- Can I just say how much I love 5:15pm as a screening time? It won’t work for me unless I get off work early, but it beats waiting around until 7:30pm for a movie to start. In a round and perfect world, movies would always start twenty minutes after I arrive at the theatre. Twenty minutes is optimal time to allow you to get a good seat without arriving too early. [Add an additional forty minutes if you're going to a film festival screening.] This is a science, my friends.
- I’m sure it will shock no one, but the spelling of the title has irritated the hell out of me ever since it was revealed as the correct and official spelling. One need not be illiterate just because one is a soldier!
- There’s a movie-within-a-movie directed by Joseph Goebbels1 called Nation’s Pride in which an enterprising young German holed up in a bell tower kills 300 Allies over the course of a three day assault. Obviously, he is an inspiration to all young national socialists and a film must be made to depict his heroic tale. At the film’s premiere, our easily pleased Führer laughs with nigh hysterical joy in watching as his enemies are massacred on screen.
It’s that kind of sensationalistic, borderline perverse joy that I thought this movie had been made with when I saw the trailer that clearly depicted it as a wartime Nazi comedy for the ages. This was as close as I thought we were going to get to a Castle Wolfenstein movie, something that revels unabashedly in killing Nazis. I mean, this is the ultimate historical fiction fantasy, is it not? The ultimate in wish fulfilment? I mean, Hitler dies at the end, for god’s sake, so this is obviously not to be confused with any depiction of reality and with a tagline like “Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France…”, we’re obviously in for a rather twisted fairy tale. So if instead of making yet another Holocaust drama telling the same stories with the same tropes we always see, Tarantino makes what should be the ultimate in World War II revenge films, where oh where is the revenge?
Brad Pitt demanded one hundred Nazi scalps. We never find out if he gets them or not, but I’d put a wheelbarrow full of Weimar Republic marks on the likelihood that he didn’t because so little of this film actually involves the revenge the movie tries to convince you is important. I know I sound horrifically bloodthirsty at the moment, but come on! The Nazis are the ultimate villains and, more importantly, they’re quite possibly the only people from actual history that you can do this sort of thing to without anyone getting upset. Think of the possibilities! Damnit do I hate feeling misled.
1 Why on earth does Firefox have Goebbels in it’s dictionary by default but not, say, brachiosaurus?
- The guy who played Col. Landa2 was fan-fricken-tastic, full stop. I think he might be the only jolly the jolly German Sturmbannführer I’ve ever enjoyed on screen. He’s not a true cinematic Sturmbannführer, of course, because he is not portly. He did have the requisite twinkle in his eye, though. I nearly died when he pulled out his pipe at the start of the film.
2A small voice in my head kept saying “Landa’s not a system, he’s a man!”
- So speaking of Landa, I was looking for something else in my archives related to Wolfenstein and instead rediscovered the New York Magazine article about how Leonardo DiCaprio was originally in talks for the role:
The role? Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, a.k.a. the “Jew Hunter,” the movie’s chief villain. Will DiCaprio accept the part? Can he speak fluent French, German, and Italian, as the screenplay requires? Most important, how will DiCaprio’s Nazitude compare to fellow box-office titan Tom Cruise’s in Valkyrie? Will Leo be meaner? More Teutonic? Will he speak in a thicker accent? Will he wear two eye patches? We can’t wait to find out!
I’m sorry, I still love “more Teutonic” as a way to describe someone. Also, the tag for that article reads “nazi leonardo dicaprio” and I think that’s hysterical.
- I’m not entirely sure what Tarantino was going for stylistically. The first two chapters are full of his typical 1970s pop cultural winks, which is fine and amusing and whatnot, but he drops that schtick for the final three chapters and I can’t help wonder what the point of doing it in the first place is. I know fans of his movies might be disgruntled if he’s trying to move away from his signature storytelling style, so perhaps he was trying to ease them into it, I don’t know. It just seemed out of place in the kind of movie that the film became by the end. That said, I did love Stiglitz’s backstory segment an unholy amount, especially when the “HUGO STIGLITZ” title came up on screen.
- This being a Tarantino film, it’s very talky which I usually like when the dialogue is funny. This was missing the funny; it was more like the girls at the start of Death Proof that you were glad to see killed rather than the girls at the end of Death Proof who you were happy to see doing the killing. It’s that shade of difference in the dialogue, for lack of a better way to describe it.
- That said, the scene where the dialogue really, really works is the one where Diane Kruger’s character is introduced and she and her fellow Basterds masquerading as SS officers have an awkward drink with yet another Sturmbannführer who is suspicious of them (and their dubious accents). A lot of the scenes seemed unnecessarily long, but there was good dramatic tension in this one without making me think that Tarantino was having the characters engage in verbal masturbation for his own pleasure and amusement.
- Speaking of running length, two-and-a-half hours long is Audrey’s least favourite length, and with good reason. There’s something about movies of this length that have that same vain feeling as director’s cut editions of DVDs: it’s long enough that you probably could have cut it down to make it only two hours but short enough to tell you that there obviously wasn’t enough quality material to stretch it into a proper epic of three hours. It’s the bloated, egotistical running time. Rarely does a movie of this length actually feel like it earns all 150 minutes. The Departed is one of these film; this one certainly is not.
- Soundtrack issues: 1) too much that was already used in Kill Bill; 2) David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”, which caused a pretty big WTF moment for me.
- Winston Churchill was random, unnecessary, and kind of amusing. Also, bars housed inside giant globes are awesome and need to make a comeback.
- Too many typefaces in the opening credits. I could have done without Futura. The odd thing is that I think he used just as many (and possibly the same ones) in Kill Bill but it didn’t bother me there. I have obviously developed font sensitivity in the last five years.
- It was with great joy that I recognized anonymous Harvey Keitel as the voice of the American general who Landa Calrissian negotiated with over the phone at the end. Have I mentioned my love for Harvey Keitel? Because I love him, mostly for his “You’re gonna be okay!” song in Reservoir Dogs. Samuel L. Jackson narrated a sequence as well, but my heart belongs to Harvey Keitel.
- I’m pretty sure no one’s forehead is as thick as Landa’s was when it was having a swastika carved into it.
- Also, I dislike Eli Roth.
- These posters are amongst my favourite this year:
Too bad the movie does not match the epic badassness of these posters. I should know better than to trust a movie released in August.
Inglourious Basterds
By far my least favourite Tarantino film.
IMDB Plot Synopsis In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
You sir have no movie soul!
This movie is freaking awesome.
I’m pretty sure that the “Futura” you’re talking about was actually “Avant Garde.”
But interesting thoughts on the movie nevertheless.
Too bad the movie does not match the epic badassness of these posters
This is exactly how I feel about this movie. I was expeting such basassery, but it totally came up short.
I loved this movie. I think a lot of people came in expecting a lot of “badassness” but got tons and tons of extended dialogue instead. Melanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz are highlights in term of acting and Tarentino finely builds up tension throughout the movie.