Mario Gauci
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08/26/09: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) ***
"The new film by Quentin Tarantino" contains a handful of excellent performances – especially from relative newcomers Christoph Waltz (a Best Actor winner at the Cannes Film Festival, no less) as Landa aka The Jew Hunter and Melanie Laurent (who plays Shosanna) that makes one look forward to their reappearance on the screen. Typically for the director, there are a couple of masterfully staged and lengthy confrontation sequences (read talkfests): the very opening with the French farmer vs. the Jew Hunter; the one in which Shosanna is invited to have lunch with Josef Goebbels; and the entire "German Night in Paris" sequence – including both the sudden eruption into violence and the Basterds' negotiation with the sole enemy survivor of the massacre (which, taking place mostly off-screen, is the only time I really liked Brad Pitt’s character – more on this later on). Surprisingly enough for a Tarantino movie, there is a comparative understatement in the depiction of violence and the end result is, thankfully, much less of a macho gung-ho experience than I was anticipating. Having so much of the dialogue spoken in the proper language (be it English, French or German) was a bold touch – given that Tarantino's trademark had previously been his reams of “oh-so-cool” dialogue. Besides, the idea of having the Third Reich destroyed by highly flammable nitrate film prints of (ostensibly) their own Nazi Propaganda movies is, admittedly, a brilliant one. Despite its obvious anachronism, I found the use of David Bowie’s “Puttin’ Out The Fire” – originally written for the soundtrack of Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of CAT PEOPLE – playing over the sequence of Shosanna making herself up before shooting her own little holocaust of a movie – to be quite inspired. Lastly, I also liked the camera angle chosen for the film’s final shot in which Pitt utters the unprophetic, “I think this might just be my masterpiece”.
Alas for Tarantino, despite the eight-year-long gestation, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is far from his masterpiece. In fact, for all its admirable qualities, I found it to be a deeply flawed film: firstly, the performances of Brad Pitt (as Lt. Aldo Raine – clearly a tribute to actor Aldo Ray, a veteran of several solid war movies for the likes of Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann) and Eli Roth as the most prominent of the Basterds are, quite frankly, terrible; Pitt's Southern drawl is extremely annoying and Roth's over-the-top characterization as “The Bear Jew" is downright obnoxious. Despite the grandiose title, the Basterds here are a pretty anonymous bunch – a far cry from the first casting rumors of John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger! Hell, even penny-pinching supremo Roger Corman came up with a much more decent cast for his own WWII commando movie, THE SECRET INVASION (1964)!
Furthermore, the cameos of Rod Taylor (as, for cryin’ out loud, Winston Churchill!) and Mike Myers (as General Ed Fenech! – obviously a tribute to, of all people, Edwige Fenech!) are simply ludicrous and the scene itself in which they both appear – which shows the Allies engaging a former film critic/ historian to go undercover during the upcoming Nazi premiere – a pointless one; indeed, I strongly doubt that film historians even existed at the time (much less published)! Tarantino's penchant for name-dropping reaches a new low here, too: Charles Chaplin (lest we forget, he had ridiculed Hitler in THE GREAT DICTATOR [1940]), Rene` Clair (he sought refuge in Hollywood before the Nazis occupied France) and G.W. Pabst (he fled from Germany once the Nazis came to power) were all, so to speak, in the Third Reich's black books at the time...therefore, it seems highly unlikely to have Nazis talking about them, using them in their childish word games and allowing posters of their movies to be hung up on the marquee of a movie theater! Besides, how would a very young German soldier know who Max Linder even was (given that the French comedian had committed suicide twenty years before)? Moreover, why would a poster for a three-year old movie – Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’ ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1941) – still be hanging in a theater lobby in 1944?!
However, the most embarrassing gaffe might well come as an insult to the director’s own ‘mentor’ on this movie: Enzo G. Castellari, the director of the original 1978 Italian film that supposedly inspired Tarantino's! In fact, while Eli Roth poses as “Antonio Margheriti” (for the uninitiated, the name of another prolific Italian genre director), Brad Pitt erroneously calls himself Enzo Gorlomi (instead of Girolami which is Castellari's real-name) – even though Castellari himself is present as an extra in the very same sequence!! Maybe Castellari did not dare correct Tarantino or perhaps he was fine with Tarantino's artistic license in redubbing him Gorlomi? He sure seemed happy enough to bask in Tarantino's supposed adulation for his work when I saw him at that aforementioned retrospective during the 2004 Venice Film Festival!
