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Thread: Quentin Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

  1. #31
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    I actually offered my other pass to a friend and he recoiled in disgust: I hate Quentin Tarantino! His movies are so fucking stupid! Don't talk to me about Quentin Tarantino!
    I couldn't believe it.
    So I used one pass and have another as a historic souvenir..

    Tarantino films have a very sharp violent incline to them. Agreed.
    When movies like Coffy and My Bloody Valentine (Canadian slasher flick) are among his all-time faves, you know where he stands.
    Love him or leave him, he's a "unique" man among directors.
    Violence in his movies is "movie violence". He's said it repeatedly.

    Oscar, you might want to stay away from this one completely if the violence in his films is a big issue with you.
    He's got some set pieces in Basterds that top even Kill Bill in agressiveness.
    To me, this film is a Masterpiece. His first true Masterpiece.
    The acting, the premise, the camerawork...it's all stellar.
    But you can judge for yourself.
    I haven't stopped thinking about the movie since I saw it, actually.
    It really stays in the mind's eye...but that's just me.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  2. #32
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    And "Basterds" is probably the Mother of all revenge flicks.
    Seriously. Better than the Crow.
    This is Jewish retribution in film form.
    If I was Jewish (I'm not) I would be pumping my fist in the air at this film. Because this film takes care of Nazi's in a way that every Jew in the world should wish they were taken care of.
    Exterminated.
    With extreme prejudice..
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  3. #33
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    If I was Jewish (I'm not) I would be pumping my fist in the air at this film.
    Well, you're not, and Jews mostly find such a gesture and such fantasies of retribution uncomfortable. Eli Roth is atypical of the American Jewish self-image. Armond White calls the movie "Jewish revenge porn." And the "basterds" story line is that.

  4. #34
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    Retribution is uncomfortable?
    Then they don't believe that "every action has an equal and opposite reaction"?

    I'm not even Jewish and I love how the Nazi's get their "just desserts" in Basterds. One sequence in particular (that I'll discuss tomorrow, with a spoiler warning of course) had me shouting FUCK YEAH! and rocking in my seat...
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  5. #35
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    Retribution is uncomfortable?
    Yes. Uncomfortable because too brutal, too much like the perpetrators. You can look at Daniel Mendelsohn's Newsweek piece -- not as strong as Rosenbaum's citing of it makes you expect -- which says
    Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure.
    (See the whole paragraph.) Mendelsohn says QT's fantasy goes against the "never again" philosophy of Jews; that revenge only repeats the cycle and means there will be an "again." This is perfectly valid, and one must consider that Tarantino's viewpoint is morally dubious at best and resorts to an adolescent machismo. Nonetheless I would argue that as cinematic art one has to givie INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS its due as a remarkble effort nonetheless, in spite of those shorcomings, which are not new but typical of the director, and just happend this time to be applied to huge historical events.

  6. #36
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    INGLOURIUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino 2009)

    Quentin Tarantiino: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009)

    Review by Chris Knipp


    With its wealth of almost-themes and lush production values, amazing cast, stomach-turning spectacles, and morally dubious Jewish revenge theme, Quentin Tarantino's movie about movies about World War II is shocking, controversial, and a must-see.

    W A R N I N G: S P O I L E R S

    Tarantino's World War II feature Inglourious Basterds shows the director's best and worst features, but in a wholly new setting. Here is his propensity for sectioned films (there are five "chapters") with disparate plots with neat but wildly implausible interconnections. His love of elaborate extended set pieces where the dialogue takes over, sometimes at excruciating length. His playful, ingenious, and sometimes career-rehabilitating casting, which provides actors with irresistible opportunities to memorably strut their stuff. His mastery of old-fashioned camera-work, with bold and traditional uses of big close-ups. Jumping at the challenge of his subject, he tries out some pretty fancy production pieces, notably gun battles and a classic old movie theater rigged up for a Nazi gala, and these are never less than colorful and delightful eye candy. And also his indifference to reality or good taste and his moral blindness.

    The new twist is the swing to Europe -- German-occupied France -- with tons of subtitled French and German dialogue, and even translating back and forth between them. A big question is this: can we really stomach a partly comic, partly grandiose, partly grind-house version of the war that is the most tragic event in modern European history? Can World War II be the basis for a movie about movies so fanciful that it seeks to resolve the war in that old Paris cinema with a host of Nazi bigwigs all on hand for a propaganda film? Besides the unbearably, cartoonishly brutal Dirty Dozen team of American Jews headed up by Brad Pitt's southern redneck and charged, as viewers of the movie trailer will well remember, to bring back "Nazi scalps" (a hundred each, in fact) -- something a little in the vein of Samuel Fuller's 1980 saga Big Red One, once planned in this long-contemplated project as a 16-episode TV series -- there's a not-so-secondary dual theme of concealment and identity. And the "Inglourious Basterds" story gets sidelined by the cinema story. But Tarantino has never been linear. And good taste or a firm hold on reality have not been his long suits. This is, no matter what, some splendid filmmaking, and however much it offends or annoys or tortures you to watch, it's a work of unquestionable proficiency, a reveling in the art of moviemaking.

