Here's the review Ilinked to; I realised that I ought to have done this earlier, and I thought it was too late to go back and edit the original post.
"The disciples of Quentin Tarantino are claiming that, with Inglourious Basterds, the master has returned to form; others will tell you it's a boring disaster. Neither is true. This spaghetti-western-inspired war film is a watchable mix of the good, the bad and the ugly.
You've probably heard that Inglourious Basterds — its title is inspired by a trashy 1978 film by Enzo Castellari — is in the tradition of films such as The Dirty Dozen. But it's not really a homage or a spoof or a trashy B-film romp. It has all these elements, but for all its fun moments, and there are a few, it takes itself rather too seriously. Tarantino, the American pop-culture kiddie, has grown up and gone all European on us.
This is a war movie that has no interest in war, its moral complexities or its grand strategies. It's not interested in human suffering, history, heroism or the banality of evil. I'm not sure it's interested in anything other than cinema. Of course, Tarantino has always been a film buff, but his passion for pop culture prevented him from being one of the boring ones. Here, however, there's no pop culture, no cool moments or hip soundtrack to fall back on — one David Bowie track is the exception. Inglourious Basterds ends up as a boring film buff's movie, awash with in-jokes about German directors and other cinematic references. It even contains the idea that film itself could destroy the Third Reich.
Tarantino has dealt with the tricky problem of addressing historical truth by simply ignoring facts and creating his own revenge-driven fairy tale. In the first of the film's five chapters — Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France — Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a notorious Nazi Jew-hunter, arrives with his men at an isolated French farmhouse to question a farmer about local Jews in hiding. It's the best scene in the film, one that plays on our sense of the familiar — the Sergio Leone influence is obvious — while at the same time leaving us in the dark. As the loquacious Landa talks and talks, we wonder what's really going on. Are the farmer's pretty daughters in peril? Is the farmer compromised? At one point, Landa asks him if they may talk in English: it seems like an audacious Tarantino trick to get rid of the subtitles, but it has a payoff.
From that farm, a young Jewish girl, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), escapes Landa's clutches. Three years later, she is the owner of a cinema in Paris. There she is wooed by a film lover and young Nazi hero called Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who is the star of a film called Nation's Pride, which Joseph Goebbels wants to premiere at her cinema. This will give Shosanna a chance to kill the top Nazi elite, including not just Goebbels, but Göring and Hitler Little does she know that a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as the "inglourious basterds", who have been spending their time in France killing Nazis, have their own plan for blowing up the party's top brass.
The trouble with the film is that it has no clear voice: it's not strong enough to be a gripping war drama, which I think it wants to be, or funny enough to be an enjoyable spoof. Tarantino's idea of a group of Nazi-killing Jews is rich in comic possibility. The team are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a Southerner with a simple delight in killing Germans. But if you're expecting some kind of Mel Brooks/Woody Allen riff on the problems and anxieties of being a Jewish avenger, you will be disÂappointed. Such is the violent and brutal nature of the basterds' revenge — we see them graphically taking the scalps of dead Nazis — that Tarantino makes the Jews seem the cruel brutes and the Nazis the victims. And, with the exception of the Pitt character, we never really get a sense of these men or see them interact together.
The film's strongest moments involve Landa talking to a suspect. In his banter, you can hear the ticking of a time bomb. Tarantino's dialogue builds up the tension by the use of trivia, repetition and digressions. It's a fine example of the art of conversation as torture, and it lets Waltz, an Austrian actor, steal the film from Pitt. But Tarantino uses this trick time and time again, and it soon grows tedious. Consequently, the film, which resembles a radio play, gets dragged down by its script."
It accurately sums up my views.
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