Like Marmite or World music, you either love or hate Quentin Tarantino movies. Especially recently, when his films reek of self-indulgence due to his singular vision and overwhelming confidence as a film-maker. But if you give into Tarantino’s vision, you’ll find yourself lost in a fascinating and entertaining world of references and downright coolness. Kill Bill merged kung fu with spaghettis westerns and revenge flicks to make a thoroughly thrilling film that was accessible even to those unfamiliar to the genres. And now Tarantino has taken a stab at the almost forgotten action war genre with his strangely misspelt Inglourious Basterds.
The Basterds are a group of mainly Jewish tough-guys led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), whose mission is to murder and scalp as many Nazis as possible. But the Basterds mettle is tested when they become involved in a plot to destroy a French cinema that will host the premiere of an SS film, attended by the likes of Goebbels and Hitler himself. And while the cinema’s owner, Shosanna, a Jewish girl in disguise, is hatching her own plot to destroy the heads of the Nazi party, she must avoid the steely smarts of Colonel Hans Landa, a man who earned the nickname The Jew Hunter and who is most likely to uncover the plots of both her and the Basterds.
Lately Tarantino has been seemingly attempting to revive long lost sub genres of cinema, such as the poorly made gore of Grindhouse cinema, or blaxploitation movies (Jackie Brown). WWII action seemed like a genre that isn’t worth reviving, an insultingly “entertaining” view of the most horrid period of the last century. Even its best examples, such as The Dirty Dozen, are forgettable at best. Yet the downright dour tone of all recent WWII films are not only too heavy but predictably so, and none of them coming close to the brilliance of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But how does Tarantino manage to make an enjoyable without appearing irresponsible to the families of concentration camp survivors? He does this by being Tarantino. Inglourious Basterds constructs a world, not of the real 1940’s in Europe, but rather an imagined TarantinoWorld, where everyone knows their cinema, where Mexican standoffs are a dime a dozen, and where our history is rewritten so drastically that it seems preposterous to be offended by its attempt to entertain. Read the rest of this entry »
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