    Events begin without ceremony or prelude at a French dairy farm with a visit from the movie's most impressive and despicable character, Col. Hans Landa (played with relish and equal linguistic skill in French, English and German by Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz), whose nickname is "the Jew Hunter." The farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet) is hiding Jews, and Landa finds them -- but it all happens in dialogue, followed by a violent rain of bullets. One of the hidden family escapes alive, Shoshanna Dreyfus (a touching Melanie Laurent), who reappears improbably several years later as the proprietor by inheritance of a Paris cinema, having taken on a French Christian name.

    This dairy farm sequence is excruciating enough, but less so than the central set piece, a long and nerve-wracking scene in which an English OSS officer's posing as a Nazi officer, Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), is gradually smoked out in a cellar bar. At a certain point in this sequence the excruciating becomes hard to separate from the tedious -- till all hell breaks loose. Central here is the German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diana Kruger), undercover for the Allies, who's caught out later like a doomed Cinderella, by a shoe that fits.

    Meanwhile there are brutal scenes of the "basterds" bashing Nazis, Jews belying the stereotypically "meek" Jewish identity by becoming comic book superheroes, foremost among them Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth of Hostel and Deathproof), "the Bear Jew," who kills Nazis by smashing in their skulls with a baseball bat, preferably in front of their comrades. And there are several Germans who pose as Nazis while their real aim is to kill them. And there is young German war hero Fredrick Zoller ( Daniel Bruhl), fluent in French, and in love with Shoshanna as well as with movies -- and he becomes a movie star, like a German Audie Murphy, beginning by playing himself in a propaganda film, but becomes increasingly detached from the image he's identified with and finally unable to bear watching the reenactments his own famous deeds. The ingenuity and parallelisms of altered or reversed identity are so fascinating one might wish identity were made more consciously resonant as a theme.

    Tarantino also makes ample use of his fetish for ritual deal-making as a motor behind scenes and action. Col. Landa makes a tough deal with the dairy farmer in the opener. Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt) is ready to bargain with Nazis, letting them keep their lives and their scalps if they'll give up German military information. At the end, Landa makes the biggest deal of all -- his life for, well, the Third Reich, basically.

    A big element is the celebration of movies, not only by the climax in a movie house, but in the constant references to old ones, to the point that Inglourious Basterds, the title itself a deliberate corruption of the English title of a schlock Italian WWII film, Enzo Castellari's Quel maledetto treno blindato, becomes more than anything a war movie about war movies. At times the whole effort threatens to get mired in material that is too familiar -- the nasty Nazis, the drinking scenes, the face offs, the suspenseful plots -- tropes executed often and with more gravitas, if less panache, elsewhere. Though inherently sui generis, Quentin Tarantino's movies have never been about originality, any more than they're about "reality." They're ingenious fantasies, built up out of cinema, delighting in the magic of what can happen on the screen.

    And after all World War II was always movies, too, and propaganda. The "Basterds" -- the team of Jews out to give individual Nazis horrible deaths -- carry out their actions primarily as a propaganda weapon, its effectiveness underlined by the film's moments of gruesome brutality. Propaganda also is the movie "Nation's Pride," made starring Zoller, depicting how he singlehandedly killed 300 men, For that, Tarantino gives us something it's surprising he's not done before, a movie-within-a-movie. Zoller calls himself "the German Sgt. York." Tarantino does not resist the temptation (how could he?) to put his versions of Goebbels (a very juicy Sylvester Groth) as well as Hitler, and even, off in the corner of a scene, Churchill, on the screen.

    Also present is the quintessential Tarantino theme: revenge. The "Basterds" are having revenge for the annihilation of Jews. Zoller's insistence that the premiere be transferred to Shoshanna's cinema gives her the idea of wreaking vengeance on a whole auditorium full of Nazis for the brutal killing of her family.

    Things get very complicated when three plots by the British, the "Basterds," and Shoshanna -- with her black French boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) -- all converge on the premiere of "Nation's Pride" at Shoshann's theater (with some confusion of the continuity in the lead-up to this event).

