A BIG SHTICK

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This article was published 21/08/2009 (5885 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Quentin Tarantino is a volcano of film history, a master not so much of words as of dialogue. His Second World War film, Inglourious Basterds, gives life to notions that Tarantino has derived from the movies: Like most of his work, it is partly a thing of its own and partly an homage to our cinematic memory. The very typo of the title hints at his audacity.

This is somewhat dangerous given the context — Nazis vs. Jews in the Second World War — but like most of Tarantino’s work, Inglourious Basterds isn’t as concerned with the reality of say, murder, as it is with the style of it, and its filmic antecedents.

 

Having said all that (and don’t think I wasn’t worried for a minute there), Inglourious Basterds is also great, improbable fun: In a way, it postulates that cinema can save the world. It’s a movie that sets Nazi Germany inside a kind of film machine, first figuratively and then literally. Occasionally it forgets to tell the story — it is told as a series of linked chapters — but it never forgets that it’s a movie. A Quentin Tarantino movie.

 

The Basterds are a group of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Lt. Aldo Raine (the name seems to be a salute to actor Aldo Ray), played by Brad Pitt with a cracker-barrel Southern accent and the aggressive jaw of someone whose mandate is to capture Nazis and scalp them. "We will be cruel to the German, and through our cruelty they will know who we are," he says, a hillbilly philosopher relishing the fun to come.

This idea of a kind of Hebraic Dirty Dozen is mostly left hanging, although granted, there’s a chapter in which a soldier called "The Bear Jew" (Eli Roth) beats a Nazi to death with a baseball bat, and the Basterds take a few scalps with maximum graphic gore. But aside from that, we never get to know the basterds very well. Inglorious Basterds, based on a 1978 film by Enzo Castellari, is content with the very idea of Jewish vengeance; at the Cannes Film Festival, Roth called it "kosher porn."

Most of the story concerns SS Col. Hans Landa, superbly played by German actor Christoph Waltz with a mixture of corrupt intelligence, sly menace and racist charm. It’s altogether show-stopping: In the first scene, Landa interviews a French farmer about a missing Jewish family (Tarantino’s camera slides down to show them hiding under the floorboards) with a smooth courtliness that makes even asking for a glass of milk from one of the farmer’s lovely daughters into a threat.

Landa will appear again, speaking fluently in several tongues — Waltz is an accomplished linguist — and making language into one of the movie’s themes. There’s a scene in a bar where the conspirators meet a group of German soldiers, and where the subtle variations in regional dialects becomes a major plot point. It feels like basing a shootout on a spelling mistake in the subtitles.

One of the Jews escapes Waltz’s farmhouse massacre and grows up to be Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), who opens a beautiful art deco movie theatre in Paris where the climax of Inglourious Basterds is set. There are several plans afoot to murder the Nazi command at the theatre, but it has a cartoonish aspect: Hitler himself is played by Martin Wuttke as a sputtering lunatic, something out of a wartime Bugs Bunny film.

The big night, like a lot of the film, comes together as a tribute to cinema, with many familiar figures. These include a Marlene Dietrich knock-off (Diane Kruger); a German version of war-hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy (Daniel Bruhl); and even a heroic film critic (Michael Fassbender) whose subtextual study of the German director G.W. Pabst is part of his qualification to be a warrior. Inglourious Basterds is filled with this kind of thing: It’s a self-indulgent love letter to war movies, a conglomeration of the contrivances and tributes that have long characterized Tarantino’s work.

Obviously, if you can have a heroic film critic, you can have anything: Even flammable film stock is a weapon of war in this adventure that is abruptly violent, ironically self-aware, recklessly overwritten, dangerously overlong and comically revisionist. It’s a Second World War fantasy made up of bits and pieces of Second World War movies and reassembled into a wordy pastiche that is irresistibly absurd. It’s positively inglorious.

— Canwest News Service

 

OTHER VOICES

SELECTED EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS OF INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO.

 

BY TURNS SURPRISING, NUTTY, WINDY, AUDACIOUS AND A BIT CAUGHT UP IN ITS OWN CLEVERNESS, THE PICTURE IS A COMPLETELY DISTINCTIVE PIECE OF AMERICAN POP ART WITH A STRONG EURO FLAVOUR THAT’S NEW FOR THE DIRECTOR.

— TODD MCCARTHY, VARIETY

 

WITH ITS EXPLODED NOTIONS OF HEROISM, TORTURE-RACK DRAMATICS AND KAMIKAZE GUSTO, IT’S A FIENDISHLY ENTERTAINING FLICK.

–JOE WILLIAMS, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

 

WITH INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, QUENTIN TARANTINO HAS MADE HIS BEST MOVIE SINCE PULP FICTION.

— JAMES BERARDINELLI, REELVIEWS

THE MOVIE IS AN UNGAINLY PASTICHE, YET ON SOME WACKED-OUT JUNGIAN LEVEL IT’S ALL OF A PIECE.

— DAVID EDELSTEIN, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

 

IN TARANTINO’S BESOTTED HISTORICAL REVERIE, REAL-LIFE VILLAINS ADOLF HITLER AND JOSEPH GOEBBELS ARE PLAYED AS GROTESQUE JOKES. THE BASTERDS ARE PLAYED AS EXAGGERATEDLY TOUGH JEWS. THE WOMEN ARE FEMMES FATALES.

— LISA SCHWARZBAUM, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

 

CALL IT PULP WAR FICTION.

 

— EMANUEL LEVY, EMANUELLEVY.COM

 

RIDICULOUS AND APPALLINGLY INSENSITIVE.

— DAVID DENBY, THE NEW YORKER

 

THERE ARE SOME NICE-ISH PERFORMANCES BUT EVERYTHING IS JUST SO BORING. HE SHOULD PERHAPS GO BACK TO MAKING CHEERFULLY INVENTIVE OUTRAGEOUS FILMS LIKE KILL BILL. BECAUSE KILL ADOLF HASN’T WORKED OUT.

— PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN

 

INGLOURIOUS IS SLOW, DUMB — AND IN A FIRST FOR QT IN HIS CINEMA SAVANT CAREER — INCOMPETENT.

 

–ROGER MOORE, ORLANDO SENTINEL

 

— COMPILED BY CANWEST NEWS SERVICE

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOVIE REVIEW

Inglourious Basterds

Starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz and Diane Kruger

Globe, Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, St.Vital

18A

Three and a half stars out of five