Matt reviews INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS!
(As usual I'm over on my own deadline and I know a few people have asked me where the fuck is my review, but you know I tend to get all excited when writing my thoughts on big films like this which in the past have been known to end up at 3,00 words, so it sometimes takes me a while. This is as much as I've written so far and I will make sure I finish it soon...) In Quentin Tarantino's world, it would be movies that defeated the Third Reich. Cinema's uber post-modernist director in his sixth feature film (counting Kill Bill as one movie for this purpose only) has gone beyond simply re-tooling scenes, thoughts, and ideas from past filmic works and has now moved to a larger playing ground altogether - he's remaking history. With Inglourious Basterds, he has remade World War II, and I loved him for it. After Public Enemies, it's my second favourite movie of 2009 and one that I know I'm going to revisit a thousand times in the future, hell I've already seen it twice and may go back for a third helping soon. I totally love everything about this picture. The wonderful characters, the note perfect showman performances, the tone of the picture, the cinematic playfullness of Tarantino, the incredible music, the humour, the deception, the World War II iconography and playing ground that made all those 60's and 70's war pictures so incredibly rewarding. The pictures my Dad would know inside out and would sit me down on a Saturday afternoon and tell me these great stories about the war. Some from movies like The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dares which the tone of Tarantino's film carries but some also involving the Holmes ancestory line. You see my Dad is someone who cares a great deal about my family's legacy and has even visited many parts of Europe searching for the war heroes grave sites, or plots in the battlefield where they must have fought. World War II is a big deal for me, and although Saving Private Ryan forever changed what I imagined the war to be like in my head, when I think about the figures that existed in that period, it will always be this kind of pulp fiction that I come too. As we all know, Basterds was originally planned as a Dirty Dozen "men on a mission" style film about a group of mostly Jewish/American WWII soldiers out for revenge against Hitler's Nazi regime with a smirking, scene chewing Brad Pitt filling in for Lee Marvin. But somewhere along the line Tarantino's over a decade in the making picture changed to be focused on that particular thread for only a small fraction of a much wider tale which has so much more on it's mind than the marketing of the film would have you think. At the heart of Inglourious Basterds is the question; What's a more powerful symbol... a film reel or the swastika? Oh yes. This is that Tarantino, the one you remember from Kill Bill. Chapter breaks et all, the beginning setting the tone for the fantasy myth that proceeds... Chapter One.
Once Upon a Time... in Nazi Occupied France.
In many ways Tarantino has made the ultimate WWII movie, he covers more ground with his two and half hour running time than any movie I've previously seen in the genre, and the delicious aspect for anyone who knows a little about history, both cinematic and factual, is to see how he effectively blends the two together. The way it continues to defy your expectations of what you think is impossible because you know that history didn't write it this way. It's tremendous fun.
Do you remember that scene in The Last Crusade when Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones stumbles across Hitler whilst he is in disguise as a Nazi? Well that's the kind of fun I'm talking about. There's a scene mid-way into the movie where we meet Joseph Goebbels and he's surrounded by the fictional characters of Tarantino's universe, but because Tarantino treats everyone as fictional (Goebbels and Hitler included) - truly anything can happen. They are all on a level playing field, history won't come to the rescue of any of the characters. It's fascinating to watch and experience.
Structured more like a novel than a feature film, even more so than the chapter breaked' Kill Bill did, Inglourious Basterds is told in chronological order and each chapter is focused on a different set of characters and it's takes a while before you actually see how they all will correlate. The pacing is slow, deliberate, the movie is in no hurry to get to the meat and bones. We need to get to know who these figures are first...
Inglourious Basterds begins with a love letter to Italian maestro Sergio Leone. We see a world weary man by the name of Perrier LaPadite (amazing performance from Dennis Menochet) chopping down a block of wood at his small French dairy farm, his family noticing before he does that a Nazi vehicle is driving up the path way.
Morricone's spaghetti western score of doom BLASTS out of the speakers... and getting out of the car is someone worse than even Lee Van Cleef who "always finished a job" in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, worse than Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West who gunned down an entire family, including a young unarmed kid. Here it's the unpredictable, self-serving opportunist Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). LaPadite washes his face. His deep soulful eyes show him to be a man of great integrity. No-one with those kind of pupils could ever get away with hiding the fact he has Jews underneath his floorboards.
LaPadite has been questioned by Nazi's before but each time he gets more nervous than the last. He knows that one day he probably won't make it out alive, and he will be killed for hiding them. Is this to be that day?
What follows is a tense game of cat and mouse. Waltz, who likes to think himself as a hawk, a dectective - a Jew Hunter (rather than killer, which is an important distinction) plays with LaPadite knowing that the longer he keeps the tension mounting, the more likely he will easily surrender when he sees the odds are stacked up against him. Landa is played with a particular vigour from the Austrian born Waltz who is the only character who seems to continuously see the bigger picture. He is more detective than Nazi, has a Columbo-style knack for sniffing out the truth but won't let you know, that he knows, until he has played with you for a little while.Eventually Landa finds the jews in hiding and massacres them all, except for Shosanna who manages to flee. Later, we catch up with her as a now grown up and stunningly attractive owner of a Parisian cinema which shows German movies (by the order of the Nazi's) all day long. She is played by the stunningly attractive Melanie Laurent.
Now Shosanna is not the kind of character that history would remember. She and her Black lover Marcel is not to be found in any history book about World War II but in Tarantino's world they are pivotal to the plot, more so than all the Basterds put together.
Chapter Two is the setup of the Basterds, as I mentioned earlier, the characters that were the original idea for Tarantino when preparing this film many moons ago and possibly what could end up being the crux for many who will have issues with the film. The marketing suggests that Inglourious Basterds are the main thrust of the movie, when in actual fact they are an equal part of a big ensemble. You might just have to wait until Sly Stallone's The Expendables opens next year for your war hungry violence. Post the second chapter of the movie which is basically the setting up of who they are, we don't really see them in action until towards the end.
MORE COMING I SWEAR, I JUST WANTED TO BASICALLY LET YOU GUYS KNOW THAT I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!! (which itself is currently at 1356 words!!!)