Inglourious Basterds Is Glorious Filmmaking
“We’re in the killin’ Nazi bidness,” Brad Pitt announces, as Aldo the Apache in Inglourious Basterds. “And cousin, bidness is boomin’!”
And for all the savagery on hand — this movie contains stomach-turning graphic violence — it’s funny business as well. Pitt’s top-notch turn as a cheerfully sadistic Tennessee-bred lieutenant who leads a squad of Jewish soldiers to scalp every Nazi they can find in the last days of World War II is one of many reasons Quentin Tarantino’s latest is one of the most entertaining films of the year.
Beginning with the title, “Once upon a time … in Nazi-occupied France,” Tarantino makes it clear that he’s thinking of spaghetti Western maestro Sergio Leone, and particularly Leone’s sprawling masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West, which like this film begins with an excruciatingly suspenseful long scene. Tarantino’s equally grandiloquent first chapter takes place against western-sounding theme music in a farmhouse in France, where a chatty, friendly, milk-drinking SS officer, Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz, who is brilliant) stops by to spread a little Third Reich good will with a suspicious farmer. Moments of random humor both puncture the tension and increase it as Tarantino and the SS man toy with expectations. The scene ends with a haunting image worthy of John Ford.
“Facts can be so misleading,” the SS colonel says, setting up Tarantino’s alternate vision of WW II — one that brings a lot of pulp fiction to history. Subsequent scenes, in which characters chat about such real-life figures as German filmmakers G.W. Pabst and Leni Riefenstahl, underline Tarantino’s goal to make not so much a WW II movie as a WW II movie about movies.
Tarantino wittily updates, most notably, The Dirty Dozen-style secret mission movies so popular in the 1960s. (The 1970s Italian action movie The Inglorious Bastards borrowed heavily from The Dirty Dozen but Tarantino doesn’t take much from it except its title, which appears misspelled on the butt of a rifle in Aldo the Apache’s Nazi-hunting squad.)
There are musical cues that bring back 70s blaxploitation films (Samuel L. Jackson pops in as a narrator) and torture porn gets a nod in the person of Hostel director Eli Roth, a friend of Tarantino’s who plays a notably merciless Jewish soldier nicknamed the Bear. When the Bear gets to work, things get very bloody very fast. It’s as if Tarantino is cheekily asking critics, “Does torture still upset you if Nazis are the victims?”
When I was in college, some students made a spoof on Indiana Jones but called it “Palestinian Jones” and featured a Middle Eastern look-alkie who muttered phrases like ” Israelis- I hate these guys” lampooning the ” Nazi’s- I hate these guys” from the movies, while he beat up and shot them. Needless to say, it was decried as a Hate film, but it also made me think. Now with WW2 over 60 years ago, this is but a Jewish Fantasy film. What if the Japanese make a fantasy movie about killing Roosevelt? Would it be art or hate?
Does torture still upset you if Nazis are the victims? Frankly, yes. I support capital punishment and recognize the necessity of killing in war but there is a good reason why the Nazis sentenced to death at Nuremburg were hanged instead of being drawn and quartered. If this movie includes “torture porn” as the reviewer calls it, then it’s just “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with army uniforms.
Whoa…what glorious filmmaking! Another movie about WWII that portrays GIs as the good guys! Who would have guessed…I mean, who knew?
Enough already. GROW UP AMERICA! The U.S. has fought in many wars since 1945 and yet WWI is the only one in which her soldiers were brave, good, honorable, and on the right side? Huh? This is a case of arrested development. It’s almost as if our national consciousness were frozen in time for over 60 years. We continue to portray the WWII GI as good and right because our daddies fought that war and Hollywood got behind that cause; Hollywood validated the merits of the mission. We continue to honor the GI of WWII while he didn’t lift a finger to protest when his Vietnam War brothers were spit upon by protesters, or when Hollywood portrayed the GWOT GI as mass a murderer and rapist.
Didn’t the WWII GI rape and commit atrocities? Indeed he did, but the machers of Hollywood liked the cause. They did not like the cause of Korean, Vietnam, Gulf I, and the GWOT wars. That’s the difference. It doesn’t matter that the GI of today is more competent, professional and disciplined than the guy of WWII. That never gets any play. In point of fact, his cause is MORE noble: he’s fighting an enemy that 8 years ago attacked U.S. soil and incinerated 3,000 of his countrymen. How many American civilians did the Nazis kill before we entered the war that took the lives of over 300,000 men?…and yet the nobility of that cause is untouchable and the reverse is true of all the rest of America’s wars.
