Inglourious Basterds
Posted by SpikeNov 20
SPOILERS AHEAD – you’ve been warned!
I finally caught up with Inglourious Basterds yesterday. Being a Quentin Tarantino fanboy, I’d wanted to see it during its theatrical run. But thanks to a dull trailer, even the presence of Brad Pitt couldn’t get my gf interested in it. And the trailer really put me off as well. Yet a lot of people I know were saying this was the best picture of the year. And over at Rotten Tomatoes, the film scores 88%, or 74% with “top critics.”
I’m one of those people who think that Tarantino’s first three films were grand slam home runs but that after the commercial failure of Jackie Brown, he has been frittering away his talent in silly little genre exercises. And Basterds strikes me as more of the same. It’s got some of his great trademark dialogue (never mind the fact that all of the characters talk in the same excessive love of words manner – if I can accept stylization from Mamet I can certainly take it from Tarantino). But over-all, the film seems disjointed, poorly paced and despite running for more than 2-1/2 hours, comes to an absurdly abrupt halt. (In the pull quote from the review by the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr, he says, “it represents 153 minutes of bravura stalling, after which its creator loses interest and walks away.” And I felt that way too. My gf looked up at me as the end credits started to roll and said, “That’s it?”)
So on the one hand, you get a film from someone who really knows how to direct the hell out of scene. “The film’s opening sequence, much of which takes place inside the restricted confines of a farmhouse room, is a marvel of choreographed camera movement and tightly coordinated performances,” says Manohla Dargis over at the NY Times. And I agree.
She also says, “rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes. Mr. Tarantino is a great writer and director of individual scenes, though he can have trouble putting those together, a difficulty that has sometimes been obscured by the clever temporal kinks in his earlier work. He has also turned into a bad editor of his own material (his nominal editor, as usual, is Sally Menke) and seems unwilling or incapable of telling his A material from his B.” I agree with that as well.
Aside from dividing the film into “chapters” again, another thing that bugged me was that there wasn’t enough of the titular characters, the so called Basterds. Melanie Laurent, Christopher Waltz and Diane Kruger all have far more screen time than Brad Pitt and his band of unmerry men, none of whom aside from Pitt are allowed to have personalities. We see them with their captives, we never get a single battle scene that shows how they came to get those captives. We get a Dirty Dozen-ish sequence in which Pitt explains to his recruits what they’re gonna do. Next time we see them is quite some time later, their reputations already established, torturing some Nazis they’ve captured in a battle.
But most of all – here’s the big spoiler – we all know at least the broad strokes of history, right? We know how WWII ended, we know how Hitler ended, and so as we watch the plan come together, we are anticipating its failure. I don’t see the purpose in allowing it to succeed, in creating this alternate reality in which the leaders of the Third Reich are wiped out and the war comes to an end in 1943 (or is it 1944?). To the best of my knowledge, no other film has done something like this – and for good reason. You can’t change history. Rambo can go back to Vietnam years later and “make up” for the past. But even Rambo never went back in time to 1965 to kill off Ho Chi Minh and end the war ten years early. So why does Tarantino think he can? And if he’s going to go so far as to change it, then shouldn’t he show the impact of that change, rather than just giving us a, “Hey, I’m Quentin Fucking Tarantino, I can do what I want! I’ve ended the war a year early, suck on that muthfuckas!”
I admired the way in which he was willing to kill off characters whom you don’t expect to die. Another spoiler – when Landa kills von Hammersmark, I was thinking to myself, “she’s an actress, she’s playing dead, once his back is turned she’ll rise up and shoot him,” but no, she’s really dead.
I’ll probably watch this again in a couple of months. Knowing the outcome next time, perhaps I’ll react to it differently. But for now, I consider Inglourious Basterds to be a further betrayal of Tarantino’s gifts.
In the meantime, I’d like to hear from those of you who saw the film and loved it. What did you see that I didn’t?
Thanks for visiting!
10 comments
Comment by EY on November 20, 2009 at 11:04 am
Tarantino has continued to “appropriate” ideas from having viewed countless hours while he worked as a clerk in a video rental store; it’s another example of the Horatio Alger scenario where unheralded individual makes good – what he’s lost since first emerging is the ability of coalescing his collage such that it makes for a succinct whole. Not a fan whatsoever of his material and find that he’s usually championed by those who fail to make the effort to source out his influences, whether they be Japanese, Polish, French, etc.
There’s an entire body of cinema outside of the English-speaking audience that’s as palatable, thought-provoking, etc. as anything that’s ever been produced and companies such as Artificial Eye (UK), Masters of Cinema (UK), BFI (UK), and Madman Cinema (Australia) all make concerted efforts to deliver them to the general public. Of course, sales for these titles are significantly lower than “blockbuster” numbers that are here today and gone tomorrow.
Comment by Spike on November 20, 2009 at 11:31 am
Where I disagree with you is that everyone appropriates ideas. No one is original. The talent comes in how you blend them and serve them up. I can source out some, maybe not all, of his influences. So what? You can make the same claim about the Beatles but that doesn’t lessen their achievement. Plenty of people worked in stores or drove taxis on the way up but only one person wrote and directed Pulp Fiction. I worked in a video store for 3 years and watched every movie in the store but I couldn’t come up with Reservoir Dogs. I think you’ll find that Tarantino, on the whole, has been championed by many people who are well aware of his influences and appreciate the way he combines them into something new. I think he’s unable to make a grand statement on a level of many of those whom he idolizes. But he’s a far more interesting entertainer than, say, Michael Bay.