As usual, Tarantino keeps shoving the music of his favorite movies down our ears despite their incongruity (being mostly Westerns in a WWII context); unfortunately, most of the time this distracts the viewer more than anything else e.g. I thought the music used for the shoot-out in the projection booth was effective but, while the tune sounded familiar to me, I could not quite place it! Is a viewer supposed to have these kinds of thoughts in his head during such a pivotal scene? Bafflingly enough, the actor playing Hitler looks and acts nothing like his historical counterpart (but, in a bizarre sort of way, this makes Tarantino's rewriting of history – apparently, it was The Bear Jew who killed Hitler! – more palatable)! But, then again, why conventionally shoot The Fuehrer and not maul him to death with a baseball bat (as per The Bear’s notorious modus operandi)? The scene were Hans Landa lunges murderously at the German actress-double agent (decently played by Diane Krueger) creates the right frisson, true, but is thoroughly uncharacteristic of the level-headed and even sympathetic personality he had displayed so far; this sudden change strikes a distinctly false note when coming so soon before Landa’s own defection to the enemy! Additionally, the Fredrick Zoller biopic having the all-important premiere is shot in a much more kinetic style than was current at the time!
Despite my own personal feelings towards the man himself, Tarantino’s latest opus is, undeniably, a marked improvement over his previous film, DEATH-PROOF (2007); not a great movie overall, mind you, but it does have a couple of peerlessly superb set-pieces and fine performances. Still, when one comes right down to it, I wonder how having a movie entitled INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (was Tarantino's quaint misspelling of the name an effort on his part to further distance himself from Castellari's modest original?) in which the sequences featuring the titular bunch are not only the weakest therein but occasionally quite excruciating to watch, can be considered much of a success…
"The new film by Quentin Tarantino" contains a handful of excellent performances – especially from relative newcomers Christoph Waltz (a Best Actor winner at the Cannes Film Festival, no less) as Landa aka The Jew Hunter and Melanie Laurent (who plays Shosanna) that makes one look forward to their reappearance on the screen. Typically for the director, there are a couple of masterfully staged and lengthy confrontation sequences (read talkfests): the very opening with the French farmer vs. the Jew Hunter; the one in which Shosanna is invited to have lunch with Josef Goebbels; and the entire "German Night in Paris" sequence – including both the sudden eruption into violence and the Basterds' negotiation with the sole enemy survivor of the massacre (which, taking place mostly off-screen, is the only time I really liked Brad Pitt’s character – more on this later on). Surprisingly enough for a Tarantino movie, there is a comparative understatement in the depiction of violence and the end result is, thankfully, much less of a macho gung-ho experience than I was anticipating. Having so much of the dialogue spoken in the proper language (be it English, French or German) was a bold touch – given that Tarantino's trademark had previously been his reams of “oh-so-cool” dialogue. Besides, the idea of having the Third Reich destroyed by highly flammable nitrate film prints of (ostensibly) their own Nazi Propaganda movies is, admittedly, a brilliant one. Despite its obvious anachronism, I found the use of David Bowie’s “Puttin’ Out The Fire” – originally written for the soundtrack of Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of CAT PEOPLE – playing over the sequence of Shosanna making herself up before shooting her own little holocaust of a movie – to be quite inspired. Lastly, I also liked the camera angle chosen for the film’s final shot in which Pitt utters the unprophetic, “I think this might just be my masterpiece”.
