I’d like to get this out of the way: I hate Quentin Tarantino. He is disgusting. His style is credited as “original” and “creative.” But that is garbage; he is a sadist. He loves pain. He loves others to feel pain. He loves his actors to be in pain. He loves the audience to be in pain, and he loves his editors to be in pain. He combines themes of spaghetti westerns and torture porn-style gore. Tarantino is a child with an assault rifle. His non-linear storylines are confusing and outlandish. He wants to be difficult. He wants you to think to yourself: “Jesus that just doesn’t seem right.” Kill Bill 1 and 2 were appalling. Terrible acting, poor special effects, and absurd storylines filled the movie. And the worst part is that it is all on purpose. His movies represent the kid in school who feigns apathy and performs poorly on purpose to seem cool, but is really just terrified that if he tries, he might fail. Tarantino is that kid. He makes jokes and calls them movies. Oh, and he helped give us the movie Hostel.
Tarantino’s smug attitude and odd face, however, are not why I am writing. I am writing to praise the movie Inglourious Basterds. Immediately my computer (an HP, because Macs are for idiots) alerts me of something: both words in the title are misspelled –yet another example of his smugness. Anyway, this movie was phenomenal. You can’t argue that. I don’t care if the Second World War has been made into 1,000 mediocre films; this is a good one. The acting is perfect. The cast is outstanding. The plot is intriguing (not to mention beautifully fictional). The music was complimentary and compelling, but not overpowering. I noticed each song as it played because it was good. They were unique and simple. The title theme, Rabbia e Tarantella, was stuck in my head for hours after the movie (in a good way). But the shining star was David Bowie’s Cat People. It starts with the climax of the film: the premier of a Nazi propaganda film based upon Fredrick Zoller’s encounter with Allied troops. We see her in a stunning red dress, which is also the color of the Swastika flags throughout the theater. Any other director would have used dark, forboding music to alert the viewer of the death and suffering; Tarantino smartly uses David Bowie’s signature sound for an extraordinary effect.
To the actors: astonishing work gentlemen. I’m not being sexist; I just think of the TWO women who appeared in the entire movie as suboptimal and relatively unimportant. This is in spite of the fact that Shoshanna is the ostensible protagonist of the story. Colonel Hans Landa. This is one of the greatest characters ever conceived. The Jew Hunter. Playing him requires perversion, psychosis, likability, intelligence, eloquence, appropriate appearance, and confidence. And the actor must be all of the above simultaneously. Surely no such actor exists, right? Wrong. Native Austrian Christoph Waltz is beautiful as Landa. But everyone knows that since he won the Academy Award for best supporting actor in Basterds. His tone twists and turns like a roller coaster. His wording is intelligent and bold. He is frank in his demands, but somehow stretches simple sentences into entire monologues that are fun to watch, not painful. He is cruel, foul, and simply psychotic. And yet, I find myself liking him. In the midst of his evil, he is a protagonist. He is wildly selfish. He plays for the winners, and it doesn’t matter to him who that is. Make no mistake; he does not end the war for the greater good or for the fame. Instead he ends it for himself. He knows Germany is going to lose, and he ends the war in Europe for his own benefit. He somehow makes eating terrifying. Brilliant! Something so innocent and necessary is twisted beyond recognition. He makes drinking a glass of milk frightening. And when he eats a strudel it is unlike any scene in Hollywood. You can feel the tension in the situation. You can see him smiling to himself. He tortures her with his presence and dialogue. He lets mystery tear Shoshanna apart. Finally, after he excuses himself, she breaks down sobbing. What an outstanding performance. Landa reminds me of one person in particular: Hannibal Lector. He is calculating, brilliant, psychotic, and as strange as mustard ice cream. But I love him. When he is off-screen I wonder where he is. He becomes giddy with excitement, bouncing and smiling like a child near the end of the movie. He is deadly serious and surprisingly self conscious when checking his English. He is informal yet dangerously polite. He laughs like a hyena, a pretty big sign that he is nuts. And at the end, we see our American protagonist (played by Brad Pitt), an Army officer, carve a Swastika into Landa’s head to remind him of his crimes. And do you know what? I felt sorry for the Colonel. I hated Brad Pitt for that. Cristoph Waltz’s performance had more levels than Burj Khalifa. I commend him. Now we move on to the Basterds: A lovable gang of hoodlums from all over the U.S. that savagely beat and torture members of the Wehrmacht. Full grown men behaving like animals. And that is exactly what they needed to be. America needed a symbol that would strike fear into German hearts, and they were it. Everyone was amazing, but Michael Fassbender stood out most. His distinguished service to the British army was cut short by a group of Americans (and one German traitor) trying to murder every German soldier possible. He is, first and foremost, a gentleman. He is polite, loyal to his country, and I assume he is quite chivalrous. And, in his finest moment, he takes part in the most suspenseful scene: the bar standoff. I have seldom seen such an intimate scene. We see each German speaking member of the Basterds lose their lives in a chilling gunfight. In his last moments Fassbender’s character “goes out speaking the Kings.” What a model Brit.
An interesting movie with the greatest cast I’ve ever seen. Tarantino might not be as much of an idiot as I thought. Official Redrew: five out of five stars.
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