Movie Review: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Of course we couldn’t let this weekend go by without going to see Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s new revenge WWII movie.  We both think it was worth spending our hard-earned cash (what little we have of it) on a movie ticket!

Here’s Anna’s take on the movie:

I’m not as big of a Quentin Tarantino fan as Serena, and I wasn’t sure what to think of this movie from the commercials I’d seen, but I was willing to give it a try…if anything to hear Serena burst out laughing every time Brad Pitt said “Nazi” in that Tennessee accent.

I wasn’t disappointed.  In fact, Inglourious Basterds now ranks among my favorite films of all time.  The movie, which takes place in Nazi-occupied France, is told in chapters and basically follows SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, who totally deserves an Oscar for his performance), also known as “The Jew Hunter;” Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his “Basterds” who hunt and kill Nazis; and Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman who escapes Landa at the beginning of the movie, changes her name, and ends up running a cinema in Paris.  In their own way, each of these characters ends up at the premiere of a propaganda film in which Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and Bormann are slated to attend.  That’s enough about the plot.

In true Tarantino style, Inglourious Basterds is violence galore.  Raine tells his men to each bring him 100 Nazi scalps, and one of his men has no qualms about using a baseball bat to bring down the Nazis.  They always let one German soldier survive to tell of the terror inflicted by the Basterds, and this soldier will wear a swastika engraved on his forehead forever.  So if this kind of violence bothers you, you’ll probably want to avoid this movie.

A lot of the movie is in dialogue, and the characters might sit at a table and talk for 20 minutes or so.  Having seen a few of Tarantino’s previous films, I knew that these scenes would end in an all-out gun battle or something similar.  And I was right.

It’s hard to say why I found such violence and mayhem entertaining.  Maybe because the Nazis get what they deserve, the dialogue was truly funny in some parts, the characters were captivating, and the story itself was brilliantly composed.  Though almost 3 hours long, I was surprised when it ended, as I could have sat through another few hours without blinking.  It was that good.

Here’s Serena’s take on the movie:

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the most linear of his films and tells a fairly cohesive story from beginning to end.  Descriptions that call this move a revenge film are accurate.  The film, which stars Brad Pitt, pits Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine against the Nazi’s in Occupied France, and let’s say the Nazi’s get some of their own medicine in a big way.  Raine, aka the Apache, scalps his victims, while another member of the Inglourious Basterds hits Nazis out of the park with his Louisville Slugger.

Unlike other Tarantino films where violence and blood are a primary focus, many of these scenes flit on the screen and vanish so the actors can deliver their lines and character mannerisms with aplomb.  Each chapter provides viewers with an inside look at the various elements at work in the final scene (which rewrites the end of WWII), and while these scenes do not become increasingly more violent, they do unravel the behind-the-scenes plotting among the Basterds, the OSS (the precursor to the U.S. CIA), and a French cinema owner, Shosanna.

Christoph Waltz who plays Nazi Colonel Hans Landa steals the show in the movie with his cut-throat tactics, top-notch detective work, and his odd behavior as a twisted Nazi.  A couple scenes were incongruous with the characters of Landa and Shosanna toward the end of the film, but they were not enough of a distraction. 

Inglourious Basterds is one of the best Tarantino films to date with nods to previous WWII movies like The Dirty Dozen.

We both give Inglourious Basterds 5 bags of popcorn!!

Check out the trailer:

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