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Inglourious Basterds [Blu-ray][Region Free]

5 star:		(101)
4 star:		(60)
3 star:		(35)
2 star:		(29)
1 star:		(51)

 

 

Where do you start with this peculiar film?
It is a mess but it includes some magnificent moments of sheer virtuousity. The acting is generally highly accomplished with the exception of Brad Pitt who appears painfully constipated throughout. His part requires minimal effort and it seems that that was all Pitt was prepared to make. Having said that it may be Tarantino's directing to blame for Pitt's wooden approach.
On the other hand Christoph Waltz is simply incredible. His performance is a tour de force with a skilfully delivered balance achieved between palpable menace and grotesque comedy. Waltz is a significant find; a towering talent whose skills in this film deserve recognition with an Oscar. It is worth watching just for his performance alone. The opening scene is deftly done and appears to promise an intelligent adult film that Hollywood did so well in the late sixties and early seventies but the film from there onward fluctuates between farce and magnificence.
There is an excellently choreographed set-piece in a Parisian cellar bar that is reminiscent of the best of Sergio Leone and much of the film is a homage to the classic Spaghetti Westerns of the sixties as well as Sam Pekinpah. Even the musical score brings to mind those great Westerns. However, too much of the film is downright infantile and ridiculous with little sense of direction.

Worth watching once but only once. Borrow.

After watching the film through, I was left feeling like there was supposed to be some sort of story that got lost in the violence. The characters do not seem to have a chance of developing into likeable people an audience could relate to. I was left feeling like the film was a waste of time for all concerned. I admit to not being a Tarantino fan so I don't relate well to it. I watched the film to see Michael Fassbender's performance and that was so limited , I don't see why his character was needed for the story. There was one major German speaking scene and that was all.

The film's opening scene showed great promise but went downhill from there.Inglourious Basterds [DVD] (2009)

I must agree with other reviewers that Christoph Waltz's performance as the German officer, Landa, was the major highlight of the movie. Daniel Bruhl as Zoller, the German war hero, was the only other character who showed more of a complex character.

So addled was I with preconceptions of woeful ineptitude and ridiculousness of such magnificent proportions, that I avoided seeing Tarantino's latest attempt at ever increasingly diminishing my expectations. Only recently, under this hefty burden of negativity, have I sat to watch Inglourious Basterds and my seemingly unfair preconceptions were initially proved totally unfounded, as for the following twenty minutes, I was enticed by the tension, awkwardness, fear, historicity, atmosphere, and the politely calm and calculating face of terror (personified magnificently by Christoph Waltz) portraying the tumult of Nazi occupied territory. I'd have been contended with an oppressive and unsettling 20 minute short, but from the end of the first 'chapter' my seemingly unfair preconceptions came to a disappointingly justified fruition. Tarantino can no more direct a film than I can tie my shoe laces with my nose. He can direct a 'scene' with varying degrees of success, but quite how he manages to express a combination of such muddled and disjointed structure, style, tone and narrative, is far beyond my comprehension.

He needs to drop the overused non-linear 'chapter' farce that befitted (accidentally?) earlier work like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, and instead focus on joining a string of 'chapters' together into some kind of vague structure, whether through narrative or theme or whatever, just providing some basic point to the whole farcical menagerie would make it far more enjoyable for all concerned. His brain appears to be tangled with ideas and instead of focussing on one he pulls at all the threads simultaneously, with differing substance, quality and meaning, no filter of the good from the bad, and the unnecessary from the pertinent, he then chooses to portray this web of ideas as separate 'chapters' whether they work together or not. As a result, the story is a disjointed mess, which could only be salvaged by a modicum of directorial prowess and couldn't even be salvaged by a bunch of crazy machine-gun toting Jewish Nazi-hunters with a death wish. While the former is distinctly lacking, the latter (though present) is distinctly underwhelming.

