“Gorlami!
Once more… ?
*whispers*
Gorlami!”
If you haven’t figured out how much of a Tarantino whore I am from my Pulp Fiction review yet, then this review will be news to you. I love Inglourious Bastards. It’s not the best movie I’ve ever seen but it sticks with me which is what some movies will just do for you. Since this is Tarantino, there’s going to be a somewhat complex plot: there’s layered chapters tallying all the way up to five, presenting all different parts of a fictional story of a roving band of American-Jew Nazi killers. The film opens with “Chapter 1: Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France.” This film’s killer opening scene foreshadows what my dad calls the “revenge porn” later seen in the movie first in “Chapter 3: A German Night in Paris”: a dairy farmer and his family are visited by the Gestapo, who are suspicious that they’re hiding a missing Jewish dairy farmer’s family. In a long conversation which is actually worth the time, Colonel Hans Landa of the SS (Christoph Waltz) and Mr. Lapidite (Denis Ménochet), talk about the missing family and Landa has an interesting argument about the preconceived animosity humans hold towards rats even while they haven’t had any bad experiences with them. He then attaches the attributes of the rats that he believes are synonymous with Jews, but this conversation is one of the scenes that represents the amazing screenwriting Tarantino put into the 2009 film. Take a look on youtube at this scene. I can assure you it will keep your attention. The point of me explaining this scene to you is that the Jewish family is found hiding and then killed, except for one…
Even though this is a rare film of Tarantino’s that reveals a linear plot versus his usual non-linear style, it still incorporates different storylines. The Bastards (Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Til Schweiger, B.J. Novak, Micheal Fassbender (half member), Gideon Burkhard, Omar Doom, Samm Levine, Paul Rust, Micheal Bacall, Carlos Fidel) and Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) are our two protagonist groups fighting the same battle in the end, fueled by different motives. Since this is only my fifth review ever, I’m still trying to find the sweet spot of tip toeing the line of spoiler material, so I guess I’ll leave the plot there but still bring up my favorite spots in The Pros and The Cons.
The Pros
As with any Tarantino movie, I’m a fan of the chapters and the way he always splits up his movies into different parts. This one has five chapters that perfectly set up the story for it to be easy to watch follow along without doing too much extra fancy stuff. For the acting performances, Christoph Waltz has a one of a kind performance. He plays Hans Landa in a way that delivers creepy, real feeling, and intriguing to the point where your eyes never leave the screen when he’s in. It’s not many times in a movie where there can be a 5-10 minute scene of just talking that isn’t broken up by fighting or a tone shift that is entertaining enough to sustain my attention. But Inglourious Bastards literally opens up the first chapter with Hans Landa talking to Mr. Lapidite for such a long time but Christoph Waltz, paired with Tarantino’s writing, makes the scene so interesting. The plot twist within Christoph’s character at the end also allows him to go off the rails and portray Hans Landa as almost a psychopath. It’s also just worth noting that the casting on this was stellar. Choosing Christoph Waltz to play Hans Landa didn’t turn out amazing because his acting is above par, but that he’s an Austrian-German actor which fits perfectly within the role of Landa. In general with the casting there were great decisions made with choosing American actors, German actors, and French actors. Diane Kruger, Christoph Waltz, and Denis Ménochet were representative of the great casting job. Brad Pitt killed it as always. He played Aldo so well, leaving us amazing scenes like the one at the beginning of the film where he is telling all of his soldiers what they’ll do on the mission. Oh, and I can’t forget the “Gorlami!” scene.
The Cons
If anything Inglorious Bastards is a very long movie and It feels long to me. Coming in at 2 hours and 33 minutes runtime, it is a quite long comedy movie but it sort of excuses its abnormal comedy length by disguising itself as an action movie. That also brings up my other question which is what is this movie trying to be? A comedy, war, action, or drama? Probably not a drama but all the others are worthy candidates. I am not so much a fan of the ambiguity and ambiguity at all in movies so that is a little bit annoying to me personally.
Once again with my ambiguity angle–I’m not quite sure I love a movie that is trying to combine dark humor with true history, but the attempt seems to be in the best interest of the style Inglorious Bastards wanted to make. Sure, some of the lines in here are amazing, but drawing a line down the middle between serious and funny in a movie that involves the Nazi’s is a very hard thing to do, let alone make it good.
A very funny while also being a seat gripping movie, the Shobe Score is an 85.