This could be the best World War II movie ever made. Quentin Tarantino has perhaps made his finest film. Inglourious Basterds will show you several of the artsy and campy trademarks that you’d expect from this iconic and eclectic Writer/Director, but it also takes you on a glorious ride.
You’ll hear hot, riffing music, old-fashioned graphics to begin a new act, shrieking sound effects that overplay the suspense, and uber close-up images of an apple struedel dessert with whipped cream topping. While the tinted hues and colorization of the film points your brain towards the 1940s, the sets, clothing and idle chatter place the viewer there fairly firmly. You get pretty much a greatest hits collection of the Tarantino film tricks (like Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction), but the added emotional swell of an exciting football game played by your home team.
The emotional rallying point is the hatred of the Nazi regime, brilliantly played out for us in an early scene where the “Jew Hunter” (SS Officer Colonel Hans Landa played by Christoph Waltz) visits a French dairy farm looking for hidden Jews on the property. Another scene involving two of these characters is in a fancy restaurant in France, where the extreme close-ups and long pauses onto the fluffy desserts take place. The slow, methodical pace of the SS officer and his coy conversation with cinema owner Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) are a masterful high point of the film. As the audience, none of us know if the SS officer really knows the Jewish identity of Dreyfus, who escaped from his killing at the dairy farm in the earlier scene, or if he perhaps does know and is just playing it out like an amused cat. Without her request, he orders her a glass of milk to go with her dessert. It all creates a mighty tension that is felt from head to toe.
The introductory/recruitement speech by Lt. Aldo Raine (played wonderfully with a dry flair by Brad Pitt) are an example of a few soon-to-be-classic scenes that’ll be played back over and over on YouTube and looped on DVD players everywhere. Sure, the Director Oliver-Stones history a little bit with this one, but it’s like a glorious dream come true for everyone but the rare Nazi sympathizer out there. There’s also the irony of couching one of the last scenes within the framework of Nazi propaganda films. I was also particularly distracted by the heavy use of the red/black/white color combination on all things Nazi, as those are the major color themes of this magazine. I haven’t been this excited about a film in a long, long time. At almost 2 hours and 40 minutes, this is one movie that’ll be worth waiting in line for.
[For extra fun, see a few tweets I posted just before and after seeing the film last Friday: twitter.com/dooglar
And, if you’re used to our DVD reviews/rating system in HM Magazine, I’ll add a cautionary note for you: Yes, there is a 3-second gratuitous sex scene when the cinema owner meets an assistant for Nazi propaganda filmmaker, Goebbels; and there is a plethora of gratuitous violence (i.e. blood, guts and gore) splattered all over the film. With the subject matter of Jews being persecuted, this certainly ranks high on the “Spiritual Conversations” meter.
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