Some guts, no glory.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Finally saw Inglourious Basterds, the long-awaited WWII action/Jewish revenge/Italian genre movie homage film from writer-director Quentin Tarantino, the other night (Friday, 4 September). In lieu of an organized review, I thought I'd throw some thoughts up against the e-wall and see what sticks:

• Watching it, I couldn't help but think that Inglourious Basterds was nothing so much as a shotgun marriage between Cecil B. Demented and The Dirty Dozen; but whereas Kill Bill, Vol. 1's amalgamation of a handful of different movies, tv shows and direct-to-video animes worked brilliantly, this union barely makes it past the reception.
  
  
• For all that Austrian actor Christoph Walz ran away with the movie, and for all of the moments of superlative film-making to be found here, Inglourious Basterds is the weakest effort from Tarantino yet. I have only a quibble or two with Manohla Dargis's assessment in the New York Times (Friday, 21 August): "Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B. The conversations in 'Inglourious Basterds' are often repetitive and overlong and they rarely sing, in part because the period setting doesn’t allow him to raid his vast pop-cultural storehouse." (She also called IB "unwieldy" and "dragging," and notes that Walz "simply has no equal in the film, no counterpart who can match him in verbal dexterity and charisma," to which I can only say, "Amen.")
  
  
• That said, if you have a liking for Tarantino's movies or an appreciation of the genres that he riffs on (and boy, does he ever like him some G.W. Pabst...), it's worth seeing Inglourious Basterds in a theatre with a reasonably big screen and sound system (though it's probably better if you see it at a matinee): the unabashedly apocalyptic ending is at once a sharp fillip to the Nazis' Final Solution and a mash-up of, at minimum, Metropolis, Carrie, Fahrenheit 451, The Dirty Dozen and Scarface: The Shame of a Nation, and is as jaw-dropping an example of John Dykstra's special effects work as he's ever done (Star Wars, Spider-Man 2).
  
  
• According to IMDB, Omar Doom and Eli Roth (writer-director of Cabin Fever and Hostel, as well as the hilarious fake trailer for the fake movie Thanksgiving in the real double feature Grindhouse), who play two of the Basterds, were nearly killed during the shooting of the finale.
  
  
• Something else I agree with Ms. Dargis on: Eli Roth, like Tarantino, should not consider himself an actor-writer-director, but simply -- and strictly -- as a writer-director. His turn as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, "The Bear Jew," is simply, to use her word, "dreadful."
  
  
• OTOH, Elvis Mitchell's interview with Tarantino for KCRW's The Treatment on Wednesday, 19 August (you can listen to it here), made it sound as though Inglourious Basterds had vasty, unplumbed depths that most viewers would fail to appreciate upon first viewing. I suppose it's helpful for Tarantino to point out that Shoshona (Mélanie Laurent), of necessity, lied throughout the movie (especially as regards the provenance of the small Parisian cinema that she runs); however, as with Death Proof, Tarantino undercuts his own position by low-balling. His cutesy-pie homages to low-budget movies -- the hand-written legends pointing to key Nazi leaders; Samuel L. Jackson explaining the volatility of nitrate films in a voice-over; Brad Pitt's one-note mugging and posing that manages to be even more one-note and annoying than his performance in the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading -- unnecessarily drag Inglourious Basterds down into the realm of a late night comedy sketch, and make it rather difficult to ascribe very many noble, highfalutin or artistic motives to it. (Speaking of sketch comedy: I couldn't help but remember the Saturday Night Live sketch about "The Bastard Battalion" when Danny DeVito guest-hosted in 1988.)
  
  
• In particular, the hardest circle for me to square about this hodgepodge was the putative role of the OSS in backing the Basterds: this throwaway line might've been more convincing had Tarantino included a scene of OSS (which, owing to the preponderance of Ivy League graduates in its ranks, was sometimes derisively said to stand for Oh So Social) muckety-mucks conniving to bring certain Nazis back to the States with clean security bills of health, whether they were to form the nucleus of America's rocketry and space groups (as in the case of Wernher von Braun) or post-war intelligence agency (as happened with Major-General Reinhard Gehlen's ORG serving as the main fount of the CIA's intelligence on the Soviet Union). Perhaps the OSS toffs could've, in Tarantino's version, supported the Basterds to throw sand in the eyes of the media and the Allies' intelligence organizations over their suborning high-level Nazis into serving the U.S.; then perhaps Tarantino could've shown Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine learning of this and deciding that he doesn't like it one damn bit....