Inglorious Basterds

I try to be consistent-- I excoriated "Titanic" because I thought it took an historical tragedy and made an insipid soap opera out of it. I don't know if I could describe "Inglorious Basterds" with the same negativity, but I came to the end of it wondering to myself, "What was the point of all that?"

I respect Tarantino; indeed, his "Reservoir Dogs" is one of my favorite movies. But I agree with the reviewers below who say he's inconsistent, and too often lets his own inflated ego get in the way of a director's restraint. I guess you could see this film as a revenge fantasy, and I'm not necessarily against them, particularly when it comes to a group as loathsome as the Nazis...as someone of primarily Irish descent, I'd love to see a film where Irish peasants rise up en masse against their English "landlords" and send them face first into the ocean with rotten potatoes stuffed down their throats. Or American Indians rising up against their oppressors from Europe. Or American slaves (when will someone make a movie about Nat Turner?) rising up against their slavemasters. Or Russians (or Poles, or Ukranians, or...) against Stalin. Etc. Etc.

The problem with "revenge fantasies"...at least as far as I'm concerned...is that you get to the end of them and historical reality is still historical reality. At best, I guess they can serve as a kind of release, a form of psychic masturbation, for want of a better way of putting it. At worst? They can be exploitative, feed into darker human impulses, and, ultimately, be empty and meaningless. (SPOILER ALERT!!!) The reality is that Hitler (a badly played caricature in this film) didn't die in a movie theatre conflagration. There was no group of American assassins scalping Nazis wherever they found them. Hitler lived far too long, and millions of human beings died. That's the historical reality, and I never found any sort of satisfaction...either as a film viewer or as a human being who would have loved it if Hitler and his minions had been gotten a hold of by those they persecuted and given exactly the sort of "rough" justice that they so obviously deserved... from Tarantino's fantasy.

Christoph Waltz is very good as the Nazi known as "The Jew Hunter" and hopefully will have a long career in movies. Brad Pitt? I've never thought he was a great, or even a very good, actor, but he's right for a role like this-- broadly played, cynically humorous. In a sense, he reminds me of Clark Gable. Gable was, obviously, an exceptionally good looking guy who also...in my opinion...wasn't much of an actor. But I guess for certain parts, you don't really have to be-- charisma can accomplish what talent can't. Whether Pitt can establish and maintain that charisma in the way that Gable did for so many decades remains to be seen, but his part in "Inglorious Basterds" can be seen as another step in the right direction.

This one is easy pickings. Let me start by saying that I believe that Tarantino has the potential of being the best director of our time. He has had great commercial success, but that's not a true benchmark of quality when you consider the crap that has oozed out of Hollyweird over the last couple of decades.

He is not a weathered director.

What I find easy about reviewing this movie is the stark contrast in the attention he pays to various scenes and sequences. Generally, he is lazy, but from time-to-time he unleashes his film-making prowess and he does it twice in this movie. Magellan touches on them in his review, the first being the farm house sequence and the second being the sequence in the basement bar...the one where Bridget von Hammersmark hooks-up with her contacts and the SS dude, listening in on their conversation, joins the table. The scene builds on his spotting their not-quite-acceptable accents. The tension is genuine and is released like a slow burning fuse until it explodes. This is great direction, great massaging and great film-making that the likes of Peckinpaw and Hitchcock would approve of.

I didn't feel as if this was time wasted, but the movie was uneven, like unmatched patches quilted together...like an early Wright Brother's flight that left the ground from time-to-time...even soared a couple of times. Tarantino clearly had a passion for parts of this movie, but cared far less for other parts of it. And, clearly, he has defined himself as a director who has not yet arrived.

On a more positive note, I thoroughly (and once again, after his role as Chad Feldheimer in "Burn After Reading") enjoyed Brad Pitt in "Inglorious Basterds". Kinda like Floyd (from "True Romance"), still mellow, goes postal.

Brad Pitt's portrayal of Lt. Rayne saves an otherwise mediocre film here.
The prvious reviewer put it perfectly when he said "standard Tarantino fare"...black comedy intermingled with some action, and the appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Diehard Quentin fans love it, no doubt. I will say that it was worth checking out.

People who claim it's too talky or slow-moving need to get an attention span. Tarantino does a movie with Nazis getting slaughtered? CS absolutely gives this a "Three Beer Movie" rating!

Pitt looks like he's having a blast as Rayne. . .it's funny and violent at different moments. . .standard Tarantino fare. I kind of liked this better than the "Kill Bills". . .

"See that's where you're wrong. . .that's EXACTLY what I expect you to do!" Classic. . .

Oh man... I hate Nazis as much as the next guy but it's hard to get behind heroes as savage and remorseless as the ones in Inglorious Basterds.

There were a couple of fantastic, tense, understated scenes in this movie. The opening scene at the dairy farm between a rough and tough farmer and an SS colonel was top notch. And the standoff in the basement bar was equally well done. Christopher Waltz pretty much stole every scene he was in as the SS colonel Hans Landa.

But the rest of the movie was the over the top blood lust stuff that Tarantino uses as filler. It's hard for me to get excited about watching unarmed people, including civilians, get burned alive while they are sprayed with machine gun fire. Even if they are the bad guys.

Pretty standard Tarantino fare. An eccentric bloodbath with a convoluted timeline. I enjoyed the film; it flowed well and the language barrier was very aptly crossed, and I very much liked the plot twist at the end (Hitler and his cronies get shot to pieces), and an already good film was capped off with a frankly spectacular performance from Christolph Waltz as the charismatic Nazi officer. There were also a couple of amusing scenes starring Brad Pitt's American renegade. Certainly worth watching, but not if you are looking for a film with a deep message.

This is exactly what I went to the theater to see. Satisfying violence, Nazi killing, and explosions. Thanks for giving us exactly what we were looking for Tarantino.

I dug seeing Nazi's getting scalped and one getting rubbed out with a baseball bat-and I think this was Brad Pitt's best movie as a half Apache leading a group of Jews who wanna _ _ _ k up Nazi's.But I still don't dig Quentin Tarantino;I generally dig blood-but I walked out of 'Reservoir Dogs'-and barely made it to the finish line in 'Pulp Fiction'.According to comedian(and rabbi)Jackie Mason,"every Jew I know ALMOST KILLED SOMEBODY" and having Hitler,Goerring,Goebbels and like-minded trash getting rubbed out by arson(I think Hitler is also machine-gunned)crosses the line into comic-book hood that could easily be replaced by Bernard Madoff,whom tons of my fellow
Chews would also love to rub out.To see a much better movie along these lines,check out 'Black Book'.

You would think that a person of my age, a senior citizen at that, would learn his lesson. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." This is another Tarantino blood fest of various types of killings. This flick of course is politically correct in that it is Jews killing Nazis. The theme was much better thirty years ago in the good old Spaghetti Westerns. Those Westerns at least had a scintilla of believability.

I WANT MY MONEY BACK!