Tarantino manages to imbue a total lack of empathy in the story and its characters, providing no emotional or intellectual nourishment for his audience. I honestly couldn't care less if he wanted to evoke the horrendous realism of the beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan, the tension and compassion of Schindler's List, the comical bad guys of The Indiana Jones Trilogy, or (as I hope at least) the comical portrayal of evil space Nazi's from the dark side of the moon in Iron Sky, as in each of these examples (the ones I've seen at least) their portrayal fits the film like a sturdy pair of lederhosen, whether good or bad they may seem odd, unreal or terrifying but they are appropriate and establish the basis upon which the viewer can drop their preconceptions and become involved in a pleasant (or unpleasant) fiction. When however, a discombobulated mishmash of vividly contrasting styles - from the comic, horrific, absurd, atmospheric, romantic, surreal etc - all feature in one film, it becomes incredibly hard for an audience to empathise, understand or solicit any genuine emotional response; other than that based on pretentious adulation for the mistakenly avant-garde genius (as in Mulholland Drive) or simply just fanboy denialism (as in Inglourious Basterds).

As for the acting, Brad Pitt stuck out like a sore thumb as the over the top, chin-jutting, comic book cliché, Michael Fassbender plays the staight-laced, uptight English officer cliché, Daniel Brühl is the disconcerting creep, Mike Myers is bland and unnecessary and guess what, Hitler (Martin Wuttke) is angry (sadly not in a springtime for Hitler way). This is not to say any of the acting is especially bad, it could be argued it is rather good in places, but there is a glaring inconsistency which upsets the balance of the film. This coincides with an imbalance of tone in many of the scenes. There's the inadvertent (I hope) inference from Monty Python's Life of Brian, with the Nazis portrayed as nothing more than scantily clad Legionaries as they troop in and out of basement taverns in search of Jews (or spoons, I can't remember which). Then what should be a cruel, calculated, murder, is simply a tawdry imitation of an impassioned nurse-strangling from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. These are just a few examples, but intentional nods or not, Tarantino should stop being such an unrelenting geek. I love geeks - with their bafflingly obscure references, their charming adoration of the extremely naff and the extremely profound, but he does such harm to their reputation by creating gumpf like this, that I find it hard to find any reason not to berate him for it.

What the film might actually achieve is simply the ability to insult the past. Not with malicious intent, but by nature of the fact that as the film gradually and subtly erodes any sense of empathy or compassion for the story and its characters, I fear it might well do the same to this period of history and the real people with which it's concerned. Ultimately, I am reminded of an old German joke in which a healthy young boy is raised from babe to toddler and toddler to teen, without any problems other than the fact he neglects to speak, without any apparent cause or reason, day in and day out, year after year...until finally he is served some apple strudel, which he soon tastes and responds, 'mother, this apple strudel is tepid'. With great surprise and wonderment his mother asks, 'son, why after all these years, have you only just now decided to speak?!', to which the boy calmly replies 'until now, everything was quite satisfactory'.

Inglourious Basterds. Tepid and unsatisfactory.

I was disappointed with this movie.

Basially I found that the dialogue went on for far too long. I am sure many will find it entertaining and clever, but I just found myself waiting for the next scene to begin. Also, the fact that the dialogue was in several different languages made following the dialogue difficult sometimes, as you could not even think of looking away from the screen. I suppose it made it more authentic. However, that seemed a pointless gesture since the movie and story did not fell realistic or authentic in any other way.

The action was OK, but there is not that much of it, being widely spread out among the action scenes. The action is quite sadistic and sometimes gory, seemingly done with the main purpose of shocking the audience. Since there was some humour in these scenes, it is difficult to know whether I should find it funny or revolting.

To me this movie is for a niche market; Those that like long cleve dialogue interwoven with bouts of extreme violence. If you are not keen on heavy dialogue in your war movies, then this is probably not the movie for you.

But in the end I just found the movie too long to be enjoyable. Although I do recognise that there are some entertaining bits.

I am glad I watched this movie as it was a different experience if nothing else, even if I did get bored sometimes. But i wouldn't watch it again.

