Review: Inglourious Basterds
Aug. 25th, 2009 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenShort review – thinking about it, this is really a film that deserves to be seen fresh. I’ll admit, I wasn’t entirely sold on it leaving the cinema, but I’ve warmed to it since then. I find I can’t really talk about it without throwing out spoilers, which is a shame, because there’s a lot of meat to this film. It’s not as coherent as I’d have liked, but Tarantino’s throwing out a lot of ideas here. Not his best film, but one of his most interesting. Christoph Waltz is especially good as the main villain, and it’s worth checking out just for his performance.
Tarantino’s all about movies; that’s his thing, his obsession. Other people try and make movies that emulate real life, Tarantino’s always made movies that try and emulate movies. He’s pretty good at it; he takes genres and compresses them to their most pure form without ever crossing the border into outright parody. But here… here it’s more obvious that ever that Tarantino isn’t making a movie about anything other than movies themselves. This is, after all, a film that climaxes with a cinema showing a war film being destroyed… by nitrate film.
It’s kind of a bait-and-switch, almost a giant joke on the audience. The publicity is for an ultra-violent two-fisted Nazi-killin’ extravaganza, but the majority of the on-screen violence is in the film within a film, the German propaganda piece. We get Hitler and the German high command as an audience substitute, laughing and cheering at the over-the-top adventures of a heroic German as he mows down Allied troops in entertaining ways. How, then, are we meant to react to the Basterds then gunning down that audience a few moments later? For that matter, why are the Basterds so noticeably absent from so much of a movie named after them?
Shosanna uses film quite literally to get a personal revenge on the Nazis. I think then that thematically, the Basterds are there to get revenge on behalf of the audience – we can’t kill Nazis ourselves, but we can use film as a weapon by making movies where we can see fictional Nazis get what they deserve. Tarantino just takes sixty years of war films to a ludicrous extreme, with one-dimensional Jewish soldiers butchering their way through occupied Europe before taking out Hitler himself. I don’t think Tarantino’s criticising the audience – he’s clearly having just as much fun making his film – but I do think he does want to emphasise that, yes, this is fun, this is cathartic – but let’s not pretend there’s that much distance between us and the German audience watching their own propaganda film.
There’s still plenty of meat here to chew through – plenty of scenes the purpose of which I’m not entirely sure of – but the more I think about this, the more I realise what a clever film this actually is. Possibly a few too many ideas thrown in with little organization, but that’s part of the fun of a Tarantino film, isn’t it? They’re always a little ragged around the edges, could use a little more polish – but then they wouldn’t be Tarantino films.
Tarantino’s all about movies; that’s his thing, his obsession. Other people try and make movies that emulate real life, Tarantino’s always made movies that try and emulate movies. He’s pretty good at it; he takes genres and compresses them to their most pure form without ever crossing the border into outright parody. But here… here it’s more obvious that ever that Tarantino isn’t making a movie about anything other than movies themselves. This is, after all, a film that climaxes with a cinema showing a war film being destroyed… by nitrate film.
It’s kind of a bait-and-switch, almost a giant joke on the audience. The publicity is for an ultra-violent two-fisted Nazi-killin’ extravaganza, but the majority of the on-screen violence is in the film within a film, the German propaganda piece. We get Hitler and the German high command as an audience substitute, laughing and cheering at the over-the-top adventures of a heroic German as he mows down Allied troops in entertaining ways. How, then, are we meant to react to the Basterds then gunning down that audience a few moments later? For that matter, why are the Basterds so noticeably absent from so much of a movie named after them?
Shosanna uses film quite literally to get a personal revenge on the Nazis. I think then that thematically, the Basterds are there to get revenge on behalf of the audience – we can’t kill Nazis ourselves, but we can use film as a weapon by making movies where we can see fictional Nazis get what they deserve. Tarantino just takes sixty years of war films to a ludicrous extreme, with one-dimensional Jewish soldiers butchering their way through occupied Europe before taking out Hitler himself. I don’t think Tarantino’s criticising the audience – he’s clearly having just as much fun making his film – but I do think he does want to emphasise that, yes, this is fun, this is cathartic – but let’s not pretend there’s that much distance between us and the German audience watching their own propaganda film.
There’s still plenty of meat here to chew through – plenty of scenes the purpose of which I’m not entirely sure of – but the more I think about this, the more I realise what a clever film this actually is. Possibly a few too many ideas thrown in with little organization, but that’s part of the fun of a Tarantino film, isn’t it? They’re always a little ragged around the edges, could use a little more polish – but then they wouldn’t be Tarantino films.