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I see Kim Newman gave away a plot point in his Sight and Sound review. Do I keep schtum?
LXX: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
I fell off Tarantino about three movies back, with the technically proficient but the ultimately cold Kill Bill - Part One, and saw Part Two on TV. I saw the full version of Deathproof, which may have been a mistake. I was agnostic about IB until I heard a rave review on the World Service, then took three weeks to finally catch it. Was it worth it?
Maybe.
Clearly no genre purist should see it - it's a war film, a caper movie in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen but borrowing heavily on the western. There's an ealry shot through a doorway which is a direct steal from the end of The Searchers (although the view is different) but Tarantino insists he could have come up with such a cool shot even if John Ford hadn't used it. Oh, and it's alternate history.
The pattern of the film is tense conversations, usually in tight places, followed by an explosion of violence. As is usual with Tarantino what you don't see is more powerful than what you do, but he perhaps holds the camera for longer.
The first chapter (he's using chapters again) is a western of a spaghetti nature, where a father hides secrets in his house when the Jew Hunter, Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). There is a massacre, but one woman escapes. Meanwhile a gang of tough recruits, the Inglourious Basterds, interrogate a German soldier, under the leadership of Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). In Paris, the survivor of the farmhouse killing, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) runs a Parisian cinema, and becomes the object of Frederick Zoller's (Daniel Bruhl) affection. Zoller is an Audie Murphy figure, who has starred in a movie of his own life, and he wishes to persuade Jospeh Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to hold the film's premiere in Dreyfus's cinema. She sees this as an opportunity to assassinate a group of Nazis and collaborators, but Landa is not far away. And the Inglourious Basterds arepart of a second plot as the stakes are raised.
This is a film in three languages - French, German and English (and some Italians) - so is subtitled for much of the period, and you've got to respect this choice. The use of English is always justifiable, but the subtitles don't translate everything, and leave merci and some other words in French. It is also a film about cinema - there's a bit part for German Oscar winner Emil Jannings - though I remained unconvinced by the movie of Zoller's exploits, and I'm not familiar enough to recognise all the score's borrowings. There's a chunk from Hitchcock's Sabotage, which was a little cheeky.
Pitt is fine, in a dodgy accent, but is absent from at least half of the film - he is not the star by any means. His antagonist is, mind, the ever treacherous, hyperintelligent Landa, who it has to be aid - and I don't think I'm the first to say it - owes a little to the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There is a constant struggle of wanting him t do his stuff, but not wanting harm to come to those he exposes.
The ending, well, the first of the two climaxes, takes the film into some very odd areas (and there's a few shots that feel uncomfortably like anti-Semitic images) which are distinctly counterfactual, but can't help be cheered. This is rather disturbing, and it is left to Pitt's character to make his mark that will be an accounting at least. There are no real insights into why the Nazis did what they did, but the film is clear where it stands even as Landa seduces the audience.
Is it inappropriate to make a spaghetti western about the Second World War? Possibly, but no more so than many of the traditional heroism pictures. And in a sense, Taratino lets go of the conceit rather too quickly for my taste. I do feel he allowed himself to run a good half hour too long, and much could have been trimmed away (I'm not sure we needed both plots on the cinema, but it brought the IBs into the rest of the movie). But this isn't the first and won't be the last time Tarantino indulges himself. Some directors are all about the indulgence.
Totals: 70 - [Cinema: 20; DVD: 47; Television: 3]
LXX: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
I fell off Tarantino about three movies back, with the technically proficient but the ultimately cold Kill Bill - Part One, and saw Part Two on TV. I saw the full version of Deathproof, which may have been a mistake. I was agnostic about IB until I heard a rave review on the World Service, then took three weeks to finally catch it. Was it worth it?
Maybe.
Clearly no genre purist should see it - it's a war film, a caper movie in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen but borrowing heavily on the western. There's an ealry shot through a doorway which is a direct steal from the end of The Searchers (although the view is different) but Tarantino insists he could have come up with such a cool shot even if John Ford hadn't used it. Oh, and it's alternate history.
The pattern of the film is tense conversations, usually in tight places, followed by an explosion of violence. As is usual with Tarantino what you don't see is more powerful than what you do, but he perhaps holds the camera for longer.
The first chapter (he's using chapters again) is a western of a spaghetti nature, where a father hides secrets in his house when the Jew Hunter, Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). There is a massacre, but one woman escapes. Meanwhile a gang of tough recruits, the Inglourious Basterds, interrogate a German soldier, under the leadership of Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). In Paris, the survivor of the farmhouse killing, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) runs a Parisian cinema, and becomes the object of Frederick Zoller's (Daniel Bruhl) affection. Zoller is an Audie Murphy figure, who has starred in a movie of his own life, and he wishes to persuade Jospeh Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to hold the film's premiere in Dreyfus's cinema. She sees this as an opportunity to assassinate a group of Nazis and collaborators, but Landa is not far away. And the Inglourious Basterds arepart of a second plot as the stakes are raised.
This is a film in three languages - French, German and English (and some Italians) - so is subtitled for much of the period, and you've got to respect this choice. The use of English is always justifiable, but the subtitles don't translate everything, and leave merci and some other words in French. It is also a film about cinema - there's a bit part for German Oscar winner Emil Jannings - though I remained unconvinced by the movie of Zoller's exploits, and I'm not familiar enough to recognise all the score's borrowings. There's a chunk from Hitchcock's Sabotage, which was a little cheeky.
Pitt is fine, in a dodgy accent, but is absent from at least half of the film - he is not the star by any means. His antagonist is, mind, the ever treacherous, hyperintelligent Landa, who it has to be aid - and I don't think I'm the first to say it - owes a little to the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There is a constant struggle of wanting him t do his stuff, but not wanting harm to come to those he exposes.
The ending, well, the first of the two climaxes, takes the film into some very odd areas (and there's a few shots that feel uncomfortably like anti-Semitic images) which are distinctly counterfactual, but can't help be cheered. This is rather disturbing, and it is left to Pitt's character to make his mark that will be an accounting at least. There are no real insights into why the Nazis did what they did, but the film is clear where it stands even as Landa seduces the audience.
Is it inappropriate to make a spaghetti western about the Second World War? Possibly, but no more so than many of the traditional heroism pictures. And in a sense, Taratino lets go of the conceit rather too quickly for my taste. I do feel he allowed himself to run a good half hour too long, and much could have been trimmed away (I'm not sure we needed both plots on the cinema, but it brought the IBs into the rest of the movie). But this isn't the first and won't be the last time Tarantino indulges himself. Some directors are all about the indulgence.
Totals: 70 - [Cinema: 20; DVD: 47; Television: 3]
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