Don’t dare make a movie showing the guys of GWOT as heroes…or even in a good light. “No no…my daddy fought in WWII and I’ve even seen movies about it.” The more we wallow in and replay the exaggerated nobility of something that happened almost 70 years ago, the more we retard our own development and prevent a proper fully engaged response to what our enemies of today want to do to us.
While I generally agree with the argument by ma_che62 above, I don’t think it applies in this case. Tarantino is not a Hollywood liberal: he’s a true artist. This is simply a story he’s been dreaming about since he was a video store clerk.
It would be nice to have Tarantino make a movie about Nam, but we’ll have to wait for him to read the conservative/pro-American revisionist historians first. Otherwise, our side of the story is simply not out there.
Did you dopes even read the review? Do you even know who Quentin Tarentino is and seen any of his movies?
It’s pulp fiction. Is it good pulp fiction or bad pulp fiction?
Mr. Boot seems to think it’s good. I’ll go see it for myself. But the review was not meant to trigger a debate about torture. Useful idiots!
Killing Roosevelt? Before or after he turned the US socialist?
Interesting juxtaposition – American Jews kill their would-be oppressors (at least in fantasy). European Jews go to the camps (in reality that is, and yes there were a few notable exceptions e.g. the Ghetto at Warsaw). If every European Jew had a gun and the will to use it, come what may, Hitler and his pals would have had a much more difficult time of it. Might even have saved some Allied lives. Instead Americans, Brits, Canadians, Poles and (lots of) Russians (pardon if I’ve left anyone out) have to do the dying for them. Us Americans need to get out of that habit imho.
And yeah, WW2 wasn’t the only good war, just the one the lefties and newsies (but I repeat myself) like because a DemocRAT was in the White House.
Just saw it. Great fun, and the young folks loved it.
On Tuesday 18 Aug I spent 5 hours at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. I do not know how to process what I saw. I do not know how to display the grief and horror I felt. I imagine, since I have not seen the movie, that Tarantino’s movie violence cannot come close to the horror of the death camps; the children were killed first; the Russian prisoners were worked near death then murdured; men, women and children stripped of their clothes, dignity and breath; mentally ill persons were systematically murdered by the ultimate death panels; and so on. Compared to what really happened, Taratino’s movie is just a movie.
Just got back from a 12:30 showing.
Incredibly lame but with a great first chapter. Would have made a first-rate short film but QT wanted to indulge his weak, juvenile, violent side.
Jack,
Well said.
Torture porn is torture porn.
Furthermore, even if you think that some people deserve an excruciatingly painful exit from this earth, mocked by their tormentors in the process, I doubt that most of the victims in this movie fit that bill.
I have not read this review yet (but will as soon as I’ve seen the movie) but I just feel so strongly about this issue I need to leave a comment on a movie thread. I just saw District 9, which had many glowing reviews (again, which I did not read but I knew how positive the majority of reviews had been). What I saw were just overwhelmingly positive reviews. These people are lying to your face (on the internet).
The film does not look terrible, but the effects are nothing to write home about; if the story had been good the effects would have been more than adequate. But the story is terrible, just dumb. Not original, not interesting, not anything. Outer Limits had more interesting and “sciencey” episodes. Not funny, not scary (because who knows what’s happening?) not anything.
The allegedly funny parts were jokes that were done better years ago in the Troops internet videos (a Star Wars parody of the tv show Cops). That is as close as this film comes to being original and it is the lamest stuff I have paid money to watch in a long time. The rest is downhill from these lame jokes. I literally wished I was seeing G.I. Joe at one point.
Again, these people are lying to your face (or the internet equivalent) if they even convey to you that this movie is “good”. Lying to your face the way Rick Sanchez and Contessa Brewer do it. Apparently it is the politics of this film that get it any positive ink. I love my fellow man as much as the next guy. But these are mother-f’ing aliens. And even if you are worried about alien rights, this movie makes no sense and the action sequences are as absurd as they are cliched. And it doesn’t help the film that the star is the biggest d-bag you’ve ever seen on the big screen at a non-porno film. I spent the whole film cheering for the father-in-law. There is some kind of payola story here, I am sure of it.
This is a great film. No wasted scenes.
Pulp Fiction?
Yes. But also Blue Velvet, Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange.
Bravo Mr. Tarantino.
Is it possible for QT to make a movie with out cutting and pasting from other movies?
Signed,
Genuinely Curious
An unmentioned element, which plays out fantastically at the end is a critique of the ‘rehabilitation’ of former Nazis to help deal with the Russians after the war. I loved that the Nazis who are allowed to live are marked in such a way that they can’t pretend they weren’t involved when they take off their uniform.
