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.
...Tarantino’s first picture to be set outside America, with much of its dialogue in French and German, it follows a gang of Jewish-American soldiers roar through wartime Europe taking down and scalping any Nazi they can get their hands on.
The problem is that there’s not enough roaring or headhunting. Tarantino, one of the most exceptional choreographers of blood-ballet working today, should have wielded a cleaver to whole sections of this 154-minute non-epic. There is far too much yakking, some of it thickly accented and hard to follow, most of it without the rhythmic zing of his best work. The violence – Brad Pitt as one of the Basterds wiggling his finger inside Diana Kruger’s wounded leg – comes as a relief. A second plot, in which a Jewish woman whose family was butchered by Nazis organizes a film screening to assassinate Hitler and Goebbels – is more succinctly and powerfully handled.
...this time? It’s not so much inglorious as undistinguished.
...Tarantino's film, which jumps like a needle on a scratchy vinyl record between three languages, bears scant resemblance to Castellari's Italian original. Here, a small group of blood-thirsty Jewish mercenaries from America, led by Brad Pitt's red-neck, half-Apache Indian leader, land in France with the mission to put the fear of God into the Nazis. The director deploys his unrivalled army of B-movie tricks to light the way.
The film starts like a spaghetti western and then accelerates into an old-fashioned war-time thriller, complete with a sumptuous plot to blow a local cinema in Paris to smithereens — and with it most of Germany's top military brass. Bullets and blood are never far from the screen.
The Basterds, as Pitt's gang refer to themselves, are introduced like vintage bad-ass cowboys despite the alarmingly incongruous Jewish looks. They ambush German patrols in forests, and proceed to scalp them in lurid closeup. Pitt's leader revels in this comic and macabre campaign, toying with captives before carving swastikas into their foreheads. While German captives gabble for their lives, Pitt's calm, southern drawl is almost comically ruthless.
The fairytale tone of Tarantino's picture is strikingly obvious from the opening line: "Once upon a time... in Nazi-occupied France". The chief villain, a Gestapo officer charged with hunting down Jews, is as familiar and frightening as the Rat Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Chistoph Waltz plays him with a fabulously silky menace, as he sniffs around the Paris cinema in which Joseph Goebbels is about to unveil his new propaganda masterpiece.
On one thrilling level Tarantino paints a surreal revenge fantasy where some of the most toxic villains in history get their grisly dues. The brief glimpse of Hitler with his bullet-ridden face almost perforated beyond recognition made the Cannes audience gasp.
...What's difficult to square is the occasional Springtime for Hitler scenes, featuring an apoplectic Fuhrer, with the darker corners of the film. The almost casual savagery perpetrated by Pitt and his German rival can occasionally look unnervingly out of place next to the lighter Mel Brooks-style moments. That said, this is a fairytale of unusual and thoughtful daring. A return at last by Tarantino to his combustible and operatic best.
...Is it fantasy or reality?
Tarantino himself doesn't see it as a total fantasy, though the movie begins with the words "Once upon a time …"
"People have come up to me a lot and asked me, 'Is it a fairy tale? Is it Jewish wish-fulfillment fantasy — or just a wish-fulfillment fantasy anyway?' " he said during the news conference.
"There are aspects of that, all right. (But) my characters changed the outcome of the war. Now, that didn't happen, because my characters didn't exist. But if they had existed … all the things that happen later in the movie are plausible."
For Hostel films director Eli Roth, who steps out from behind the camera to play one of the Basterd sergeants, the Jewish wish-fulfillment theory worked. Getting a crack (literally in his case, with a baseball bat) at German High Command was a kind of comical catharsis.
"Being Jewish, this is definitely for me like Kosher porn," Roth joked. "It's something I fantasized about since I was a very young child."
“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.
It is not so much Kill Bill as Kill Adolf. Quentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornets’ nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American.
The tone of the film, provisionally entitled Inglorious Bastards, is set early on by Lieutenant Raine [Brad Pitt] in a pep talk to his men. According to a leaked version of the script, the officer says: “Every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps . . . and y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis, or die trying.”
It is not just the scalping, or the carving of swastikas in foreheads, or the shooting of a German officer’s testicles, or the slow strangling scene – all shown with Tarantino’s customary love of detail – that is likely to upset the nation and its critics. It is the whole idea of turning the Second World War into a comic book adventure in which not a single German character has redeeming value.
To judge by the leaked Tarantino script, the only good German is a dead one – with the suspense concentrated on how he should die...
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