Inglorious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds (Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Laurent, Diane Kruger) — Quentin Tarantino loves film.  As a director, he has created some of the most controversial movies of the past 20 years, including the two Kill Bills, Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown and part of Sin City.  He tends to be one of those directors whose films you either love or hate.  I, for one, have mixed feelings.  I mostly skip his films.  Of those I have seen, I really liked Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction.  He creates a film about every two years.  They are almost always over the top.  Often, they are tributes to particular genres of cinema – the graphic novel in Sin City; marshal arts in Kill Bill; and “B” movies in Grindhouse, for example.

 

Inglourious Basterds – with the misspellings of both words – is a combination of The Dirty DozenDr. Strangelove, and Mel Brooks’ Producer’s segment, Springtime for Hitler.  Yes, it’s a comedy, a farce, a bloody war movie, and a suspense thriller.  It’s pulp and it’s camp.  But it’s also fabulous cinema.  Tarantino presents his film in parts, each separated by a bumper slide with a title, sort of like a novel … most like The Sting.

 

The opening segment is astonishing.  A dairy farmer with three beautiful daughters toils away in France early in the German occupation circa 1941.  Up comes an SS officer and his small band of troopers.  The colonel, Hans Landa, walks up to the house, engages the farmer, invites himself in, and starts a conversation, all over a glass of milk.  He seems surprisingly engaging.  He suggests the two speak in English because his French is poor and proceeds to lay the trap.  There’s an unaccounted for Jewish family he is trying to find.  Can the farmer provide any details?  The names of the family members? Their whereabouts?  I won’t give away the scene but it is brilliant filmmaking.  The dialogue makes the scene – the tension mounting despite the banter — while the acting, particularly by Christoph Waltz as the SS officer in a guaranteed Oscar nomination, is superb.  This scene and the act last interminably long but create an amazing amount of tension while setting up the entire movie.

 

Then we meet the Basterds, a group of Jewish soldiers under the command of the reddest of rednecks, Lt. Aldo Raine, in another quirky Brad Pitt role (a little like Burn Before Reading).  They get dropped behind enemy lines to kill Nazis, scalps and all.  For a brief time, you start to think this is historical drama, even though it’s over the top.  Maybe we never heard about these guys?  Wrong.  This is the beginning of an alternative version of World War II.

 

In the ensuing 90 minutes, we meet all of the Nazi hierarchy: Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Borman.  We spend time with a famous actress (played by National Treasure’s Diane Kruger) who is collaborating with the British.  We meet the Jewish girl Landa let get away, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent).  Just to tell you how outlandish it all is, the British officer leading a potential assassination of Nazi leaders is played seriously but in a cameo by Mike Myers – yes, that Mike Myers.  Along the way, we get to know most of the Basterds, too, and their unrelenting desire to wreak havoc and gruesome death on the Nazis.

 

I can’t say this is the best movie of 2009 so far but I can tell you that it is the most unique and creative.  That makes it an Oscar contender, particularly with 10 films to get nods this year.   It opened stronger than any Tarantino movie ever.  And with Pitt leading the way, even with limited screen time, the public seems ready to embrace the madness.  The audience I was with clapped at the end, something I witness regularly in California but rarely in Iowa.  My wife wouldn’t see it because she knew it was violent, but please don’t let that keep you away.  See it for Waltz’s performance, for Tarantino’s story-telling, for the alternative ending to World War II, and for the fun of it.

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