Inglourious Basterds

Grade: B

I’m always put off by directors who desperately want to be noticed. Never mind the screenplay, the performances, or even those pesky little things called facts, I can’t help but think of Rudy Guiliani’s first Mayoral inauguration when his young son kept popping up from behind the podium, stepping on his Daddy’s lines and mugging for the camera as though begging, “look at me look at me look at me.”

Okay, little Quentin, we’re looking we’re looking.

In his masturbatory fantasia that bears no relation to actual WW II history, director Quentin Tarantino knows how to spin a fantastical yarn while photographing depictions of violence in all their obsessively blood spurting glory. He masterfully succeeds in treating every scene as a mini-opera, powerhouse vignettes that build tension and gravitas while never quite telegraphing how they will play out or ultimately fit into the scheme of the story. He is also a genuine auteur at inserting intensely modern sensibilities into another era, at once highly entertaining and intentionally jarring. He seems delighted at his ability to keep us off-balance, but also a little too self-impressed with how smart and offbeat he is by half.

Just to make sure we’re paying attention, Quentin underscores all his crescendos with a variety of musical stylings which include latin guitar strumming, eclectic pop music, and the ever-dreaded choral arrangements – everything and anything so long as it bears no resemblance to the film’s actual time period. While subtitles are most welcome and ingeniously utilized to fuck with us and his characters, his trademark use of superimposed captions have now become merely tiresome and distracting.

Brad Pitt, clearly having the time of his life, portrays a Tennessee good ole boy who runs a special ops unit of assorted Jewish-American oddballs who make their way into German-occupied France to kill (and scalp) Nazis. Their motivation is to kill (and scalp) Nazis. Never for a moment do we forget we are watching Brad Pitt having the time of his life. Killing and scalping Nazis. He also loves to brand the few and far between he allows to survive with swastikas on their foreheads. It’s all ghoulishly satisfying, but also lacking in any real depth or motivation.

(Spoiler Alert: If you want to see Adolph Hitler’s face blown to smithereens Brian DePalma style, this is the film for you. Forget about Eva and the bunker, pesky details about what actually occurred during WW II would get in the way of Tarantino’s reverie.)

Christopher Waltz stands out as a marginally nutty “Jew Hunter,” an insanely brilliant investigator, connivingly evil, but nevertheless deliciously fun to watch –a moral center is not the film’s strong suit. Mélanie Laurent glows as a Jew inexplicably permitted to survive as a youth who matures into a very vengeful young woman (kinda hard to blame her) and Diane Kruger delights in the glamorous role of a movie star gone rebel.

The film’s climax, the burning of a cinema filled to capacity with those pesky Nazi’s, is oddly anti-climactic. Think a poor man’s “Godfather.” Or just think of “Godfather III.” After two and a half hours, Tarantino has petered out.

It’s all highly intriguing, beautifully filmed, offbeat and undeniably entertaining. Yet ultimately, it is also frustratingly pointless.

And, um, what’s with the misspelling of the title? Pretentious much?

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/