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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Year: 2009
Reviewed: January 03, 2010
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Birthday Cake-Second Highest Rating |
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I have watched and enjoyed many of Quentin Tarantino's films. I thought "Pulp Fiction" to be a riotous ride, with surprises and unique twists around ever corner. While admittedly, "Reservoir Dogs", is not my favorite film of his (albeit a large fan favorite), it still packs a solid, visceral punch unlike many other films. I believe two of his strongest movies to date are "Jackie Brown", and ironically a movie he did not direct, but rather penned, "True Romance".
For the most part, I find Tarantino's films lacking in both substance and depth. They always seem to leave in me a sense of wanting more; namely with story and character. I got this same feeling while watching his newest film "Inglourious Basterds".
My first question, and I think an intelligent one, why misspell the title? With "spell check" and editors abounding, there must be an artistic reason to misspell both words in the title. But for the life of me, I can't find the answer -- not in the movie, or in the story. Are we simply to infer that the Basterds are that stupid? And basically, that is what is wrong with the entire film. There are choices made that make no cinematic sense, and do not serve either the story or the characters; they simply appear to be random choices made by the director for reasons known only to him. Why does Brad Pitt's character- Lt. Aldo Raine- have a noose scar about his neck? Not only was this jarring and annoying, as it was never explained, but it also seemed hackneyed, like Tarantino was attempting to recapture some of the glory and mystery from "Pulp Fiction" regarding Ving Rhames and the band-aid. Why do we not know anything about the "basterds", beyond the fact that we know they like killin' Nazi's? These characters are the inspiration, not only, for the title, but supposedly the entire film. We know nothing about them, and they were the only characters I really cared to know about. Why does Tarantino insert a long musical montage set to a recent David Bowie song in a World War 2 period piece? Again, a glaringly, what I felt was, inappropriate choice for a period piece.
Tarantino likes to play with a great many things: violence, exploitation, superfluous voiceovers, camp, and serious drama. Sometimes these things meld exquisitely, and appear seamless. Sometimes they only draw attention to themselves, and draw the viewer out of what could have been a damn good movie. The character Col. Hans Landa is played brilliantly by Christoph Waltz; in fact, as far as I'm concerned, his performance is the reason to watch this film. But as stated above, I wanted more. I wanted more detail and back-story concerning the Basterds. Concurrently, I wanted less of the cinema story; I found it tedious. I wanted more drama, like that of the very first scene where Col. Hans Landa is elegantly and agreeably interrogating a French dairy farmer as to whether or not he is hiding Jews. And again, I wanted less of Tarantino inserting stupid, little icons and titles, describing things to me, the viewer, he should only be showing me. To be honest, for Tarantino to exploit and trivialize such a glaring, and historically significant period as World War 2 I consider bad taste. Now that I think about it, the entire film- barring Waltz's performance- is superfluous.
"Inglourious Basterds" gets a BIRTHDAY CAKE review.
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