane Kruger did very nicely too... and it was interesting to see the split in her character between the movie star and the dishevelled double agent.

As far as the guys go, Eli Roth definitely held my attention. I'm not even sure why, there's just something about him... mostly the eyes.

His scene with the baseball bat was actually another one, like the whole opening scene, that was a study in extracting the maximum amount of anticipation from the audience... we hear him coming... and hear him, and hear him, and hear him... and the camera pushes in and in and in... and just when you think it's never going to happen, there he is.

Like with all Tarantino movies, there are moments of comedy... in fact the beginning of the chapter involving Michael Fassbender's character is played very broadly and very much for laughs (but then that is the scene with Mike Myers in it)... in fact, even the camera angles are designed to be comedic.

Speaking of which... while I'm sure the movie is probably chock full of signature Tarantino camera angles, there was only really one that stood out to me as being very much like one from the first Kill Bill movie (an overhead shot that follows the character over the top of an internal wall as they go through a door). But then I don't tend to pay attention to that stuff very much.

All in all though, while it's a long movie and in some ways it's a subject matter that has been tackled ad nauseum, Tarantino's version has a lightness about it without being disrespectful, and still manages to feel authentic while it's taking history careering off in directions it never imagined.

yani's rating: 3 glasses of milk out of 5