Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: Movie Review

Quentin Tarantino's work is pure sensation - it's loud, rude, obscene, and delightfully stylish. So, how do you transplant such absurdities to a World War II picture? Well, it adds up to Nazi scalpings, David Bowie's "Cat People", and a climactic scene of bloodshed that gives "Kill Bill: Volume 1" a run for it's money.

The film begins with a magnificent piece of suspense, arguably the finest sequence to ever appear in a Tarantino film. SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) visits a French dairy farmer (Denis Menochet), whom he believes to be harboring Jews. Landa flirts with him - teases him with his wordplay, intimidates him with his ridiculous pipe. Finally, he breaks the dairy farmer, and Landa's men fire at the bodies hiding under the floorboards. Only one girl escapes: Shosanna (Melanie Laurent).

The second chapter introduces us to the "basterds" of the title, a group of American madmen who take pleasure in desecrating and scalping their Nazi opposition. Their leader is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a square-jawed Tennessee bad boy. Perhaps his most valuable weapon is the Nazi's biggest fear - the "Bear Jew" (Eli Roth), a menacing figure with an improbably thick Boston accent, who specializes in caving in Nazi skull with a Louisville slugger.

We catch up with Shosanna four years after the massacre of her family, and now she's running a movie theater. A Nazi war hero, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), falls in love with her, and coincidentally filmmaker Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) is due to premiere a new propaganda film with Zoller, playing himself, in the starring role. The event is moved to Shosanna's theater, and not long after plans erupt to take advantage of such a vulnerable position - the basterds plan to sneak in and blow it up, and Shosanna and her lover, the black projectionist (Jacky Ido), plan to set it ablaze.

It's no secret that Tarantino is a cinephile, and in "Basterds" he flaunts his knowledge to such excess that it becomes just as much about early 20th century film as it is World War II. Ennio Corricone's music recalls any number of spaghetti westerns, two characters debate the merits of Charlie Chaplin vs. Max Linder, Emil Jannings makes an appearance, and on and on. Perhaps the most noteworthy reference is the name Henri-Georges Clouzot on the theater's marquee. While i'm not suggesting that "Basterds" is any "Wages of Fear", it's safe to say that Tarantino watched his fair share of Clouzot to prepare for the film's great suspense sequences.

Christoph Waltz is as good of a villain as you'll get in this kind of schlocky picture. He's a calculating sleuth, a fiend who takes more delight in taunting his foes than in delivering the fatal blow. He can't simply show a woman her shoe and say "I found this", he has to drag this process on to the point where he's slipping it on her foot. Unfortunately, however, Waltz is just so good that I regretted everytime Tarantino hijacked the picture from him with useless narration, a soundtrack that calls too much attention to itself, and gimmicky name-cards.

Two performers that haven't been given enough credit for their work in the film are August Diehl and Michael Fassbender, who give the film it's second best sequence. Diehl's Nazi officer suspects that Fassbender's British spy is not, in fact, a German officer. Like Landa, but with a much shorter fuse, Diehl discovers his foe's game, and then toys with him relentlessly until the final shoot out.

"Inglourious Basterds" has some wonderful stretches of film - great pieces of suspense with dialogue as sharp as anything Tarantino has done. These scenes are too smart for a film that otherwise resorts to cheap thrills and gimmicks to keep the teenage boys salivating. That being said, however, there is still enough to love about the film to give it a strong recommendation.