by Paul Decirce

Created on: March 27, 2010

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS:  Hollywood's Indie (SIC) Spectacular

People of a certain generation - mine - revel in the mastery of Tarantino's first four or five projects.  His story for Natural Born Killers, his script from True Romance and his first two films Resesvoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction all have well worn places in DVD collections around the world as modern genre masterpieces.  

 Yet taking a look at his output since Pulp Fiction, it's easy to see the ideas drying but the chatter increasing.  Tarantino's modus operandi, to take classic exploitation scenes and to angle the camera and the script from the other side, from the behind-the-scenes side, is well known.  First scene in Pulp Fiction:  instead of just doing what the film in the 70s would do, he has the assassins pause before their big entrance, talking candidly about massages and other useless subjects.  We're given an insight into their workings, no longer simply cut-out 70s mobsters but now real living persons.

Same in Reservoir Dogs.  We don't see the action of the film (the robbery).  It's what happens after the normal movie subject occurs.  I can't help but think the same thing as his main Nazi Killer (Brad Pitt) has a friendly conversation with a prisoner of war.  In the war movies of past, it was shoot first, talk later.  

At first I was as much of a Tarantino fan as the next, but having to endure conversations between killer and victim (Jackson and DeNiro) in Jackie Brown, the teacher and his student (Carradine and Thurman) in Kill Bill, the gang of girls against the Death Proof driver (Kurt Russell) being examples.  Before the bad guy dies, we gotta talk him to death first.

Inglourious Basterds was no different, yet somehow better paced than every film of his since Pulp Fiction.  While there are plenty of sit-down conversations to be had, almost all of them seem to somehow move the story forward.  Enzo Castellari's 1978 film of the same name bears little resemblance to Tarantino's film other than to nod at the low-budget of it all.  

 So by now you surely know the story of the film: a crack squad of US soldiers are nicknamed inglorious bastards' by the Nazi for their special brutality.  They are out to kill Nazi's and soon pledge an attempt on Der Fuherer's live itself.  In a queer double-switch of utilizing history to create a sense of place and then by finishing the story by re-writing what actually happened, the film moves from bio-pic to fiction story with huge clunkiness.  Sort of like reading a story where the first person voice dies at the end.  It's unwritten rule of story-telling.  

 But Tarantino is supposedly such an 'artiste' that such a vehicle to work with should be okay.  Or is it?  He's used real history for his setting and character base, another film title as his own (if not mis-spelled), and all that remains is a made-up ending of blowing up a movie theatre.  I think all of these obviously glaring issues aren't supposed to matter because it's a Tarantino film and HE loves film and WE love film so we're supposed to go along with it for the fun of it.  Well, it depends on your mood.

 Ultimately there were some real positives:  I thought there were great scenes, like the first.  Second, it wasn't too long, a problem with QT.  Third, Christopher Waltz as Hans Landa.  There wasn't enough blood, but QT's never been about the screen blood.  It's all implied as usual, until the explosion at the end woke me from my haze of Cheeto's and Red Bull.

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