The NYTimes Reviews "Inglourious Besterds"

I've been following this film's evolution at this blog (I, II, and last August) and here it is in the NYTimes:

Tarantino Avengers in Nazi Movieland

From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker...

...the American avenger, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is a nod to the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray, a sandpaper-voiced 1950s Everyman who often seemed most at ease wearing Army fatigues, as he does in Anthony Mann’s 1957 masterpiece “Men in War.” (Mr. Ray’s widow, Johanna Ray, served as one of the casting directors for “Inglourious Basterds.”)

Raine leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative and whose numbers include a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew (the director Eli Roth, dreadful). Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German Army hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. There’s the British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox (a very good Michael Fassbender), and the German movie star turned spy, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

Mr. Tarantino likes to take his sweet time — he can be a master of the slow windup — but rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes...

As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well...Set against a sweeping stretch of green French countryside in 1941, it opens with a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), chopping wood. As his ax looms ominously in the foreground of the shot, he readies himself for some unwelcome German visitors. Colonel Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, has come looking for hidden prey, a task for which he is, as he explains in a long verbal jag, eminently suitable. Because Germans are like hawks, Landa explains, most cannot think like Jews, who are more like rats — a characterization that, of course, was a privileged metaphor and ideological instrument in the Nazi’s campaign against European Jewry.

The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly — both times I’ve seen the movie I could almost hear the audience holding its collective breath — but Landa keeps smiling and talking and charming, and Mr. Waltz’s performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment if you choose. Mr. Tarantino makes it easy to do just that by capping this exegesis with an abrupt sight gag: after asking the farmer if he can smoke, Landa pulls out a pipe so comically large it immediately undercuts his threat, transforming him from a ferocious Jew hunter into a silly man whose flamboyant pipe suggests he suffers from some masculinity issues.

The joke fades quickly, as they do in this film, because Landa has already guessed there are Jews hiding where you might expect to find rats, under the floorboards. Mr. Tarantino reveals them in their hiding place, the camera slipping through the floor to show the terrified family members prostrate, their hands over their mouths and eyes wide in fear. It’s a shocking moment partly because this image resonates with horror, but it’s also shocking because it comes cushioned with laughs. Yet the shock dissipates because the Jews are irrelevant here. What matters is how he builds the tension with unnerving quiet and a camera that circles Landa and the farmer like an ever-tightening rope. What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking.

But too often in “Inglourious Basterds” the filmmaking falls short...The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form...This isn’t to say that the film’s representation of National Socialism, its repellent invocation of the Holocaust crematoriums in the final blowout and calculated use of the Jews-as-rat metaphor are not vulgar in the extreme. Mr. Tarantino likes to push hard against accepted norms, as his chortling exploitation of spectacular violence and insistent use of a noxious epithet for blacks has shown in the past. But complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is about as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence: these are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of dialogue. This is, after all, a man who has an Oscar for a movie with a monologue about a watch stashed in a rectum.

...Mr. Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history. In that sense “Inglourious Basterds,” which takes its title if not its misspellings from an Italian flick in “The Dirty Dozen” vein, is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

An Observation on "Inglourious Basterds"

Given that this is a Quentin Tarantino movie it’s no surprise that the murdered Jews in “Inglourious Basterds” have no meaning in and of themselves however. They’re just props, as much a part of the production design as the farmhouse table and Landa’s comic pipe...He thinks that the Holocaust should be answered with another holocaust.

Source

Premiere May 20 - “Inglourious Basterds”

I blogged earlier and now, it's coming:

“THIS ain’t your daddy’s World War II movie,” Quentin Tarantino said with a grin, standing on a street corner here that had been scrubbed of 21st-century signposts to become the set of “Inglourious Basterds,” his new film about a band of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting revenge quest against the Nazis...Mr. Tarantino calls “Inglourious Basterds” his “bunch of guys on a mission movie.” Judging by the script, it should have the crackling dialogue, irreverent humor and stylized violence that are hallmarks of his work.

“You’ve got to make a movie about something, and I’m a film guy, so I think in terms of genres,” he said. “So you get a good idea, and it just moves forward and then usually by the time you’re finished, it doesn’t resemble anything of what might have been the inspiration. It’s simply the spark that starts the fire...I just wanted to tell my story and have the same freedom I would have telling any story. I want the act of writing to be so fulfilling that I have to question do I want to even make the movie.”

...Not that he’ll change the title. “Basterds should be spelled with an e,” he said. “It sounds like it has an e.” He shouted, “Basterds! Basterds!” in what sounded like a Boston accent: more “BAS-tids” than “BAS-terds.” (As for the spelling of “Inglourious,” Mr. Tarantino said: “I can’t tell you stuff like that. It’s a movie thing.”)

...The screenplay is loaded with movie references and jokes, and intrigues involving actors and film premieres. Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is portrayed as a typical studio chief. (“People write about the horrible anti-Semitic films,” Mr. Tarantino said, “but most of the 800 movies he made were comedies and musicals.”) And it is safe to say, without spoiling the history-bending penultimate scene, that cinema saves the world.

