Mar 20, 2012

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds, mispelled but cool.
Quentin Tarantino has always wanted to expand his filming by choosing to direct movies of different kinds, though some follow a similar pattern (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction & Jackie Brown)  his latest efforts have been very different (Kill Bill, DeathProof & his latest master piece Inglourious Basterds) I, as a Tarantino fan,  feel compeled to complete his movie making journey at my very humble movies blog so it is urgent that I complete his movies list. 

Inglourious Basterds, intentionally mispelled to avoid confusion with a much older film of the same title(Inglorious Bastards) So, what could Tarantino have in mind to amaze his loyal fans and new audiences? the answer is a war movie with a splendid cast. I believe he stated he always wanted to make a war movie somewhere (this was some time before entering the production of Inglourious Basterds) So, I gotta be honest, I've never been a fan of war movies, and I'll tell you why. Wars are probably the most horrible human invetion since religion. Rich people send their slave troops to fight a war they start in their corporate board of directors of whatever is making them earn huge chunks of money, so I always felt, if I fucking despise war why would I fucking want to watch a movie about it? So, when Quentin Tarantino was in the production of his war movie I was like, this is it for him, his movie's going to suck and I'm not gonna continue enjoying & admiring his career. However, Tarantino has his ways of doing his business good, so inevitably I had to swallow my words, prejudices and whatever shit I felt towards war and yeah, I was blown away once again. 

Inglourious Basterds is a movie about being jewish while the nazi assholes were hunting their preys all through europe, also it is about being allies who form a very special unit known as the basterds, soldiers speciallized  in hunting nazis good. The movie is purely fictional and although some of the real WWII facts do appear, it is the fiction that makes the movie so interesting and refreshing. Besides war can only be entertaining if it is fictional. Wars have neither winners nor losers, and there hasn't been a single war about peace, it is just impossible to find peace through killing and taking what's not yours in a violent and disrespectful way. 

Nazi Hunters.
Mean guy.
Mélanie Laurent, french beauty.
The movie has a high class cast of actors & actresses that do the most excellent job, period! Inglourious Basterds is a dark and violent comic fantasy, gloriously so. Built on the framework of The Dirty Dozen, Inglorious Basterds ditches the elongated training sequences of The Dirty Dozen to plunge into the action right away. In the process, Tarantino fixes one of The Dirty Dozen's major flaws by giving the bad guys screen time to remind us just how bad the Nazis were. The Nazis with the most screen time end up becoming the most completely human characters in the film, which ironically makes them even worse monsters.

Bu ditching the training sequences, Tarantino is also able to give us a picture of the entire war, showing us not only British, American and German soldiers, but also giving us glimpses into the world of French and German civilians, both collaborators and Resistance.

It goes without saying that any Tarantino film is going to have fantastic dialogue, but when Tarantino made the decision to have the French characters speak French and the Germans speak German, beyond adding a level of authenticity, Tarantino also somehow ensured that his dialogue in French was as sharp and funny and clever as his English dialogue.

Case in point, during the opening sequence the Nazi "Jew Hunter" SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christian Waltz) is interrogating French dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet). Landa suspects that LaPadite is hiding a family of Jews. While subtly pressuring LaPadite, Landa asks for a glass of milk. After greedily gulping it down, Landa compliments LaPadite on his daughters and his cows, "à votre famille et à vos vaches, je dis bravo." The thing of it is, in French "vache" means cow, but it is also a vulgar name for the vagina. If reprimanded for this vulgar pun, Landa could quite convincingly claim not to understand French well enough to have meant it that way, but Landa does mean it that way and he means it as a threat. And LaPadite understands his meaning all too well.

In this movie Hitler dies as he deserved.
That is a really subtle piece of acting and word-play that many audiences would never catch, or at least they might understand the subtext without knowing the exact nature of the threat. The film is rich with that kind of detail. All of the French and English dialogue is chosen with that same attention to detail and while I can't swear to the German, I would suspect that it shows a similar level of craft.

The nazi hero.
Shosanna Dreyfus.
I so despise Nazi scumbags.
Mélanie Laurent as it was meant to be.
Nice bush.
Diane Kruger's bush.
Inglourious Basterds opens with the phrase, "Once Upon a Time... in Nazi-Occupied France." In its more serious moments, Inglourious Basterds reminds us that the first casualties of war are compassion and the ability to relax, as in almost every elongated sequence of the film, Tarantino finds a new way to build cruel tension to almost unbearable levels.

Tarantino also reminds us that film is dangerous, even inflammable and that its power deserves respect.

Here's the movie trailer, and get ready for the Kill Bill & Pulp Fiction reviews.

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