I am a huge Quentin Tarantino fan. Naturally when Inglourious Basterds came out I was at the theater opening weekend. This is his newest movie. Written and directed by one of the greatest directors of our time, this movie is phenomenal.
We start off in Nazi-occupied France and follow the story of two people with one goal. Shosanna Dreyfus, played by Mélanie Laurent, is a crazy young Jewish girl who escapes the massacre of her family and finds refuge with her alleged aunt and uncle. Lt. Aldo “the Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt) is the southern born leader of the Basterds, a group of American and French soldiers who cruelly slaughter Nazis as a hobby.
The plots are intermingled as both Shosanna and the Apache, each ignorant of the other, plan and attempt an assassination on not only Hitler, but also most of his regime during a movie premiere.
The acting in the film is superb. Pitt is as hilarious as ever, and with his southern accent you’ll be cracking up every time he opens his mouth. I was wary of Tarantino’s choice to cast friend and co-director Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny “the Bear Jew” Donowitz, a presumably mad Nazi murderer, but the pick was spot on. The part couldn’t have been played by anyone else. Some of the lines were delivered with a little less skill: Marcel, Dreyfus’ African-French lover, for example; but, overall, the acting was great.
As always, Tarantino is a master with the camera. He is an artist and the camera is his brush. Throughout the entire movie I was amazed at his perfectly set up scenes. He drives just near enough the conventional to have the audience fall asleep before flipping it on its head to remind them they’re watching Tarantino. He breaks every cinematographic rule, but always with a carefully planned reason.
Article comments
1 - Friendly Psychopath
War porn laced with uncomfortable moments of self reflection for mouth-breathing audience members who are unwittingly embracing extremism in their daily lives. It takes the tired use of terms like nazi and justice into the realm of WW2 era legends for deliberate over-exploitation and evokes emotion in ironic ways.
It's classic Tarantino where you laugh at gore due to witty dialogue of course but he also inverts it so that you are horrified by the characters on screen doing the same as you in the audience. Fucking brilliant stuff. It plants a germ in the minds of people going along without critical thought of just how extremist and intolerant we as a society have become. Like many of the characters in the film, some people are so perverted by violence in their lives that they cannot get by without rage directed at someone or something. Motivations and justice judgements aside, they compulsively need violence in their daily existence.