...The Basterds — the film’s Jewish soldiers, given their nickname by the Nazis — hadn’t made the trip to Paris, but their presence could be felt in the grown-out “basterd haircut” (short on the sides and in back, long on top) that Mr. Tarantino was sporting. “The Basterds don’t have the luxury of being soldiers,” he said. “They have the duty to be warriors, because they’re fighting an enemy that’s trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Mr. Tarantino, who was born in Tennessee, said his childhood revenge fantasies centered more on the Ku Klux Klan. “But it’s all the same,” he said. “Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the ’50s. That’s another story you could tell.”

Not to mention a shelved subplot about African-American soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. “I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie’s a smash,” he said.

Remember The Film "Inglourious Basterds"?

Do you recall the new Tarantino film? I blogged about it here, last August. W




Well, Inglourious Basterds is set to premiere (as promised) at the Cannes Film Festival (France) in May. The film will be in competition as well.

The trailer:



To remind you:

...The film centers on an all-Jewish American commando unit called “the Basterds” which is causing mayhem behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France. The unit is led by one Lieutentant Aldo Raine, played by none other than the yellow press’ favorite Hollywood beau Brad Pitt. He leads them to scalp Nazis and wreak havoc upon Hitler’s occupying force, while sporting a moustache that some claim will bring that type of facial hair back into the mainstream. The most surprising aspect of the script though is that the actual main character seems to be not Raine, but a young Jewish-French girl hiding in a Paris Cinematheque. Shosanna [Dreyfus], as Tarantino has baptised his latest heroine, is seeking revenge for the murder of her family at the hands of an evil SS Colonel, Hans Landa. While Nazi party bigshots are planning the premiere of a propaganda film at the Cinemateque, The Basterds’ and Shosanna’s paths will inevitably cross, in what sounds very much like a clever and violent plot to strike against the occupiers...

Let's make it a bit clearer:

The Basterds

The Basterds are a hand-picked bunch of tough guys who chase down Nazis and scalp them, a practice that has given their leader, Raine, his nickname. "The idea is that they're doing an Apache resistance against the Nazis," says Tarantino. "It's taking the idea that the Jews are acting like the Apaches in a no-win situation. The idea is to terrify the Nazis, get inside their minds."

Aldo 'The Apache' Raine is played by Brad Pitt



Aldo Raine is an American hillbilly who has recruited a crack team of Nazi killers called The Basterds, and who joins forces with the British to carry out Operation Kino.

Shosanna Dreyfus is played by Melanie Laurent



Shosanna is a Jewish girl who escapes the SS and moves to Paris, where she assumes a new French identity and becomes the manageress of a small cinema.

Frederick Zoller is played by Daniel Brühl

Zoller is a German sniper who is being celebrated in Josef Goebbels' latest propaganda production, Nation's Pride. He falls for Shosanna, and tries to persuade Goebbels to hold his premiere in her cinema.

Ed Fenech is played by Mike Myers

Fenech is the brains behind Operation Kino, a plan to sabotage Goebbels' big premiere.

Colonel Hans Landa of the SS, aka The Jew Hunter is played by Christoph Waltz

Landa is the suave genius of the SS and a celebrated Nazi. Hitler has personally put him in charge of ridding Occupied France of Jews.

Sounds a bit violent?

You bet:



And this:-

...Quentin was like, 'No, no, no. This is the movie they were talking about in "Knocked Up"! This is Jews kicking ass.' ... This movie has the intensity of 'Reservoir Dogs,' the style of 'Pulp Fiction,' the violence of 'Kill Bill,' the adrenaline of 'Death Proof' and the characters of 'Jackie Brown.' It's really the greatest of Quentin's talents, all culminating in this film."

..."There are a lot of scalpings," Roth grinned wickedly. "He's not going to skimp on the scalping, let me tell you. Quentin based what the Basterds do on what the Apache Indians did. They would do what's known now as the Apache Resistance, where they would capture people and horribly mutilate them, scalp them, torture them, cut them up and leave one person alive. Then, [the survivor] would go back to the cavalry and describe what happened — and the psychological warfare got so strong that if the cavalry came across a bunch of Apache Indians, they would just take their guns and shoot themselves in the heads and shoot each other in the heads because of the horror of what had been described to them. ... This is what the Jews are doing to the Nazis. We get these Nazis and we scalp them, and we beat them to death with a baseball bat."

And to Roth, a Jewish filmmaker from Boston with a well-known taste for blood, there couldn't have been a more welcoming environment to make his acting debut (after small cameos in various films over the years). "What's funny is I expected [Tarantino] to cast a bunch of big dudes. I thought I'd be the smallest guy," Roth marveled. "Instead, he basically cast my Hebrew school class. I looked around, and I was like, 'These are the kids who were in my bunk at Camp Cedar Lake.' It's them going on a killing spree — and that's what makes it so much fun."