Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...
So at the Biograph theatre last night I finally saw Tarantino's preposterous alt-hist WW2 spaghetti western 'Ingluorious Basterds'. I had imagined it would be some Dirty Dozen-style Nazi-slaughtering Jew-revenge movie. However, I found something that I thought was shrewder and cleverer than that.
Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of grotesque atrocities committed against Nazi monsters. But I was surprised to the extent that the rank-and-file Germans were humanized, and that their deaths made the 'Basterds' look like deranged tossers. There was a whiff of Colonel Kurtz about these psychopathic Nazi-killers--men whose methods had become deeply unsound.
Not that there was a lot of the 'Basterds' in the movie. There's just one act (of five) devoted to them and when they emerge for the final act they appear comically inept. Instead the main figure in the movie is the Jewess Shoshanna and much of the action revolves around her grand revenge scheme against the Nazis who butchered her family. Like many of Tarantino's movies since Pulp Fiction, women have the best roles and the best lines. Mélanie Laurent is a luminous presence as Shoshannah Dreyfus and Diane Kruger rules her scenes as a German actress turned British agent.
Above all, Ingluorious Basterds is another of Tarantino's love-letters to the cinema. Only instead of riffing on the themes and actors of the '60s and '70s he goes completely nerd on us on the '20s and '30s. Sections of the movie are film-school treatises on Pabst or UFA. (Pabst gets multiple mentions.) Eli Roth directs the movie-within-a-movie 'Stolz der Nation', itself a pastiche of UFA propaganda films.
Best of all the movie displays a masterly handling of tension. Tarantino takes a tense set-up and just winds it as far as he possibly can. Though the scenes are VERY long, they never seem overlong, and when the violence comes it is almost a relief.
A lot of critics are getting very excited about Christoph Waltz's charming turn as Standartenführer Hans Landa, who sets a new benchmark for screen Nazis and pretty much steals the movie. But there's a wonderful French and German cast, with Daniel Brühl, Julie Dreyfus and Denis Menochet amongst the standouts. And there's another thing--at least two-thirds of the movie is in French and German. English dialogue barely gets a look-in.
The nutty alt-hist conclusion is probably going to annoy many CSWers, but I thought this was a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work. It's full of surprises, contains plenty of Tarantino's film-enthusiast obsessions, and in the final scenes gives us at least one truly memorable image.
Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of grotesque atrocities committed against Nazi monsters. But I was surprised to the extent that the rank-and-file Germans were humanized, and that their deaths made the 'Basterds' look like deranged tossers. There was a whiff of Colonel Kurtz about these psychopathic Nazi-killers--men whose methods had become deeply unsound.
Not that there was a lot of the 'Basterds' in the movie. There's just one act (of five) devoted to them and when they emerge for the final act they appear comically inept. Instead the main figure in the movie is the Jewess Shoshanna and much of the action revolves around her grand revenge scheme against the Nazis who butchered her family. Like many of Tarantino's movies since Pulp Fiction, women have the best roles and the best lines. Mélanie Laurent is a luminous presence as Shoshannah Dreyfus and Diane Kruger rules her scenes as a German actress turned British agent.
Above all, Ingluorious Basterds is another of Tarantino's love-letters to the cinema. Only instead of riffing on the themes and actors of the '60s and '70s he goes completely nerd on us on the '20s and '30s. Sections of the movie are film-school treatises on Pabst or UFA. (Pabst gets multiple mentions.) Eli Roth directs the movie-within-a-movie 'Stolz der Nation', itself a pastiche of UFA propaganda films.
Best of all the movie displays a masterly handling of tension. Tarantino takes a tense set-up and just winds it as far as he possibly can. Though the scenes are VERY long, they never seem overlong, and when the violence comes it is almost a relief.
A lot of critics are getting very excited about Christoph Waltz's charming turn as Standartenführer Hans Landa, who sets a new benchmark for screen Nazis and pretty much steals the movie. But there's a wonderful French and German cast, with Daniel Brühl, Julie Dreyfus and Denis Menochet amongst the standouts. And there's another thing--at least two-thirds of the movie is in French and German. English dialogue barely gets a look-in.
The nutty alt-hist conclusion is probably going to annoy many CSWers, but I thought this was a thoroughly enjoyable piece of work. It's full of surprises, contains plenty of Tarantino's film-enthusiast obsessions, and in the final scenes gives us at least one truly memorable image.