I caught the afternoon showing and I was shocked at the wretched excess. Nazis were bad people but to glorify disemboweling them was shocking. I couldn’t help but notice the same lack of human dignity that America has today with the treatment of political prisoners in Gitmo and Abu Ghirab. No wonder the world hates us.
There is an argument that fantasizing about revenge is cathartic, but it also coarsens the spirit and brings us just that much lower to the ground. To cheer on the enthusiastic torture of Nazis because they tortured others first suggests that you place no particular onus on the act of causing torment for personal pleasure, and that the only moral factor is whether or not the tortured “deserves” it, in your judgement.
Deserving victims or not, such a person is a sadist. Tarantino’s Nazi-scalping death squad is a team of base sadists obsessed with revenge, who receive our approbation on the sole basis that their targets are among modern society’s universally acceptable villains.
As has been said, when we executed convicted Nazis following the Nuremburg Trials, we did not intentionally inflict pain on them for our own pleasure; we killed them quickly, not as vengeance, but because justice demanded their crimes be answered. Even if they had deserved torture on some cosmic karmic scale, to have meted it out would have said far more about us than it would have about them.
Quentin Tarantino is utterly vile. His movies diminish the humanity of anyone foolish enough to watch.
It’s as if Tarantino is cheekily asking critics, “Does torture still upset you if Nazis are the victims?”
What an odd question. Most of the Germans tortured in the movie are simply conscripts.
Why is a conservative website running a rave review of a snuff porn film?
Get a grip people, this is soul-sickening pornography.
That is bad enough.
But it is all the worse because it convolutes pornographic sadism with the heroic cause that remains the primary moral and patriotic touchstone that still reminds Americans of who they really are and who they can be.
Think about it people. It Quentin Tarantino made a movie about the American revolution in which he showed George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette getting their kicks by artistically slicing up British soldiers with their swords, would you all think that was great art?
There can be no republic without human virtue.
Pornography, by degrading humanity, acts to destroy the capacity of people to act as citizens.
It’s not art. It’s anti-human propaganda.
17. Vinny B
“I couldn’t help but notice the same lack of human dignity that America has today with the treatment of political prisoners in Gitmo and Abu Ghirab. No wonder the world hates us.”
Gitmo does not hold political prisoners, they hold terrorists. Most were released and many found there way back to kiling infidels actually.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE50C5JX20090113
Abu Ghirab has got to be the biggest nothing in the historical index of evil. There were no mutiliations, disenbowlments or deaths. Some bored, sadistic national guard MPs f*cked with a bunch of criminals. Did you ever find out what those “poor souls” were in there for or who put them there to begin with? Thought not. The pictures ran 44 days in the NYT never really answered many questions, but they were never meant too. It was a poltical prop to club GWB with. The Army launched the investigation a year before the pics hit the news and the NCOIC got 10 years for his participation and even now people believe “torture” occurred, but they can never remember the specifics. Nude piles, dog barking and standing on a box with a bag on your head. A joke when compared to the Sadaams methods and henchmen, but whatever. Those responsible were punished and the “torture at Abu Ghirab” myth lives on.
Oh, the world will always hate US, but especially you Vinny. Keeping the hate stoked and focused at a far away boogey man keeps the people distracted from the local authority and political figures.
Ah, but Hollywood can make a movie having non-American soldiers as the heros…Say Vasiley Tsitsev (played by Jude Law) in “Enemy at the Gates”.
Only Americans must be potrayed as cowards, war criminals, torturers, rapists and thieves (Kelly’s Heros).
I think I will keep my money in my pocket.
When I read about this movie I immediately wondered if whether Tarantino lifted the theme of “The Jewish Brigade” about Jewish soldiers in a British Brigade who assassinated Nazi troops authored by Harold Blum and then turned it around and made Blum’s book into an American WWII film story.
The “Jewish Brigade” is fascinating reading about several battalions of Jews enlisted in Palestine who fought for the British Army. While on the other hand the Arabs manned a Nazi division that fought for the Germans. Interesting how the Husseins keep that historical fact under a tight lid; that the Arabs fought for Nazi Germany and considered Hitler a hero.
I’m sorry to have to correct you but “Tarantino’s Jewish soldiers” do NOT “join forces with the girl who runs the movie theater.” In fact neither is ever aware of the others plot. The Basterds do however join forces with the German actress who is working as a double agent for the british and who is attending the premier of the movie.
>>>(Critic Guy) It’s as if Tarantino is cheekily asking critics, “Does torture still upset you if Nazis are the victims?”
>>(MoHo) What an odd question. Most of the Germans tortured in the movie are simply conscripts.
Again, good point. I’m glad to see it raised.
