”…And when the Germans close their eyes at night and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with…Sound good?”
Quentin Tarantino has dabbled in a variety of genres and given each his own unique stamp. He’s tackled the heist film (Reservoir Dogs), the gangster pic (Pulp Fiction), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), the drive-in B-movie (Death Proof) and though he only wrote the screenplay, Tarantino has stated that True Romance was his take on the love story. Kill Bill was his stab at the martial arts epic and Spaghetti Western. Now, Tarantino adds his signature to the war movie with the long in development, Inglourious Basterds. More specifically, I’m speaking of the ‘bunch of guys go on a mission during World War 2’ subgenre, taking inspiration from similar films like The Dirty Dozen and Enzo G. Castellari’s original Inglorious Bastards.
With scars around his neck and a country fried hillbilly accent, Brad Pitt becomes Lt. Aldo Raine, the commander of a Jewish unit dropped into enemy territory. Their mission is to kill every Nazi they find. Known as the Bastards, Lt. Raine’s company has put the fear of God into the enemy due to their brutal methods including scalping their victims and carving Swastikas into the lucky few who escape. Also in Lt. Raine’s unit are Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Hostel director Eli Roth), a baseball bat wielding Bostonian, and Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a former German soldier imprisoned for murdering Gestapo officers in their sleep. Two unlikely members of the Bastards are B.J. Novak (best known as Ryan on The Office) and the 5’4 Samm Levine from Freaks & Geeks.
Though the Bastards are the title characters of Tarantino’s picture and the centerpiece of the film’s advertising, they really aren’t the main characters. In fact, many of the Bastards disappear without much word about their fates. The lion’s share of the attention belongs to Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish fugitive who survived the massacre of her family, and Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), nicknamed the Jew Hunter. Having a nickname like that, it’s easy to guess who the villain of the piece is. Shoshanna is the heart of the film and there’s real heartbreak and tragedy throughout her arc. Inglourious Basterds opens with the chilling account of Col. Landa discovering her family’s hiding place underneath the floorboards of a French dairy farm.
Quentin Tarantino has dabbled in a variety of genres and given each his own unique stamp. He’s tackled the heist film (Reservoir Dogs), the gangster pic (Pulp Fiction), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), the drive-in B-movie (Death Proof) and though he only wrote the screenplay, Tarantino has stated that True Romance was his take on the love story. Kill Bill was his stab at the martial arts epic and Spaghetti Western. Now, Tarantino adds his signature to the war movie with the long in development, Inglourious Basterds. More specifically, I’m speaking of the ‘bunch of guys go on a mission during World War 2’ subgenre, taking inspiration from similar films like The Dirty Dozen and Enzo G. Castellari’s original Inglorious Bastards.
With scars around his neck and a country fried hillbilly accent, Brad Pitt becomes Lt. Aldo Raine, the commander of a Jewish unit dropped into enemy territory. Their mission is to kill every Nazi they find. Known as the Bastards, Lt. Raine’s company has put the fear of God into the enemy due to their brutal methods including scalping their victims and carving Swastikas into the lucky few who escape. Also in Lt. Raine’s unit are Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Hostel director Eli Roth), a baseball bat wielding Bostonian, and Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a former German soldier imprisoned for murdering Gestapo officers in their sleep. Two unlikely members of the Bastards are B.J. Novak (best known as Ryan on The Office) and the 5’4 Samm Levine from Freaks & Geeks.
Though the Bastards are the title characters of Tarantino’s picture and the centerpiece of the film’s advertising, they really aren’t the main characters. In fact, many of the Bastards disappear without much word about their fates. The lion’s share of the attention belongs to Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish fugitive who survived the massacre of her family, and Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), nicknamed the Jew Hunter. Having a nickname like that, it’s easy to guess who the villain of the piece is. Shoshanna is the heart of the film and there’s real heartbreak and tragedy throughout her arc. Inglourious Basterds opens with the chilling account of Col. Landa discovering her family’s hiding place underneath the floorboards of a French dairy farm.
Has there ever been a movie villain like Hans Landa? Someone so deliciously evil? The late-Heath Ledger blew audiences away with his Joker and the little known Christoph Waltz appears to be doing the same with his Landa. This is a multi-faceted character that goes beyond simple mustache twirling. His Landa greets you with a smile and friendly chit-chat and somehow it’s both humorous and unnerving. He possesses a disarming charm that actually makes you like him one minute, but then he does something monstrous and you remember he’s a fucking Nazi. Landa is also smart, quite possibly the smartest guy in the movie. His intellect and deductive abilities remind one of Sherlock Holmes and Tarantino plays those allusions up when Landa pulls out a comically large pipe.