Where I agree with you is that I think that people who like something do owe it to themselves to seek out the sources and influences. But let’s face it, there are more people (in America at least) who will be entertained by the Magnificent Seven than by Seven Samurai. That’s just the way of the world.
Comment by EY on November 20, 2009 at 12:25 pm
It’s the glib appropriation that is hard to stomach though – as in no original spin; Hal Hartley and Richard Linklater are 2 American directors that I’d readily champion before Tarantino – what makes Tarantino more popular is that his material is far easier to digest whereas Hartley’s early efforts had a true Nouvelle Vague ethos and Linklater has channeled the spirit of Eric Rohmer, especially w/ “Before Sunset.”
Americans don’t care for foreign cinema NOT b/c they can’t be bothered/are too lazy to read subtitles – it’s b/c they don’t really want to confront a nattily bow-tied UNhappy ending. Which says a lot about the perception of escapism that one could attach to the concept of the moving image, but film from other parts of the world (e.g. Haneke) end up w/ unresolved conclusions, death, tragedy, ebb and flow – as how life unfurls really…
Comment by EY on November 20, 2009 at 12:32 pm
As for the Beatles, the early albums are not really marked improvements over a lot of Merseyside-based contemporaries, all trying to present their interpretation of American R&B. It’s when they finally broke free of those shackles and started on their Revolver/Rubber Soul/etc. run that their material gets really interesting. In much the same way that listening to Jagger and Richards cover Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” is a nice exercise in mimicry, but pales in comparison w/ their own true compositions such as “Backstreet Girl” let alone the Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Brothers-influenced “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers.”
Comment by Spike on November 20, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I don’t know how old you are – I could argue that within the context of that era, what the Beatles did sounded new and different, the Stones too. With 20/20 hindsight, and having now absorbed all or most of their influences, I have little use for it. But at the time, I Wanna Hold Your Hand sounded new and fresh to my young ears.
Comment by Spike on November 20, 2009 at 12:47 pm
On your first paragraph, I think we’re gonna have to agree to disagree. I’d say that Tarantino is immensely more talented than Hartley or Linklater, which is why I’m disturbed by what I see at his own betrayal of his talent in the last decade.
No argument though on your second paragraph!
On the other hand, a few months back when I did a column in BC on Criterion DVDs, I wrote something along the lines of, I don’t think most Americans even realize that you can do this in film, that you can show and say stuff like that, but on the other hand, once exposed to it, probably only 10% of them would go for it. Something along those lines. Americans once did go for it, as the first half of the 70s proved, but something changed in the national psyche … and the one-two punch of Jaws and Star Wars pushed that kind of filmmaking out of the public consciousness. One could argue that a similar thing happened in Europe – where we once had a plethora of auteurs releasing incredible films on a monthly basis, now the number of people working at the level of a Fellini or Bergman has dropped by 90%, so perhaps it’s not merely endemic to the USA.
Comment by EY on November 20, 2009 at 12:59 pm
The British blues explosion really did do a disservice to the electric sound emanating from Chicago, especially the ’50s material vis-a-vis Chess. What transpires there though is again a filtered interpretation – and is maybe less than 6 degrees of separation from what a television program like “Sha-Na-Na” was plying.
As for cinema – one need only look towards film noir from the ’40s and ’50s in America as intelligent form of the medium. Bogart’s performance in Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” is spellbinding and worthy of the praise that alumni of Langlois’s Cinematheque Francaise heaped on it. What you’ve mentioned about the dearth of heavyweights like Bergman and Fellini may indeed hold true, but a contemporary movie like Despleschin’s “A Christmas Tale” (that examines the dysfunction b/w adults in a nuclear family) wouldn’t capture the public imagination in the U.S. presently as it did upon release in France. And if the mantle isn’t being maintained in locales such as Western Europe, auteurs such as Taiwan’s Hou Hsieu-Hsien (e.g. “Three Times”) and the late Edward Yang carry/carried on that tradition.
Comment by EY on November 20, 2009 at 1:10 pm
An example of influence, but not outright slavish mimicry is a forthcoming title on Criterion: Leo McCarey’s much beloved “Make Way for Tomorrow” – the inspiration for Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.” Although Ozu’s famed film liberally borrows from McCarey’s masterpiece (as his scriptwriter was well aware of it), Ozu spins his movie in his own unique fashion that it credibly stands on its own and is deemed one of the treasures of world cinema in its own right. And although Ozu would continue to revisit the theme of nuclear familial fragmentation time and time again, it in no way diminishes the import of his own work nor of that of the legacy of “Make Way for Tomorrow.”
Comment by Daniel on November 20, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Say Basterds recently and agree with everything you said. It was all mixed up.
One thing you didn’t mention: I kept thinking the Basterds would somehow get looped in with the plot about the French girl who owns the cinema, but it never happened.
Comment by Spike on November 20, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Yeah, I was expecting that too, but not overly fussed when it didn’t happen.