Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds... or however the hell it's misspelled... is Quintin Tarintino's (or however the hell that's spelled) latest bloodfest.  It's a wwii revenge movie, because sometimes (just sometimes) winning the war and instituting an unconditional surrender is just not enough of a kick in the balls to your long-since dead, discredited and completely historically dehumanized enemies.  Yup, sometimes a "revenge flick" is just what you need.

About the movie itself, it's not that bad.  There is a little less blood than i had expected given, well, it's tarintino.  Some of the atmosphere development goes on far too long and the build up becomes draggy.  The action that follows is typically high intensity but way too short lived for the preceding build up.

The characters are all over the place.  Brad Pitt's character seems to lack presence despite being the main character.  You get brief glimpses of him being... sadistic and psychotic, but that's about it.  He's said to be a brilliant leader and is known throughout nazi-germany (for his sadism, mostly), but you never really see him do anything.  The rest of the "Basterds" have less importance, still.

The best character in the film is, by far, the main villain: Hans Landa, the jew hunter.  Landa (Christoph Waltz) is nothing short of a brilliant villain.  Everything his character says and does just oozes with a kind of insidious creepiness.  Yet, Waltz plays Landa as a character who is sophisticated and brilliant all the same.  It's one of those roles that's definitely deserving of praise (an oscar, maybe?).  When an actor can make even eating a strudel seem like an act of evil, you know he's done a good job.

Sadly, the rest of the movie's villains are nothing but incredibly shallow stereotypes of all the worst nazi characteristics (just so ya know they're evil!).  This seems like an odd choice of characterizations because the only reason to use such stereotypes is to hammer home a heavy-handed point.  A practice that is almost wholy unnecessary when dealing with someone as infamous as Hitler.  It's not like anyone in the audience is going to mistake Hitler for a redeemable character or anything.

Yet Hitler, Gobbels and any other nazi you see is portrayed as a slobbering degenerate oaf who laughs at the death and misery of others (get it?  They're EVIL!).  They may as well have also said "and they're small in the pants" after every nazi introduction.

Now i'm not trying to defend nazi murderers, but let's face it.  Shallow villains is more of an insult to the viewer than who you're characterizing them after.  "I don't trust you to understand why this guy is evil, so i'll make it as obvious as posssible."  Just seemed kinda dumb to me.  Oh well, Waltz' character more than makes up for it.

Though i'd like to go on about other issues i had with the film, many more are very much plot significant, so i don't want to spoil them.  Suffice it to say, when you walk into a movie, there's a set of truthes you take to be universal and infallable.  There can be acceptable breaks from reality, even with these truthes, but you have to really really need it to be plot significant in order to pull it off nicely.  When a writer/director does it just because, it can be a little bit like a cold shower - uncomfortable, if not outright offensive.

Now, normally i avoid reading reviews of movies i'm planning on seeing since most reviewers just spoil the plot outright.  But because i waited several weeks to see this one, i inevitably saw a glimps of a review somewhere online (can't recall where).  This reviewer said Inglourious Basterds was basically a world war ii movie with the jews cast as nazis.  At the time i didn't understand what this meant, but after seeing Inglourious Basterds i think i know.

Ultimately, there are a lot of times little things i can pick at in this movie, some of them more glaring than others.  I'm not going to say the movie was bad, though, 'cause there were times i did overtly enjoy it.  There was the characteristic gore and violence, at least some decent atmosphere building (the opening scene comes to mind) and even some humourous scenes for good measure.  Definitely a good mix of elements.

All in all, i give this movie 4 and a half dead nazis out of 6.  Plain ol' B.

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Hey, that's a good review!

*sorry about no pic... i'll put one up later if i can think of something clever.