    Whether or not you buy (or at some points can even stomach) the whole thing, the production is lush, the acting is rich, the set-pieces, however torturous, are impossible to look away from, and there's a fascinating interweaving of almost-themes. This is Tarantino -- and his big team -- working at full-bore. Waltz (who won Best Actor for this performance at Cannes) carries the day, but the film is alive with all the people in it. Brad Pitt, with his down-home shtick, his heavily drawn rustic tough guy and deliberately campy Ozark accent, though his character is not as funny or as vivid as stuff in Full Metal Jacket, is still quite entertaining, the heart of a style of movie in which comedy constantly turns scary and horrifying. Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine (his name itself a war movie tribute) in turn gets his chance, like so many others, to put on a (in his case comically clumsy) fake identity. There are only two important female characters, played by Melanie Laurent and Diana Kruger, but both are fine and memorable. All in all Inglourious Basterds is troubling, drawn-out, brilliant -- and not to be missed. The answer to whether we can stomach the outrage and irreverence is that we just have to: Tarantino makes his own rules.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-21-2009 at 05:52 PM.

  7. #37
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    Schnitzel-licking good

    Inglourious Basterds


    WARNING SPOILERS









    The first chapter of Inglourious Basterds is intense. It involves the Jew Hunter making an official stop at a French farm to look for Jews in hiding. He sips some milk, kinda like how Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction sipped his Sprite. I'm sure it hit the spot..
    The farmers' three daughters are absolutely gorgeous.
    They are asked to leave the farmhouse while The Jew Hunter and the farmer discuss "matters".
    When this chapter opened I felt like I was watching perhaps a tribute to Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, with a long shot of the farmer chopping wood. (Redmond is seen chopping wood in the same manner in the Kubrick).
    The chapter ends in a horrific way. That's all I'll say.

    Basically what happens in the next two and a half hours is the introduction of the Basterds and one highly decorated German privates' film career. (It also involves said Private's courtship of a gorgeous Jewish movie theatre owner who escaped from Landa's bullets).
    The ending is an atomic bomb of a plot twist, which includes the incineration of Hitler and Goebbels.

    Go see it now.
    You won't fucking regret it.
    Tarantino burned the house down with this Masterpiece.
    I could watch it for infinity.
    Last edited by Johann; 10-02-2009 at 10:28 AM.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  8. #38
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    Roger Ebert gives the film 4 stars, saying it's one of the best films of the year.

    His review is excellent and I'm so glad he's come out in defence of the film. (At Cannes he told Tarantino it could be one of the worst or best films of the year- glad he's settled his mind).

    This film does indeed grow on you. For a short minute while watching it I felt it might be the one Tarantino movie that I wouldn't like. The "controlled uncertainty" of the opening *flawless* chapter for a minute just seemed to be a chapter that was jerking our chains. Then I realized he's just setting up Landa's character, making us get a real hate on for him.
    Ebert says scenes aren't chewed in Basterds- they're "licked".
    ha ha I like that. Licked scenes. Like wartime lollypops...

    I could go into great detail about the scenes and what's in them and how I reacted, but I'd like to hear some other opinions before I say anything more.
    Last edited by Johann; 08-21-2009 at 10:05 AM.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  9. #39
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    I put in a spoiler warning, but the info I give is in the reviews I've seen.

    Yes, Col. Landa in the opening scene is definitely like Jules.

    LANDA: "This is very tasty milk." [His exact words I don't recall.]

    JULES: "Mmm-mmmm. That is a tasty burger."

    LT. ALDO RAINE: "If you ever wanna eat a Sauerkraut sandwich again take your Wiener Schnitzel lickin' finger and point out on this map what I wanna know."

    I'll have a look at Ebert's review.

  10. #40
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    Ebert said he feels since this film debuted at Cannes, it's OK to let fly with spoilers. Enough time has passed.




    The scenes with Lt. Hicox being smoked out that "ends with all hell breaking loose" was the sequence I was referring to when I said I was shouting "FUCK YEAH! and rocking in my seat.
    And everybody else in the audience was just as shocked and rocked by it- loud applause broke out after that scene.

    And then, the scene right after when Lt. Raine says "drop the gun or we'll drop grenades"- WOWZA. Miss Hammersmarck's survival was a shock. When she's called a traitor and then unloads..wow. Not expecting that at all
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  11. #41
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    And also, that scene with the smoking out of Lt. Hicox has real similarities with a scene in Barry Lyndon where Captain Potzdorf (Hardy Kruger) says:
    Sergeant! This man is unter arrest!
    Barry replies in shock: Under arrest? Captain Potzdorf, I am a British officer!

    Potzdorf: You are a LIAR! You're an imposter. You're a deserter. I suspected you this morning. You say your Uncle is the British Ambassador to Berlin with the ridiculous name of "O'Grady"..
    Last edited by Johann; 08-21-2009 at 11:46 AM.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  12. #42
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    FYI heads up!