As the Bastards cut through the Nazi ranks, Shoshanna has made her way to Paris where she now owns and operates a movie theater. The venue was left to her by an “aunt” who was to be played by Maggie Cheung before her scenes were excised from the final cut. Laurent actually learned how to operate a projector for her role and even screened a print of Reservoir Dogs along with trailers and cartoons. Much to Shoshanna’s chagrin, she is pursued romantically by an overzealous German soldier named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) who has become the subject of his own picture after killing hundreds of American soldiers single-handedly. The Nazi high command (including Hitler) will screen the film at Shoshanna’s theater. It is here that both she and the Bastards make their plans to assassinate Hitler and all his cronies.
While Inglourious Basterds is nominally a war movie, Tarantino once again throws in a heavy dash of the Spaghetti Western into the mix. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he fills Basterds’ score with compositions by Ennio Morricone and other pieces culled from Westerns such as The Alamo and The Big Gundown. The film’s opening chapter feels just like a prologue out of a Sergio Leone movie and is packed with Western iconography from its title (“Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”) to a John Ford-style shot through the doorway. During a jailbreak sequence, the Bastards emerge from their hiding spots in a scene reminiscent of the way Henry Fonda and his men were revealed in Once Upon a Time in the West. He finds inspiration of a different sort in a projecting booth shoot-out that ends in a fashion that draws obvious allusions to John Woo’s The Killer.
No matter who Tarantino casts, sometimes the real star of his films is the dialogue. Often, Tarantino’s penchant for pop culture references and long conversations derail the actual plot and come off as self-indulgent. Take a look at the never ending breakfast conversation in Death Proof for a perfect example of that. You’re just waiting for them to shut up so we can get to the car chase. Here, Tarantino leaves you wanting more. He writes his characters like real, three-dimensional characters rather than characters that sound like they’re written by Tarantino, if that makes any sense. Yes, a few times the dialogue could have been easily trimmed, but the majority of the time, he’s able to weave the words in a way that builds the kind of tension I haven’t felt at the movies in a long time. He finds incredibly clever ways to juggle the various languages (French, German, English) that once again works to enhance the overall story. The titular Bastards are the only ones who feel one-dimensional, but that’s not a knock at all. They are cartoon characters (especially Brad Pitt), but damned if they aren’t entertaining.
Writing and directing a period piece certainly helped in reining in Tarantino though he still manages to make plenty of other references that fit the time period and the story. Shoshanna’s theater, for example, screens films from directors like G.W. Pabst and Henri-Georges Clouzot. He also manages to drop in the obligatory references to Leni Riefenstahl.
Despite all the scalping and machine gunning, the film’s highlight for me was a sequence involving Michael Fassbender (fresh off his amazing performance in Hunger) as Sgt. Archie Hicox, a stiff-upper lip British paratrooper and former film critic; Mike Myers under heavy make-up as his commanding officer, and veteran Rod Taylor in a quick cameo as Winston Churchill. There was just something so joyous to this film geek about hearing these men explain UFA in hoity toity aristocratic accents.
Tarantino does get a little too cute with a pair of anachronistic moments. He uses a 70’s style title to introduce Stiglitz that was actually rather amusing. Tarantino also chooses David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)” for a sequence with Shoshanna getting all dolled up (applying her own brand of war paint) for the film premiere. The song is the theme from Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People, a film only Tarantino could like.
Even at a length of two and a half hours, Inglourious Basterds feels like an appetizer for a much bigger film. I don't think QT has ever been able to manipulate the wide range of emotions that he does with Basterds. He brings the action and the funny while never letting us forget the tragic ugliness of war. He's made a fantastic hybrid of the war & Western genres that alternately acts as a love letter to movies, one where two of its heroes are a film critic and a film projectionist. Imagine Cinema Paradiso with machine guns and explosions. Tarantino has already mentioned the possibility of a prequel to flesh out the backgrounds of the Bastards. Whether or not this project will ever see the light of day or fall to the wayside (i.e. The Vega Brothers, Kill Bill anime prequel) remains to be seen. This is easily one of Tarantino’s best films and one of the best releases of 2009.
As the Bastards cut through the Nazi ranks, Shoshanna has made her way to Paris where she now owns and operates a movie theater. The venue was left to her by an “aunt” who was to be played by Maggie Cheung before her scenes were excised from the final cut. Laurent actually learned how to operate a projector for her role and even screened a print of Reservoir Dogs along with trailers and cartoons. Much to Shoshanna’s chagrin, she is pursued romantically by an overzealous German soldier named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) who has become the subject of his own picture after killing hundreds of American soldiers single-handedly. The Nazi high command (including Hitler) will screen the film at Shoshanna’s theater. It is here that both she and the Bastards make their plans to assassinate Hitler and all his cronies.