`Inglourious Basterds' is a typical Tarantino film and if you are a fan of his films then this will right up your street. This is set in WW2 and follows a group of American commandos who are behind enemy lines and who terrorize nazi soldiers to lower morale. It also features a Jewish cinema owner who plans to enact her own form of revenge; both stories weave their way separately through the film and join up at the end. This is shot in a series of vignettes (very much in the pulp fiction style) and each little episode provides an extra element to the overall story. Some of the dialogue and behaviour of the Basterds will make you laugh, that is until the retribution begins and then you get the usual Tarantino ultra violence that will make you wince as you watch. The Basterds behaviour is as deplorable as the nazis at times, but their delivery and flair raise a wry smile throughout. There is an excellent cast, with many decent actors playing small roles as well as main characters and whilst the direction is stylised it is easily as good as previous films by Tarantino. The ending is ludicrous but is shot with tongue firmly in cheek and although complete fantasy, it is the ending you would want to make this a satisfying film experience. It's not real, but it is good cinema. This was better than I expected and is worth a watch at some point, just note that it is an 18 certificate for a reason.

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Tarantino can be a great filmmaker when he tries. The Kill Bill films were a triumph of sheer style, and his gift for dialogue is unrivalled by most Hollywood writer/directors. But Inglorious Basterds was just a leaden, tedious drag, further spoiled by an undercurrent of mean-spirited sadism. Whereas Kill Bill was pure fantasy, this is based on one of the most important episodes in human history, and therefore, unless you're making a balls-to-the-wall comedy (a la The Producers) it should be treated with some respect.
One scene which sickened me involved young, sobbing German soldiers forced by the Basterds, a gang of American Nazi hunters, to watch them torture and kill their comrades. This would be fine if the Basterds weren't just shallow hero figures, so devoid of past and future that they almost serve as surrogates for testosterone-heavy audience members. Regardless how justified their actions may be, they come across as savage yankee apes, not moral avengers. Something's terribly wrong with a film when I sympathise more with a Nazi than an enemy of Hitler's regime. I might have liked Aldo Raine and The Bear Jew given some individualism. What drove them to such nihilistic violence? A boner for bloodshed, apparently.
Another such scene ends with an undercover agent shooting a German soldier, after he'd willingly disarmed so she could be rescued by the Basterds. Earlier he'd told her about his newborn son. I'm supposed to root for these cretins?
The one character I was supposed to sympathise with and did was Shosanna, a young Jewish girl who narrowly escapes when her family are murdered in a French farmhouse. She goes on to run a cinema which will host the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film, and plans to blow it up come the big night, wiping out most of the party's upper echelons. She's sweet, vulnerable, and haunted by a dark thirst for vengeance, which is more understandable than the Basterds'.
What annoys me is that certain elements of this film imply that a much deeper, more insightful and satirical work could have blossomed from it. The prologue is a masterpiece of tension, terror and pity, but even that displays a small touch which indicates the direction the film will take: halfway through a terse conversation between a Nazi and a dairy farmer, the former starts smoking a ludicrously oversized pipe, making him look like a clown. I can think of no better moment to surmise what this film is about than that.

The Plot
Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his team of Basterds, a squadron of ruthless Jewish soldiers, are on the hunt for Nazi-scalps. Meanwhile, in a small Parisian cinema, a vengeful Jewish survivor uses a film premiere as the perfect opportunity to exact her own revenge on the German High Command.

The Review
More than ten years in the making, Quentin Tarantino returns to form with his long much anticipated World War Two based spaghetti western, Inglorious Basterds.

The ten years of work though has created a genuinely tense action thriller of epic proportions. There's less action than you'd expect from a Quentin Tarantino film, but the tension is positively simmering, built slowly and surely in key scenes through use of both superb dialogue and subtle direction. When the action arrives though, it does with a bang; quick and bloody is the order of the day. Despite containing numerous set-piece scenes though, the film's two and a half hour running time flies by.

The best roles have been saved for the non-English leads of Christoph Waltz and Melaine Lauranet. As The Jew Hunter, Waltz manages to be both creepy and likeable at the same time, whilst managing to keep the character utterly believable. As Jewish victim Shosanna Dreyfus, Melaine Laurent has the right mix of vulnerability and vengefulness. Laurent has been gifted a rare role in Hollywood these days, a strong, leading female character, and seizes the chance to make her mark.

The film isn't without its weak parts though. The Basterds of the title are essentially superfluous to the story, as they take up a small amount of the screen time. Also, characters such as Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine and Martin Wuttke's Hitler, are played too much for laughs, when more grounded characters could have given the film an even deeper sense of threat and foreboding.