Conscripts, or even volunteers who had the misfortune of being about 18-20 when their nation went insane and took them with it, do not deserve to be sadistically murdered after capture.
The idea that there is something “cheeky,” or “challenging” about the gruesome excesses of this movie is a cop-out.
It’s like saying you make (the other kind of) porn movies in order to make some sort of ironic comment on society’s fascination with sex.
Not buying it.
I’m sure Debbie Does Dallas was actually a very ironic and deeply profound statement about society’s obsession with sex.
Yeah, that’s it.
That’s the ticket.
Randall, nice call. Tarantino’s films are needlessly bloody. I see this as a symptom of a country that has been completely desensitized to violence–I don’t care who the victim is. Like junkies chasing that first magical high, Americans need more, more, more absurdly bloody hyper-real depictions of sadism. There were actually people laughing at some of the scalping scenes when I went to see this movie.
That being said, I think Tarantino was cheekily pulling some other bells in the film that probably got under the radar of people like the reviewer here. The Nazi SS officers charade-inspired ode to the completely ignored legacy of slavery and Jim Crow during that era quietly eviscerates the trope that Americans were driven to Germany by some ethical need to save the Jews. African Americans d Jews were still being lynched in places like Tennessee, the home of the film’s protagonist. In my own humble opinion, the Aldo character was as much a critique of American blood-thirst disguised as justice as anything else.
Alas, my humble 2bit take: Q’s worst flick yet. The pacing is horrendously slow (I’m no action fiend, mind you, I even like most of Jarmusch’s movies), Brad Pitt sound like he’s reading directly from the script and it features all of Q’s clichés without the satisfying intellectual pay-off. The real star is the Nazi ‘hunter’ character. His performance is Day Lewis-esque and truly engrossing. Beyond that, you have a revenge-exploitation flick without the guttural satisfaction of revenge. Ack.
I saw this movie and I am a conservative. Before you knee jerk bash this film without seeing it, go see it! One of the best movies I have seen in the last couple of years. Pro American military, negative dialogue about socialism, fantastic film. Also, a pseudo history lesson for people to see how truly awful the Nazis were. Well-written with a beautiful spaghetti western feel.
Pro American military, negative dialogue about socialism, fantastic film.
Where did you get the negative dialogue about socialism part? Whoa.
The actor who played the SS “detective” stole the show. In fact I was surprised by the superb acting chops of several of the German actors. The scene in the basement tavern in which another German actor playing another SS man faces off against the fake-German Brit was superb. Tarantino seems to be the kind of director who can craft tight gripping scenes within a loose, baggy and essentially unbelievable overall film.
Saw the “Basterds” on Sunday afternoon. I really wanted to like it more. I love few things better than a bunch of dead Nazis from the hands of German Jews.
Sadly, Basterds was merely OK and only moderately enjoyable. I could only give it a 1-1/2 to 2 out of 4. It was nearly 2-1/2 hours long (which is perfectly fine with me), but it had a number of extended periods of boredom that just brought the movie down to mediocrity.
Tarantino has done better.
Hi,
1st a Question:
I read Roger Ebert’s review last night. Ebert said:
“A character at the beginning and end, not seen in between, brings the story full circle.”
I saw IB today and was wondering what character Ebert was talking about?
2nd some comment about the films sadistic violence;
a) The chapter 2 entitled “Inglorious Basterds” which included the above mentioned tortures is only a small part of the film
b) the victims of the torture are merely conscripts and I’m not sure the “Basterds” (or at least “Apache” and “Bear’ are meant to be ‘All-American”/”Boyscout” type heros, I think Tarantino’s intent may have been to make them morally ambiguous like “The Man with No Name”/ “Blondie”/”Manco” and the “Dirty Dozen”.
eg–Was the grining pin biting Jim Brown as Jefferson tossing granades and gasoline on screaming helpless civilian women at the chateau at Wren, as a horrified Sgt Bowren (Richard Jaekel) looked on, a hero or a terrorist ?
I don’t think we are expected to enjoy or even respect those actions from American soldiers, I think we are suppose to be horrified by them
Jim
Action film making is my passion and i love watching films like this too.
I believe Inglourious Basterds is a salute to the Holocaust. By way of twisted humor, the violent acts of vengeful Americans, as well as a young Jewish hideaway, lift the subject matter out of its murky content. We see the Third Reich as a group of thugs, not genocidal maniacs. The American Basterds portray a cowboy mentality of vengeful renegades. All women have two sides, one hidden to common knowledge, one not.
For all these reasons, I believe Inglourious Basterds is a salute to the Holocaust, as it underplays the real violence, the real suffering and the real story.