Overall Rating: B+
Filmmaking/Artistic: A−
Storytelling: B
MPAA Rating: R (Extreme violence)
The pitch
You know how Tom Cruise stunk up the place in Valkyrie trying to do history? Well, what if we changedhistory and made a group of renegade Jewish-American soldiers who scalped the Germans (you know, like in Dances with Wolves or Nurse Betty) into submission? And what if the lead were a Southerner, just to make fun of Cruise’s accents? Someone like Brad Pitt doing an accent? Hey, can we get Brad Pitt?
Overview
A brutally violent Jewish revenge fantasty set in World War II, Inglourious Basterds sets up a “what if” scenario, and plays it out with Quentin Tarantino flair. What if we could have knocked off Hitler, Goebbels, and all the Nazi big wigs while they were watching Cinema Paradiso? A master of dramatic tension, Tarantino delivers a film that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats, in a story that is of course improbable, but engaging.
Full review
Your Movie Monkey was one of those rare audience members who liked, but didn’t love, Pulp Fiction. The dialogue was of course fantastic, and the chronological sequencing fascinating, but the mix of violence and comedy just didn’t sit completely right. Perhaps some of the issue was the moral mixing of gangsters and thieves as heroes, but The Monkey just couldn’t find it at all comic when an innocent young man in the back of a car was accidentally shot, and the movie turned to the clean up of the “mess”, even though the following scenes were intended as comedic.
Inglourious Basterds on the other hand provides a fictional setting where the motivation for the violence is the horror inflicted on the Jews (and others) by the Nazis. The opening scene of the film involves a German colonel, Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), investigating a French dairy farmer suspected of hiding Jews. Landa’s slow, methodical, non-threatening examination of the farmer, with his calm, almost happy demeanor, creates dramatic tension in a way almost difficult to describe.
As with Pulp Fiction, the stage has been set with this interchange, and Landa’s actions will be reflected later in the film. In the meantime, in another chapter of the movie (literally), we learn that Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, doing a decent Kentucky Fried Accent) has established a Jewish-American guerrilla squad of soldiers (the Basterds) whose job is to each obtain 100 Nazi scalps (again, literally). Those Nazis who are captured and are released (no prisoners are taken) have swastikas carved into their foreheads, so the world will always know what they did, even when they remove their uniform.
The rest of the plot is fairly complicated, although it involves a chance to take out Hitler through the power of the movies.
Through it all, the Tarantino formula of long discussions building to an intense, violent climax is successfully implemented. If you like the formula, you’ll probably love this movie. If you are squeamish at all, stay at home.
Christoph Waltz is brilliant as Col Landa, and clearly the show acting wise, although Brad Pitt also does a decent job in his role. The strangest bit of casting (stunt casting?) was Mike Meyers as a British army officer. His makeup was such that he wasn’t instantly recognizable, but Your Movie Monkey kept thinking, “why is he talking like that?” And then… “0h, that’s what they did with Mike Meyers.”
Your Movie Monkey did find the movie revolved around a kind of theme… “What we shoulda done back then to the Nazis”. The actions of the Basterds and others whose intentions are to thwart the Nazi regime are definitely presented as heroic. Even Raines carves up one Nazi’s forehead after making a deal for his release, and when the guy insists “but we had a deal–you’ll be thrown out of the army”, Raines says something like, “No, I’ll just get yelled at, and I’ve been yelled at before”, the message is that this retribution… this torture. .. is “what’s right”. Is it? If this is right, then what about the interrogation methods we are now discussing as a nation (of which waterboarding seems to be the worst, clearly far less than carving swastikas into a forehead) for our military services?
It has long seemed to the Movie Monkey that the message of Hollywood is mixed. Popular film depicts acts of physical retribution as positive, and yet the same folks that make these movies fight hard against any form of “rough” interrogation in a prospective way in a real life situation where some have threatened death to Americans. The Monkey isn’t sure what he thinks about the whole issue (mixed feelings, of course, and he wishes we lived in a world where the discussion wasn’t even necessary), but he is sure that our popular culture and our political discourse reflect nearly opposite opinions.
