INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS [2009] review
February 1, 2010 · Print This Article
I think I may be done watching Quentin Tarantino movies. He does not make many, so it will not be that hard to do. This is the feeling I am left with after watching INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Would I ever want to watch the movie again? No. Is it basically the same movie Quentin has already made a couple times? Yes. How’s that? Female heroine, check. Gory violence for its own sake, check. Two characters having an exteeeended conversation, check.
Also, when a movie’s opening scene is by far its best, it is maybe time to stop watching movies by that director. Not to say I totally was not into that first scene. I was. When Colonel Landa, a Nazi, has a seemingly innocent conversation with a French dairy farmer, and Landa so thoroughly enjoys a class of milk given to him, and we slowly become aware that the farmer may be illegally hiding Jews on his farm somewhere, the tension ratchets up and it is a devilishly good feeling for the viewer.
Then the trademark Tarantino randomness jumps in and we are in a completely different setting. Then these random things start to become interconnected, which is pretty cool, but then the gory violence comes into play and one death in particular toward the end just ruined the movie for me. As soon as that happened, I wanted to stop watching the movie.
I thought the movie was going to be about Brad Pitt’s group of basterds hunting down Nazis, but there is absolutely none of that. Instead there are just a couple of scenes of the basterds already having Nazis in their grip and enacting gory violence on them. How did they catch them? Who knows. Are we shown their military or guerilla skills? No. All we see is the long conversations they have with their captured prey.
So I find myself being fifty-fifty on BASTERDS and maybe Tarantino in general. I like the long conversations and seeing how they play out. However, I do not like how they all end in huge violent outbursts with painful on screen deaths to watch. For me, I do not feel sad when a character I care about dies in a Tarantino film, I feel angry as you can tell Tarantino is killing the character off in fact just to piss viewers like me off.
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The long conversations are trademark Tarantino. Actually, I found this to be his LEAST dialogue-driven film. And the dialogue is what I appreciate in Tarantino films. Nonetheless, I enjoyed Basterds. And I’d argue that Colonel Landa is one of Tarantino’s best characters to date.
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Jason Collin Reply:
February 1st, 2010 at 10:08 AM
Yes, Colonel Landa was good which I had heard before seeing the movie. Did you think his decision at the end was out of character though? (avoiding mentioning specific spoilers here). I guess it’s hard to say because we know no background on him really, except the info we got from his initial rats analogy.
None of the characters save for one did I really care about, and she was the only character that had an actual background. I didn’t care about a single one of the basterds as those out of place brief backgrounds Tarantino did show for some of them did not provide much.
Tarantino can direct and write sitting around a table scenes very well, and he can create a cool character or two per movie, but do we ultimately really care about that cool character?
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What I think is funny is that so many people think this kind of story is something new. It’s not. It’s called “alternate history” and there are oodles of “alternate histories” written by science fiction authors and mainstream “historicals” authors. The folks in Hollywood and critics and reviewers in general need better backgrounds in literature.
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Jason Collin Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:20 PM
I did not know ahead of time the movie was going to portray an alternative history, but I liked how it played out.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the movie–even the surprising ending. I thought the tavern scene was equally amazing as the opening scene–it is amazing how all the actors carried on in multiple languages without losing the energy in their delivery of their dialogue.
I guess it is partially because I approached the movie expecting a “Tarrantino flim” that I had no problem with the violence, the dialogue, or the plot. For me it was just madcap, over the top fun (if the violence had been more subtle it might have been disturbing, but it was so bombastic as to lack a realistic punch).
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Jason Collin Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:19 PM
Yes, the tavern scene was good, but hard contrast between the careful dialogue then sudden extreme violence, I guess I don’t like that abrupt transition and Tarantino loves it.
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