Movie Review: Inglorious Basterds

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Inglourious Basterds is the most brutally entertaining film of the summer, a revisionist World War II epic that plays fast and loose with both the history books and the well-worn conventions of its genre. The film also represents a triumphant return to form for director Quentin Tarantino, the manic genius behind Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill series.

Now comes his long gestating masterpiece, a sprawling combat saga about a bloodthirsty regiment of Jewish-American soldiers with a gruesome penchant for scalping Nazis. And folks, it doesnít disappoint.

The film establishes its dramatic prowess early on, with a hypnotic opening sequence that finds SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogating a hapless French farmer who has been accused of harboring a family of Jewish fugitives. This twenty-minute scene begins with a simple request for a glass of milk and ends in a massacre.

The rest of the plot kicks in when the titular Basterds finally show up, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a deranged but moralistic redneck from the mountains of rural Tennessee.

Aldo Raine is a larger-than-life role, and Pitt, slipping into an accent just north of a George W. Bush impression, manages to imbue the part with all the swaggering machismo and righteous Kentucky-fried fury it deserves.

Inglourious Basterds may not be the best thing its creator has ever done, but it definitely ranks among his finest. And thatís pretty damn good company to keep. By blending Tarantinoís frenzied directorial style with the nostalgic essence of classic war movies and spaghetti westerns, Inglourious Basterds becomes much more than the sum of its generic parts. In fact, it ultimately becomes Tarantinoís blood-inked love letter to cinema itself.

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Movie Review: Inglorious Basterds

What a lovely way in which to end the review, describing the movie as Tarantino's "love letter to cinema". But wait, where have I read that same phrase before? Oh yes, in a previously published review of the same movie which saw the work as "the ultimate love letter to cinema" (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-20/tarantinos-would-be-masterpiece/). Purely coincidental, I'm sure.

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