Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Ever since making an ear-cutting splash in ’92 with Reservoir Dogs and spawning a flannel-wearing generation of film geeks with the iconic Pulp Fiction writer/director Quentin Tarantino remains the most vital filmmaker of his generation. Whether you love or hate his films, one has to admit that they rarely induce an indifferent reaction. With Inglourious Basterds Tarantino has made a Holocaust film that doesn’t feel like School on Saturday or make you think you have homework after the movie. If you thought Death Proof was too talky or that Jackie Brown wasn’t worth the 2.5 hour investment, then odds are you’re not going to enjoy Basterds and you’d be better off watching your District 9 download again or seeing massive drug buys, prostitution, car antenna abortions, and arms deals occur during screenings of Post Grad because of the 7 people in the theater, none of them are actually watching the movie. Call it the Keaton factor.

In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has fashioned revenge porn we can all relate to. We may not be able to identify with the oversized seafood being oppressed in J-Berg because they look a little different or give a flying fillet o’ fuck about whether some narcissistic New York shrew completes and blogs about all the Julia Child recipes, but I think we’ve all thought to ourselves not only about how Hitler was a monster, but in choosing to both shoot himself in the head and bite into a cyanide capsule rather than getting taken out of Berlin...turned out to be a huge pussy as well taking the easy way out.

Finally, at least in the movies, Hitler and the rest of the Third Reich get what’s coming to them in a movie in which I noticed the great majority of the audience left the theater smiling and laughing as Basterds seems to be the most communal experience of all of Tarantino’s films. Let’s face it...everyone wants to see dead Nazis.

The last time this summer I saw such an overwhelmingly positive response (crowd-wise) to a movie was Up.

Pixar and Quentin Tarantino: Bringing People Together Through Balloons, fat kids, and Nazis getting beaten to death like minorities pulled over by the LAPD

It’s 1941. We’re in Nazi occupied France and Ennio Morricone’s Spagh-West music twangs over the opening credits

We open on an innocuous looking milk farm with the farmer and his lovely daughters all in a row.
A car pulls up with the familiar swastika decal on it. This is rarely good news for anybody unless you look like Christopher Atkins.

A small group of SS officers step goose- step out, led by the seemingly amiable Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Walz). Col. Landa has been selected by Hitler himself to weed out the remaining Jews still hiding out in France. Hitler selects Landa because he is very, very good at his job (“I can think like a Jew”). In fact, his cute and cuddly nickname is “The Jew Hunter” and you don’t just get that name by not being good at Jew Hunting.

Landa inquires about a Jewish family unaccounted for and if Milk Farmer knows anything about it. The camera moves below the floorboards to show that he does.

You can guess where this scene is going, yet Tarantino plays you as he maximizes every moment for tension as the audience is teasingly and torturously given chances of hope that everything will turn out okay (“Before I leave, may I have another glass of milk?”) for Milkman and the Basement Jews.

It doesn’t.

But one girl named Shoshanna escapes the massacre and Landa lets her go. After all, it’s only one little girl and she can’t possibly grow up and be important later in the movie.

Meanwhile...

In the scene that plays in the trailers, a small group of Jewish American soldiers has been recruited to torture and kill Nazis. They’re led by Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt). They are also very good at what they do (“Final Rule of Inglourious Basterds...if this is your first night, then you hafta kill a Nazi”)

It helps that when you love your job you do the best you can.

The Basterds kill platoons of Nazis leaving the fields where they die as red as the Spell-check whenever I write the words “Inglourious” or “Basterds”, but leave a couple alive for info-gathering purposes. If one of them decides to get clam-lipped, it’s perfectly okay with the Basterds as it allows Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz (Hostel writer/director Eli Roth) to go to work. What does he do? He beats Nazis to a literal pulp (their heads look topped with moldy ketchup and ingluorious mustard) with his trusty bat (“Watching Donnie beat Nazis to death is the closest we get to going to the movies”) while providing scintillating baseball commentary as well. Like Wall-E last year, schools should bus in kids of all ages to see this

The Basterds allow one very lucky Nazi to live Natural Born Killers style to tell the tale, but not without a very graphic “souvenir”.

Hitler is perturbed.

We flash forward to 1944...

A rather quaint movie theater is getting its marquee changed by a young French woman named Emiliana (Melanie Laurent). She owns the theater but she doesn’t really own that name. It’s been changed as her real name is Shoshanna Dreyfus AKA The Girl from the Beginning of the movie All Grown Up and Primed for Vengeance.

