Quentin Tarantino is entitled to march to his own drummer when he directs movies, but when he rewrites history in an ineffective attempt to be funny, or just for his own cute concerns, he goes too far for my taste. That’s my problem with "Inglourious Basterds," which opens today, where he stretches the truth like a hunk of silly putty. In addition, tossing cultural history as if it were cole slaw, he unearths the Indian technique of scalping, once a mainstay of Westerns and now, with the help of modern techniques, a disgusting piece of filmmaking.
The story takes us back to World War II, beginning with a German officer in a mad search for Jews to kill. He gets most of a family hiding in a French basement, but one young woman escapes.
Enter Brad Pitt, bearing a ridiculous accent designed by someone who may once have wandered across the Mason-Dixon Line or who flew from Miami to Chicago. He’s in charge of a group of Jewish-American soldiers whose task is to kill Germans. Fair enough, but the group’s sadism is way beyond not only good taste but also intelligence. Pitt’s character, Lt. Aldo Raine, might be a nod toward the late actor Aldo Ray, who performed in dozens of war movies and westerns, all violent.
With cutesy chapter headings to interrupt the flow of the story, we next get to Paris and an old movie theater, much like the one in London that Dame Judi Dench operated in "Mrs. Henderson Presents."
And guess who is running the theater? Well, if you guessed it was the same young woman who escaped from the basement only a couple of years earlier, and she has grown up to be beautiful Melanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus, you’d be right.
Suddenly, in the sort of coincidence that only movie-makers can find, the theater is going to be used for a film saluting German soldiers, and that Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are all going to be there, and the theater is filled with cans of old-fashioned nitrate film, in storage for years and highly inflammable, perfect to fire up the barbecue for a Nazibake.
We interrupt this planning for a visit to a tavern where our illegitimate soldiers meet Diane Kruger as Bridget von Hammermark, a famous German actress, in the company of some German soldiers. That sets up a violent bloodbath, of course, and a tribute to Cinderella, obviously one of Tarantino’s muses.
To me, the only single word to describe this movie is absurd – an absurd premise, hokey writing, overacting from all hands, directing that yields in every scene to gunshots, blood and violence. There’s a funny moment from Eli Roth and Samm Levine as two of Pitt’s soldiers trying to pretend they’re Italians, but not nearly as funny as Tarantino, on this occasion, pretending he’s a writer and director.
At multiple locations
–Joe
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Papa Joe; I agree w/ you about the QT movie. Normally I love QT movies, but I thought this movie was a tasteless travesty. There are probably some kids actually thinking that this is how WWII ended in real life. And using the Nazi persecution of the Jews to set up this sadistic comedy just feels WRONG. Good call.