    Quentin Tarantino will be on Charlie Rose tonight. Check local PBS for broadcast times.
    Colige suspectos semper habitos

  13. #43
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    Are you gonna watch it? Give us a fine transcript? Yes?
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  14. #44
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    Thanks cinemabon.

    You can watch all Charlie Rose interviews online one or two days after they appear. Just go to his website http://www.charlierose.com/schedule/
    Click on Guests and then on "recent guests."

  15. #45
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    The August 21, 2009 Charlie Rose interview, coinciding with the US release date of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, which went for the hour, showed Tarantino in fine form and ought to be a nice living record for students of his passions and methods to draw on for statements about theses at this stage of the director's career. The interview will be available in its entirety on the Charlie Rose site as are all the previous QT appearances on the show; I'll put up a link to this new one here when it's available.

    QT made clear that he revels in this opportunity to present his viewpoint and methods in an intelligent context with Charlie Rose to such an extent that he even looks forward to the next post-relase Charlie Rose exposition "during the writing process." This is Tarantino's ninth Charlie Rose appearance, and four of these, done in 1994, 1997, 2004, and 2009, are hour-long appearances coinciding with releases of his movies.

    Tarantino put a big emphasis on the fact that he's a writer-director, that the writing process is central to his work. He said he'll never do an adaptation of somebody else's book again as he did with Elmore Leonard in Jackie Brown, though he noted that the "houty-toity" film critics (I think he was referring specifically to opinons in Film Comment) have decided Jackie Brown is his best work and the rest of his oeuvre is irrelevant and to be avoided. It's hard to face the "Everest' of the blank page, he said, and a director can keep going more smoothly and turn out more films by working from other sources, but then will wind up wondering where his "voice" has gone. He prefers the struggle, and plans to go on with it. But Tarantino repeated that he plans to stop making movies at sixty and write novels from then on.

    Apropos of a brief pastiche of excerpts from his films at the outset of the interview, he expressed satisfaction with what he has done, said he's mainly competing with himself -- just as his critics say (they question whether anything else comes up to Pulp Fiction) -- but says that's a good place to be.

    He compared himself indirectly with David Fincher, said Fincher is one of the important American filmmakers of his generation -- but is not a writer-director. (I kind of wish he'd mentioned that Paul Thomas Anderson is. Now there's some competition. But he refrained from comparing himself explicitly with any other director alive or dead, except to mention a certain passage in a film that he said he could never possibly equal.)

    Similarly, still describing the importance of the writing process in his work and how that unfolds, he stressed that his screenplays grow not out of storyline but character, and that the characters write the movie, and he follows them wherever they take him. That is an explanation of the disjointed structure of Tarantino's films. Obviously character is built out of dialogue. I'd add: he has been both praised and condemned for slavishly following the unfolding of his dialogue whereever it takes him and at whatever length. You will see this particularly in the David Carradine-Uma Thurman (The Snake Charmer and The Bride) dialogue in Kill Bill: Vol 2, and in the underground cantina dialogue in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS in which the Engish film critic Lt. Archie Hicox posing as a Nazi officer is smoked out. Incidentally I forgot to note that Michael Fassbender, who plays Hicox (he is half German, half Irish), stars in (and starved himself for) the role of Bobby Sands in English artist Steve McQueen's powerful film Hunger (NYFF 2008).

    An important pont: what about thematic undercurrents, "meta-stories" or "subtexts"? In a question about this from Charlie, Tarantino said at the Sundance workshop he did for Reservoir Dogs, the Sundance folks said "you think you know everything but you don't know this," and pushed him to analyze his subtexts, so he did it for a relatively innocuous scene of the movie. He found a lot of stuff going on in it that was interesting, mainly about father figures. Then, according to Tarantino, he said, "Okay, fine; I get it. Now I don't ever have to do this again." In his creative process he finds it essential to focus exclusively on the fundamental linear progress of the screenplay, and let the undercurrents take care of themselves; notice them later on, after the movie's been made (and he noted it will be at least three years before he himself can judge how INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS fints in and rates within his oeuvre). His process is intuitive, not analytical or self-conscious. And it's because it's this way, he asserted, that he comes up with screenplays nobody else could have written.

    I found this very interesting because it is an answer to something I say in my reveiw about what I found was a major subtext or meta-story of the film, the identity theme: "The ingenuity and parallelisms of altered or reversed identity are so fascinating one might wish identity were made more consciously resonant as a theme." He just doesn't work that way.

    There's a lot more, but I've already gone on at too great length. I hope others will watch the interview and can add their comments (Johann...?
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-22-2009 at 11:32 PM.

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