Movie Review: INglorious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds I have a love-hate relationship with Quentin Tarantino. I’ve had it ever since I saw Reservoir Dogs, thought it was brilliant, and wished I hadn’t. I haven’t seen all his movies, the previews of a few of them were enough for me. And I wasn’t going to see this one either, but my daughter and her boyfriend (he’s a movie-maker) said it was awesome. And it is. Awesome, I mean. Terrible and awesome.
(In order to assuage my guilt at having to say anything positive about Tarantino’s work, I will add a negative qualifier to each positive adjective. Thus, this movie was perversely brilliant. See how that works?)
Hopefully, by now, no one goes to a Tarantino movie innocently. Either we know to stay away or we have seen Pulp Fiction and know, more or less, what to expect. This kind of movie finds its own audience and everyone else leaves them alone. You know who you are.
Inglorious Basterds is a WWII fantasy. It has nothing, as far as I know, to do with reality other than to borrow the time period and locations of the war. It stars Brad Pitt as an easy-going hick from Tennessee who is tasked to put together a commando group of American Jews, jump behind enemy lines and kill, torture, disfigure, disembowel, dismember, and whatever other dis they can think of, Nazis. Their job is to strike fear into the hearts of the rank-and-file German soldier, a task they succeed at with obsessive glee. There are a few other threads, stories, being woven flawlessly into the weave of the Basterds story, having to do with a punctilious and flamboyant—but ruthlessly efficient SS Colonel, a young Jewess he allows to escape her families massacre for sport, and an American double-agent who is a famous German actress plotting to destroy half the high-command at the Parisian premier of the Third Reich’s propaganda minister’s latest epic movie. (Nice sentence, right?)
Tarantino works the camera like the demented genius he is. He gets brilliant work from each of his actors. Pitt as the laconic “Apache” , Aldo Raine, and a wonderful Diane Kruger (National Treasure) as the German actress, Brigit Von Hammersmark, but the best performance is Christoph Waltz as the insidiously pleasant and urbane Colonel Landa, the amoral, vainglorious, and brilliantly efficient SS “Jew Hunter.” Watching Waltz create and imbue this character is worth the price of admission. Pitt does this bizarre and creepy-charming Brando-as-Don-Corleone-thing with his face in a few scenes that is fun to watch as well. Even the guy who plays Hitler is perfect. Everything is done to perfect detail, down to the use of German, French, and Italian, with subtitles where needed. Tarantino throws in those Chapter Headings (Kill Bill) he’s so fond of, and a few asides to introduce certain characters and let us know why they are important or just that Quentin apparently really likes this one or that one. He chooses music from his favorite era, the “Spaghetti Western”, a sub-genre the rest of us like to call “terrible movies.” (Don’t get me wrong . . . I love those movies too. It’s just that Quentin seems to worship them and wants to bring them to the level of masterpiece.) This one has lots of hi-reverb harmonica and guitar—music to kill by.
I doubt I would like Tarantino if I ever met him. I can only go by what I’ve seen in interviews on television and a few of his acting parts, but he seems to be on meth all the time. He is frenetic, nervous, hyper, talks to fast, and knows way to much about the movie industry and its history. And he knows how smart he is and seems to revel in it. I don’t think he uses the violence and gore for which he is infamous in a gratuitous fashion though. I think he really, truly, loves it. It’s what he grew up with and he wants to let everyone know how he feels about it. I think he’s one of those “if you’re going to shy away from the ugly stuff you don’t deserve the pretty stuff” kind of guys, but of course, that’s a lot of BS.
Okay, down to brass tacks. This movie is, as I said, absolutely, disturbingly, brilliant. If you do not want to see violence and gore (lots of Germans are scalped for example), and are not interested in a good deal of profane language, stay away from this, or any, Tarantino movie. If you know what you’re getting into, this is a good as Pulp Fiction, maybe better. As I said, it is sheer make-believe. I won’t give then ending away; suffice it to say it does not agree with history as we know it. As usual, it is Tarantino living out another adolescent fantasy. It is rated R and deserves every bit of that rating. Oddly, there is no sex and no skin. Nita would still have to be hospitalized after seeing it.