While Inglourious Basterds is nominally a war movie, Tarantino once again throws in a heavy dash of the Spaghetti Western into the mix. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he fills Basterds’ score with compositions by Ennio Morricone and other pieces culled from Westerns such as The Alamo and The Big Gundown. The film’s opening chapter feels just like a prologue out of a Sergio Leone movie and is packed with Western iconography from its title (“Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”) to a John Ford-style shot through the doorway. During a jailbreak sequence, the Bastards emerge from their hiding spots in a scene reminiscent of the way Henry Fonda and his men were revealed in Once Upon a Time in the West. He finds inspiration of a different sort in a projecting booth shoot-out that ends in a fashion that draws obvious allusions to John Woo’s The Killer.
No matter who Tarantino casts, sometimes the real star of his films is the dialogue. Often, Tarantino’s penchant for pop culture references and long conversations derail the actual plot and come off as self-indulgent. Take a look at the never ending breakfast conversation in Death Proof for a perfect example of that. You’re just waiting for them to shut up so we can get to the car chase. Here, Tarantino leaves you wanting more. He writes his characters like real, three-dimensional characters rather than characters that sound like they’re written by Tarantino, if that makes any sense. Yes, a few times the dialogue could have been easily trimmed, but the majority of the time, he’s able to weave the words in a way that builds the kind of tension I haven’t felt at the movies in a long time. He finds incredibly clever ways to juggle the various languages (French, German, English) that once again works to enhance the overall story. The titular Bastards are the only ones who feel one-dimensional, but that’s not a knock at all. They are cartoon characters (especially Brad Pitt), but damned if they aren’t entertaining.
Writing and directing a period piece certainly helped in reining in Tarantino though he still manages to make plenty of other references that fit the time period and the story. Shoshanna’s theater, for example, screens films from directors like G.W. Pabst and Henri-Georges Clouzot. He also manages to drop in the obligatory references to Leni Riefenstahl.
Despite all the scalping and machine gunning, the film’s highlight for me was a sequence involving Michael Fassbender (fresh off his amazing performance in Hunger) as Sgt. Archie Hicox, a stiff-upper lip British paratrooper and former film critic; Mike Myers under heavy make-up as his commanding officer, and veteran Rod Taylor in a quick cameo as Winston Churchill. There was just something so joyous to this film geek about hearing these men explain UFA in hoity toity aristocratic accents.
Tarantino does get a little too cute with a pair of anachronistic moments. He uses a 70’s style title to introduce Stiglitz that was actually rather amusing. Tarantino also chooses David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out the Fire)” for a sequence with Shoshanna getting all dolled up (applying her own brand of war paint) for the film premiere. The song is the theme from Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People, a film only Tarantino could like.
Even at a length of two and a half hours, Inglourious Basterds feels like an appetizer for a much bigger film. I don't think QT has ever been able to manipulate the wide range of emotions that he does with Basterds. He brings the action and the funny while never letting us forget the tragic ugliness of war. He's made a fantastic hybrid of the war & Western genres that alternately acts as a love letter to movies, one where two of its heroes are a film critic and a film projectionist. Imagine Cinema Paradiso with machine guns and explosions. Tarantino has already mentioned the possibility of a prequel to flesh out the backgrounds of the Bastards. Whether or not this project will ever see the light of day or fall to the wayside (i.e. The Vega Brothers, Kill Bill anime prequel) remains to be seen. This is easily one of Tarantino’s best films and one of the best releases of 2009.
Also in the picture are the gorgeous Diane Kruger as actress/spy Bridget Von Hammersmark and in voice-over cameos by Samuel L. Jackson (as the narrator) and Harvey Keitel (as Lt. Raine’s commanding officer).
Rating: ****
2 comments:
Hi William,
I had noted that Tarantino was quoting "The Killer" in the projection-room shootout scene as well (being a big fan of John Woo and also having scene "Inglourious Basterds" five times), but I wasn't sure whether the scene was a direct quote or whether it was just a homage. If the latter, can you point me to the specific scene from "The Killer" he is quoting? (My copy of the DVD is in Queens at a friend's apartment.)
Thank you very much,
Lan D. Ho
landho@icametogame.com
The projection booth scene reminded me of the end of The Killer where Sally Yeh and Chow Yun Fat (both blind) were trying to crawl to each other. It wasn't a direct quote, but Tarantino certainly seemed like he was inspired by Woo's film.
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