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For those of you Quentin Tarantino's afficionados here's a great review of his latest flick 'Inglourious Basterds' from the New York Times. Enjoy!
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
August 21, 2009
Tarantino Avengers in Nazi Movieland
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 21, 2009
From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker. Played by a little-known Austrian actor, Christoph Waltz, Col. Hans Landa is a vision of big-screen National Socialist villainy, from the smart cut of his SS coat to the soft gleam of his leather boots. There might be a fearsome skull (the death’s head, or totenkopf) grinning on his cap, but Colonel Landa has us at hallo.
“Inglourious Basterds,” first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is Mr. Tarantino’s sixth feature. (The bifurcated “Kill Bill” is really one film.) In many respects it looks and, as important, sounds like a typical Tarantino production with its showboating performances, encyclopedic movie references and streams of self-conscious dialogue. The whistling on the soundtrack comes straight from the Sergio Leone catalog via the composer Ennio Morricone, and the American avenger, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is a nod to the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray, a sandpaper-voiced 1950s Everyman who often seemed most at ease wearing Army fatigues, as he does in Anthony Mann’s 1957 masterpiece “Men in War.” (Mr. Ray’s widow, Johanna Ray, served as one of the casting directors for “Inglourious Basterds.”)
Raine leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative and whose numbers include a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew (the director Eli Roth, dreadful). Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German Army hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. There’s the British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox (a very good Michael Fassbender), and the German movie star turned spy, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.
Mr. Tarantino likes to take his sweet time — he can be a master of the slow windup — but rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes. The film is divided into five chapters organized around specific bits of business and conversations that increasingly converge. The second introduces the basterds while the third brings Shosanna together with her German suitor, who introduces her to Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). Landa swans in, and a ludicrous plot to kill Hitler is unveiled. The fourth chapter throws in an unrecognizable Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill, a barely recognizable Mike Myers as a British commander and a risible fiction: a suave film critic (Mr. Fassbender).
As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well. Much depends on whether you can just groove on his framing and staging, his swooping crane shots, postmodern flourishes (Samuel L. Jackson in voice-over explaining the combustibility of nitrate prints) and gorgeously saturated colors, one velvety red in particular. The film’s opening sequence, much of which takes place inside the restricted confines of a farmhouse room, is a marvel of choreographed camera movement and tightly coordinated performances. When the scene moves inside the farmhouse, you admire how neatly the German soldiers outside are positioned within one of the windows, a shot that recalls the framing of an image in Monte Hellman’s 1971 cult classic, “Two-Lane Blacktop.”
This sequence crystallizes much of what is pleasurable about “Inglourious Basterds” even as it underscores the film’s pronounced failings. Set against a sweeping stretch of green French countryside in 1941, it opens with a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), chopping wood. As his ax looms ominously in the foreground of the shot, he readies himself for some unwelcome German visitors. Colonel Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, has come looking for hidden prey, a task for which he is, as he explains in a long verbal jag, eminently suitable. Because Germans are like hawks, Landa explains, most cannot think like Jews, who are more like rats — a characterization that, of course, was a privileged metaphor and ideological instrument in the Nazi’s campaign against European Jewry.
The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly — both times I’ve seen the movie I could almost hear the audience holding its collective breath — but Landa keeps smiling and talking and charming, and Mr. Waltz’s performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment if you choose. Mr. Tarantino makes it easy to do just that by capping this exegesis with an abrupt sight gag: after asking the farmer if he can smoke, Landa pulls out a pipe so comically large it immediately undercuts his threat, transforming him from a ferocious Jew hunter into a silly man whose flamboyant pipe suggests he suffers from some masculinity issues.
