Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Country: US/GER
Technical: col/2.35:1 153m
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Daniel Brühl
Synopsis:
In Nazi-occupied France a Jewess who survives her family's massacre to become proprietress of a Parisian cinema, and a group of Jewish-American guerrilla-style Nazi-killers, both become involved in a plot to wipe out the German High Command during the première of a pruriently violent Goebbels film.
Review:
Again Tarantino is given millions of dollars to indulge himself in his peculiar brand of shaggy dog tale-spinning. Little regard is paid to conventional audience demands for clarity or realism: the opening scene, itself a riff on the second sequence of The Good the Bad and the Ugly, runs for twenty minutes of largely subtitled dialogue in what is effectively a prologue; there is no illustration of how the Basterds get about France undetected, or any account made for the absence of German troops on guard at the premiere, save for two outside the Führer's box; last but not least, the film is such a fantasy that it even alters the course of history in its wet dream of a massacre at the end, clearly a sort of homage to The Dirty Dozen. None of this matters at all if you enjoy Tarantino's play with dialogue, smiling villainy or Mexican stand-offs. The opening scene with Waltz, and another later in a basement tavern, are masterpieces of tension sustained through clench-toothed bonhomie, culminating in explosive violence. The soundtrack is peppered with Morricone quotes and allusions, you can luxuriate in the cinephile's detail of a cinema showing Riefenstahl one week and Clouzot the next; meanwhile there is no attempt to make the film within the film a credible work of its era. What is missing of course is a moral centre: at no point do we get particularly close to any of the characters, and the cartoon presence of far from convincing Churchill and Hitler standins reduces the chances of our taking any of the killing seriously, if it weren't for the repellent detail of baseball bat beating, scalping and delight in the spectacle of female bodies dancing in time to the Schmeisser bullets ripping into them. It's a thrilling ride, a field day for the actors, a virtuoso display of filmic technique, and yes, it is wonderful to see a mainstream film in which linguistic accomplishment is foregrounded in quite such a way; but this is a work which gets more pleasure from the interlocking facets of its 'movie-ness', pausing to give us a lesson in the flammability of nitrate film stock, than in anything close to the human heart.
Country: US/GER
Technical: col/2.35:1 153m
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Daniel Brühl
Synopsis:
In Nazi-occupied France a Jewess who survives her family's massacre to become proprietress of a Parisian cinema, and a group of Jewish-American guerrilla-style Nazi-killers, both become involved in a plot to wipe out the German High Command during the première of a pruriently violent Goebbels film.
Review:
Again Tarantino is given millions of dollars to indulge himself in his peculiar brand of shaggy dog tale-spinning. Little regard is paid to conventional audience demands for clarity or realism: the opening scene, itself a riff on the second sequence of The Good the Bad and the Ugly, runs for twenty minutes of largely subtitled dialogue in what is effectively a prologue; there is no illustration of how the Basterds get about France undetected, or any account made for the absence of German troops on guard at the premiere, save for two outside the Führer's box; last but not least, the film is such a fantasy that it even alters the course of history in its wet dream of a massacre at the end, clearly a sort of homage to The Dirty Dozen. None of this matters at all if you enjoy Tarantino's play with dialogue, smiling villainy or Mexican stand-offs. The opening scene with Waltz, and another later in a basement tavern, are masterpieces of tension sustained through clench-toothed bonhomie, culminating in explosive violence. The soundtrack is peppered with Morricone quotes and allusions, you can luxuriate in the cinephile's detail of a cinema showing Riefenstahl one week and Clouzot the next; meanwhile there is no attempt to make the film within the film a credible work of its era. What is missing of course is a moral centre: at no point do we get particularly close to any of the characters, and the cartoon presence of far from convincing Churchill and Hitler standins reduces the chances of our taking any of the killing seriously, if it weren't for the repellent detail of baseball bat beating, scalping and delight in the spectacle of female bodies dancing in time to the Schmeisser bullets ripping into them. It's a thrilling ride, a field day for the actors, a virtuoso display of filmic technique, and yes, it is wonderful to see a mainstream film in which linguistic accomplishment is foregrounded in quite such a way; but this is a work which gets more pleasure from the interlocking facets of its 'movie-ness', pausing to give us a lesson in the flammability of nitrate film stock, than in anything close to the human heart.
Country: US/GER
Technical: col/2.35:1 153m
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Daniel Brühl
Synopsis:
In Nazi-occupied France a Jewess who survives her family's massacre to become proprietress of a Parisian cinema, and a group of Jewish-American guerrilla-style Nazi-killers, both become involved in a plot to wipe out the German High Command during the première of a pruriently violent Goebbels film.
Review:
Again Tarantino is given millions of dollars to indulge himself in his peculiar brand of shaggy dog tale-spinning. Little regard is paid to conventional audience demands for clarity or realism: the opening scene, itself a riff on the second sequence of The Good the Bad and the Ugly, runs for twenty minutes of largely subtitled dialogue in what is effectively a prologue; there is no illustration of how the Basterds get about France undetected, or any account made for the absence of German troops on guard at the premiere, save for two outside the Führer's box; last but not least, the film is such a fantasy that it even alters the course of history in its wet dream of a massacre at the end, clearly a sort of homage to The Dirty Dozen. None of this matters at all if you enjoy Tarantino's play with dialogue, smiling villainy or Mexican stand-offs. The opening scene with Waltz, and another later in a basement tavern, are masterpieces of tension sustained through clench-toothed bonhomie, culminating in explosive violence. The soundtrack is peppered with Morricone quotes and allusions, you can luxuriate in the cinephile's detail of a cinema showing Riefenstahl one week and Clouzot the next; meanwhile there is no attempt to make the film within the film a credible work of its era. What is missing of course is a moral centre: at no point do we get particularly close to any of the characters, and the cartoon presence of far from convincing Churchill and Hitler standins reduces the chances of our taking any of the killing seriously, if it weren't for the repellent detail of baseball bat beating, scalping and delight in the spectacle of female bodies dancing in time to the Schmeisser bullets ripping into them. It's a thrilling ride, a field day for the actors, a virtuoso display of filmic technique, and yes, it is wonderful to see a mainstream film in which linguistic accomplishment is foregrounded in quite such a way; but this is a work which gets more pleasure from the interlocking facets of its 'movie-ness', pausing to give us a lesson in the flammability of nitrate film stock, than in anything close to the human heart.