The Verdict
Cinema's ultimate basterd returns to form with one of his best films yet.

A loose thread which has run through most of Tarantino's films is the idea that anyone who puts on a mask, or a disguise, or a costume, or just pretends to be someone else... is doomed. The Reservoir Dogs couldn't spot the traitor in their midst because they'd obliterated their own identities, and The Bride's attempt to be Mrs. Tommy Plimpton ended in disaster. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has finally delivered a definitive exploration of this theme. The more horrible it gets, the more wonderful it gets - and it gets pretty damn horrible.

The plot: Aldo Raine is off to Nazi-occupied France to make a Western. He's cast a dozen angry Jewish soldiers as Apache indians, and the entire Wehrmacht as marauding cowboys. And in the best war movie tradition, he's keeping absolute demarkation between the goodies and the baddies. Trouble is, not everyone on Aldo's own side can play their own parts perfectly either. Phoney German and Italian accents might fool the home audience, but won't get past astute critics like Gestapo Major Dieter Hellstrom and SS Colonel Hans Landa. By the time Aldo Raine and Josef Goebbels have finished making their respective propaganda fantasies, war has become so theatrical, and cinema so violent, that there's no distinction between a combat ambush and a movie premiere.

Some reviewers condemned this movie on moral grounds, namely that it transforms Jews into mass-murderers and Nazis into victims - which it does, but you're not meant to like that transformation; you're meant to be horrified. Inglourious Basterds has very little concern for historical reality, but plenty to say about the art that portrays it. It's the type of masterwork which I can only call "thematically saturated" - everything reflects the theme in some way; there's barely a single gesture which is superfluous or gratuitous. The attention to detail is meticulous. Tarantino really takes his time ratcheting up suspense over very polite, genteel conversations, giving much greater impact to the intermittent bursts of extremely bloody violence.

This is postmodern filmmaking at its very best - composed entirely from loving recreations of the worst glorifying excesses of gung-ho war movies, but knitting them all into a macabre ironic comedy of art, violence, masquerade, and collapsing identity.

Inglorious Basterds is definitely a typical Tarantino film. A vicious plot that relies heavily on script, an intense build up to some explosive scenes and a great mixture of dramatic plots and black humour. So it's nothing we haven't seen before from the guy, but touching on a War theme with his style of direction is a brave thing to do. Luckily, it's a fantastic film, one of his best, and in a decade or so it will be considered a modern classic.

It has one of the best intros to a film I have seen in recent film. It's certainly slow paced, but the build up is real gripping stuff. From here, you'll know that Christopher Waltz, who plays The Jew Hunter, will be the immediate stand out performance. And so it is, and a sinister, terrifying performance at that. Brad Pitt also leads The Inglorious Basterds, a cult formed to kill any Nazi's they come across, and plays a fantastic anti-hero. One of his best roles, even if his accent isn't groundbreaking. The two female main characters are portrayed beautifully, and even give a menacing touch to the male dominating film. I also want to point out Eli Roth's character in particular, because his character is suprisingly one of the most likeable in the whole film, and delivers an extremely intense entrance into the movie.

The script is pure brilliance, something we've come to accept from all QT's films from now on. It pretty much makes the film. It balances the progression of the story perfectly with the humour, and there's unexpecedly a lot. If there's a few duds, it's similar to most QT's previous films: the pacing is slow, and it feels each stand out scene is filled with unnesecarry material that we could have done without. But I suppose this helps for multiple viewings, and also gives a slightly more intense build up for the dynamic climax to the scene. Oh yeah, and the very last scene is pretty damn clever and a great send off to such a brilliant movie.

If you've seen any of his previous films, in particuar Pulp Fiction, you'll most certainly enjoy this film. What's more is, it seems this film can only get better with repeated viewings. After liking the first and adoring the second, the third made Inglourious Basterds one of my favourite of the 00's, something I never would have expected after the first sitting.

It seriously is a modern masterpiece and is not to be ignored.

this film is surpassed my expectations, i did not think a fictional story line which directly involved hitler, would ever wow my in a film, however this film did just that. Brad Pitt plays his character perfectly!
the film explores an alternate series of events running up to the last days of hitler, the film is so well made i never get bored of watching it!