As she’s changing the marquee a young Nazi (Daniel Bruhl) keeps staring at her ass and tries to flirt with her using his extensive knowledge of movies because nothing gets the girls wet like when you bust out factoids about Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Shoshanna converses as politely as she can but it’s clear she’s not interested. Young Nazi presses on as he’s not used to hearing no very often especially now because...

It turns out that Young Nazi is better known as Fredrick Zoller. Herr Zoller has been decreed a War hero after killing hundreds of Enemy soldiers in a Bird’s Nest. A film has been made about him, and oddly enough, he’s playing himself in the movie called Nation’s Pride.

Nation’s Pride was going to have a gala premiere at the Ritz, but because Freddy Z is such a hot commodity, he persuades the movie’s director (and Reich Minister of Propaganda) Joseph Goebbels to have the premiere at Emiliana’s.

Most of the Third Reich and some of the leftovers from the Second Reich will be there. The Harlem Globetrotters will even play the Washington Generals before the premiere, except in this scenario the white guys actually win (truly revisionist history) or the Globetrotters will be gassed. More importantly, Hitler will be there as well...

Which means, thanks the help of a comely double agent/movie star (Diane Kruger, Pitt’s costar in the abominable Epic-lite Troy), the Basterds might be there too.

Let the Nazi killing family fun begin...

What works with Inglourious Basterds-

1) Christoph Walz- The advance word from Cannes was (for once) accurate and though premature, Cristoph Walz is and should be the Front runner for Best Supporting Actor for his creepily genial Hans Landa. Along with Jules Winnfield, Stuntman Mike, Mr. Blonde and Bill, Landa has to rank up there with the best characters Tarantino has ever written as Walz dominates every scene he’s in and I don’t think he even has to raise his voice. Whether he’s eating Strudel, drinking milk, or looking at shoes, Landa’s always 2 or 3 steps ahead of everyone, including the Basterds. You hate him enough that the audience cheered and laughed the loudest when he got what was coming to him in the end...though it may not be what you expect (and no, he doesn’t get raped like Ving Rhames).

Let’s hope that if Walz remains the favorite for Best Supporting Actor by the end of the year, he doesn’t have to die to lock it in...

2) Mike Myers’ cameo as “Ed Fenege” (if that’s a reference to Edwidge Fenege, he doesn’t look a thing like that beauty from 70’s Italian Exploitation) is spot on, reminding audiences that not all movies he appears in are Razzie worthy. Of course it helps to share a scene with Winston Churchill.

3) The final 20 minutes are as cathartic a film experience as I’ve seen all year...and I’m not even Jewish. Not to be too revealing, but it’s the history we all wish happened cranked up to a 12. Revenge of the Big Face indeed...

4) Samuel L. Jackson gives a lesson on nitrate film and why you probably shouldn’t smoke around them.

5) An extended sequence in a bar (“You’re fighting in a fuckin’ basement”) that you just know is going to end in a Mexican standoff, but just how it gets there is one of the movie’s best surprises.

6) Like Watchmen and UNlike Transformers 2, Inglourious clocks in at 2 and a half hours, but you rarely feel it, and judging by the audience reaction, wish for a whole lot bloody more.

What doesn’t work-

1) A la Kill Bill, Inglourious is divided into “Chapters”. It worked fine with the episodic nature of those stories, but in Inglourious it just feels gimmicky and completely unnecessary.

2) A swastik-awful lot of time is spent on establishing Hugo Spiglitz (Til Schweiger), though his character never really amounts to much. His intro should have been cut simply for time. It’s like watching Ocean’s Eleven and having a 5-minute background spot on...Casey Affleck.

Overall. Though Tarantino may not be for everyone, if you’re even neutral about him or just like seeing Nazis die you’re going to have a grand time seeing the Third Reich burn, baby, burn. If only this movie had been released in 2008, because if you’re REQUIRED to have a fucking Holocaust movie be nominated for Best Picture, then it should have been this instead of the laughably pretentious Reader. How does Inglourious Basterds stand in Tarantino’s filmography? Carve this with a knife in the 5th (out of his 6 films, not counting Four Rooms) slot right in front of the stop-and-start but still very good Death Proof but just behind Jackie Brown. “This just might be my masterpiece...” Maybe not, but it’s still a Nazi gorging good time.