Alas for Tarantino, despite the eight-year-long gestation, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is far from his masterpiece. In fact, for all its admirable qualities, I found it to be a deeply flawed film: firstly, the performances of Brad Pitt (as Lt. Aldo Raine – clearly a tribute to actor Aldo Ray, a veteran of several solid war movies for the likes of Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann) and Eli Roth as the most prominent of the Basterds are, quite frankly, terrible; Pitt's Southern drawl is extremely annoying and Roth's over-the-top characterization as “The Bear Jew" is downright obnoxious. Despite the grandiose title, the Basterds here are a pretty anonymous bunch – a far cry from the first casting rumors of John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger! Hell, even penny-pinching supremo Roger Corman came up with a much more decent cast for his own WWII commando movie, THE SECRET INVASION (1964)!
Furthermore, the cameos of Rod Taylor (as, for cryin’ out loud, Winston Churchill!) and Mike Myers (as General Ed Fenech! – obviously a tribute to, of all people, Edwige Fenech!) are simply ludicrous and the scene itself in which they both appear – which shows the Allies engaging a former film critic/ historian to go undercover during the upcoming Nazi premiere – a pointless one; indeed, I strongly doubt that film historians even existed at the time (much less published)! Tarantino's penchant for name-dropping reaches a new low here, too: Charles Chaplin (lest we forget, he had ridiculed Hitler in THE GREAT DICTATOR [1940]), Rene` Clair (he sought refuge in Hollywood before the Nazis occupied France) and G.W. Pabst (he fled from Germany once the Nazis came to power) were all, so to speak, in the Third Reich's black books at the time...therefore, it seems highly unlikely to have Nazis talking about them, using them in their childish word games and allowing posters of their movies to be hung up on the marquee of a movie theater! Besides, how would a very young German soldier know who Max Linder even was (given that the French comedian had committed suicide twenty years before)? Moreover, why would a poster for a three-year old movie – Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’ ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1941) – still be hanging in a theater lobby in 1944?!
However, the most embarrassing gaffe might well come as an insult to the director’s own ‘mentor’ on this movie: Enzo G. Castellari, the director of the original 1978 Italian film that supposedly inspired Tarantino's! In fact, while Eli Roth poses as “Antonio Margheriti” (for the uninitiated, the name of another prolific Italian genre director), Brad Pitt erroneously calls himself Enzo Gorlomi (instead of Girolami which is Castellari's real-name) – even though Castellari himself is present as an extra in the very same sequence!! Maybe Castellari did not dare correct Tarantino or perhaps he was fine with Tarantino's artistic license in redubbing him Gorlomi? He sure seemed happy enough to bask in Tarantino's supposed adulation for his work when I saw him at that aforementioned retrospective during the 2004 Venice Film Festival!
As usual, Tarantino keeps shoving the music of his favorite movies down our ears despite their incongruity (being mostly Westerns in a WWII context); unfortunately, most of the time this distracts the viewer more than anything else e.g. I thought the music used for the shoot-out in the projection booth was effective but, while the tune sounded familiar to me, I could not quite place it! Is a viewer supposed to have these kinds of thoughts in his head during such a pivotal scene? Bafflingly enough, the actor playing Hitler looks and acts nothing like his historical counterpart (but, in a bizarre sort of way, this makes Tarantino's rewriting of history – apparently, it was The Bear Jew who killed Hitler! – more palatable)! But, then again, why conventionally shoot The Fuehrer and not maul him to death with a baseball bat (as per The Bear’s notorious modus operandi)? The scene were Hans Landa lunges murderously at the German actress-double agent (decently played by Diane Krueger) creates the right frisson, true, but is thoroughly uncharacteristic of the level-headed and even sympathetic personality he had displayed so far; this sudden change strikes a distinctly false note when coming so soon before Landa’s own defection to the enemy! Additionally, the Fredrick Zoller biopic having the all-important premiere is shot in a much more kinetic style than was current at the time!
Despite my own personal feelings towards the man himself, Tarantino’s latest opus is, undeniably, a marked improvement over his previous film, DEATH-PROOF (2007); not a great movie overall, mind you, but it does have a couple of peerlessly superb set-pieces and fine performances. Still, when one comes right down to it, I wonder how having a movie entitled INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (was Tarantino's quaint misspelling of the name an effort on his part to further distance himself from Castellari's modest original?) in which the sequences featuring the titular bunch are not only the weakest therein but occasionally quite excruciating to watch, can be considered much of a success…
