Watched the Quentin Tarantino flick with the wife on Saturday night. I heard mixed reviews about it, about the glorification of violence and, perhaps, the moral vagaries rolled up in that evil called “suicide bombing.” Initially, I wasn’t interested in seeing it, or at least contributing in some microsmall way to Mr. Tarantino’s net worth. But I do like him nonetheless, and enjoy his movies. So, when I saw this on the library shelves, I borrowed it on the taxpayers’ dime.
Never has my opinion of a movie fluctuated as widely as it did during the course of the 153-minute Inglourious Basterds.
You may know the basic story. Brad Pitt, as Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee good ol’ boy who hates him some Nazis, is in charge of a band of Jewish American commandos. Their sole mission is to operate behind the lines in German-occupied France, killin’ and terrorizin’ Nazis. The action slowly zeroes in on a movie theater in Paris in which Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and most of the German high brass will be present to watch a morale-boosting movie of Germany’s Sergeant York. This tale is told, I believe, in five “chapters” on the big screen.
Chapter 1 introduces us to Colonel Landa. The actor who portrayed him, Christoph Waltz, went on to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, a completely worthy decision. Colonel Landa will go down in the pantheon of the best of the best of the villains in the Tarantino-verse. Only, he’s much much more repugnantly evil than anything before we’ve seen in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s his character, not Lt. Rayne’s, who is the centrifugal force within the movie. His is the magnetism which pulls us in. Being the perfect, unpredictable mix of cultured genility and throat-strangling insanity, he is simply and simultanenously frightening and fascinating to watch.
Lt. Rayne and his boys are the subject of Chapter 2. It’s here where I paused the DVD player and said to my wife, “You don’t win over the audience by making your good guys more sadistic than your bad guys.” I almost turned off the flick. A lot of the violvence is unnecessarily graphic and stomach-turning. “Why show this?” I asked myself. Isn’t World War II the noble war we fought, where we were the noble saviors on white horses? This chapter kinda took anything that was redeeming about our presence in Europe 1941-1945 and beat it to death with a baseball bat.
However, the last three “chapters” completely redeemed the movie. Completely. Yeah, it was still violent, but mostly machine-gun fire violence comparable to something you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan. Violence wasn’t being fetishized; it was used as an end, as a way to tell the story. And the story sucked me in, I have to admit.
Tarantino is the unquestioned master of at least two things in my amateur opinion: Dialogue, and the Mexican Standoff. Throughout the entire movie – which has huge chunks at a time solely spoken in either French or German – the dialogue hooks you, draws you in. It is a pleasure to listen to these characters interact. First, they all come awake to us, become alive, as convincingly real men and women stuck in a horrible time in horrible circumstances. Second, you never know fully where the conversation is going. It’s like watching the volley in a tennis match. It meanders through dark alleyways and over thousand-foot crevices in tiny, ill-kept foot bridges. Third, you always know that the verbal kill shot is going to come, that danger lurks at every word, every expression, even a hand gesture. It’s incomparable, and as a dialoguist (?) Tarantino has no peer.
Then there’s the Mexican Standoff. Indeed, one character even pontificates on the exact characteristics of the Standoff and whether the standoff he happens to be in qualifies as one of the Mexican kind. There’s at least three in the movie; one where one player holds all the cards, another where no one (or perhaps everyone) holds the cards; and a third where the one holding the cards is not the one we may or may not think is doing the holdin’. Regardless, watching any of these standoffs is hypnotic, surreal, and absolutely breathtaking.
So, I started off being quite disgusted and offended by the flick, but then I turned around and thought it possibly the best thing I saw all year. Weird, huh? If you can stomach the voilence, some gratuitous grotesque images, and sequences of … let’s say, mental torture, then you should watch it. Because what remains after you remove all that is a film that will be talked about when we’re all very old men and women.
I give it a conditional A minus.
Never has my opinion of a movie fluctuated as widely as it did during the course of the 153-minute Inglourious Basterds.
You may know the basic story. Brad Pitt, as Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee good ol’ boy who hates him some Nazis, is in charge of a band of Jewish American commandos. Their sole mission is to operate behind the lines in German-occupied France, killin’ and terrorizin’ Nazis. The action slowly zeroes in on a movie theater in Paris in which Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and most of the German high brass will be present to watch a morale-boosting movie of Germany’s Sergeant York. This tale is told, I believe, in five “chapters” on the big screen.
Chapter 1 introduces us to Colonel Landa. The actor who portrayed him, Christoph Waltz, went on to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, a completely worthy decision. Colonel Landa will go down in the pantheon of the best of the best of the villains in the Tarantino-verse. Only, he’s much much more repugnantly evil than anything before we’ve seen in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s his character, not Lt. Rayne’s, who is the centrifugal force within the movie. His is the magnetism which pulls us in. Being the perfect, unpredictable mix of cultured genility and throat-strangling insanity, he is simply and simultanenously frightening and fascinating to watch.
Lt. Rayne and his boys are the subject of Chapter 2. It’s here where I paused the DVD player and said to my wife, “You don’t win over the audience by making your good guys more sadistic than your bad guys.” I almost turned off the flick. A lot of the violvence is unnecessarily graphic and stomach-turning. “Why show this?” I asked myself. Isn’t World War II the noble war we fought, where we were the noble saviors on white horses? This chapter kinda took anything that was redeeming about our presence in Europe 1941-1945 and beat it to death with a baseball bat.
However, the last three “chapters” completely redeemed the movie. Completely. Yeah, it was still violent, but mostly machine-gun fire violence comparable to something you might have seen in Saving Private Ryan. Violence wasn’t being fetishized; it was used as an end, as a way to tell the story. And the story sucked me in, I have to admit.
Tarantino is the unquestioned master of at least two things in my amateur opinion: Dialogue, and the Mexican Standoff. Throughout the entire movie – which has huge chunks at a time solely spoken in either French or German – the dialogue hooks you, draws you in. It is a pleasure to listen to these characters interact. First, they all come awake to us, become alive, as convincingly real men and women stuck in a horrible time in horrible circumstances. Second, you never know fully where the conversation is going. It’s like watching the volley in a tennis match. It meanders through dark alleyways and over thousand-foot crevices in tiny, ill-kept foot bridges. Third, you always know that the verbal kill shot is going to come, that danger lurks at every word, every expression, even a hand gesture. It’s incomparable, and as a dialoguist (?) Tarantino has no peer.
Then there’s the Mexican Standoff. Indeed, one character even pontificates on the exact characteristics of the Standoff and whether the standoff he happens to be in qualifies as one of the Mexican kind. There’s at least three in the movie; one where one player holds all the cards, another where no one (or perhaps everyone) holds the cards; and a third where the one holding the cards is not the one we may or may not think is doing the holdin’. Regardless, watching any of these standoffs is hypnotic, surreal, and absolutely breathtaking.
So, I started off being quite disgusted and offended by the flick, but then I turned around and thought it possibly the best thing I saw all year. Weird, huh? If you can stomach the voilence, some gratuitous grotesque images, and sequences of … let’s say, mental torture, then you should watch it. Because what remains after you remove all that is a film that will be talked about when we’re all very old men and women.
I give it a conditional A minus.
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