Movie Review: Ingloruious Basterds

Every once in a while a movie comes along which achieves something that few films today or in the past have ever been able to. The reason we attend films in the first place is obviously to be entertained, but this is an easy feat to achieve. Even during films like Terminator: Salvation or X-Men Origins: Wolverine, two of this year's summer flops, I can honestly say that I was more interested in the screen than the gum on the floor. As long as there's some decent action or even a few unintentional laughs, we'll walk out of the theater without regrets at having spent $6-10 for all of this. Inglorious Basterds, however, exists on a different level of entertainment. I cannot remember one single moment in this entire film when my eyes were not locked on the screen ahead of me and my ears tuned into every word coming out of the actors' mouths. Regardless of what critics with fancy-pants degrees in cinema studies may think, this is my favorite in recent memory.

Let's start with the actors. Brad Pitt plays Aldo Raine, the drawling but dangerous Tennessee man with gallows scars (never explained in the film) who leads a team of Jews into Nazi occupied France to fight a guerrilla war. Tarantino may have made a daring move by making the film's (arguably) main character its greatest source of comic relief, but it works nonetheless. While I won't spoil its context, he speaks Italian at one point in the film and the results are uproarious. His number two is Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) is a man as blunt and violent as the films which Roth himself has directed in the past. He, along with the remainder of the American cast, represents the desire for retribution which has circulated among many among the Jewish people since the beginning of the Holocaust. The results of their actions in this film, in an ambitious alternate history, were truly cathartic to me on a personal level, as it may well be for anyone whose relatives or friends were murdered by the evils of Nazi Germany.

These are some basterds you don't want to mess with

The leading ladies in the film are brilliant as well. Diane Kruger is stunning as a defecting German actress, both in her beauty and her skill in playing the role of a spy and a spoiled actress interchangeably and concurrently. Despite that, however, I must say that she was overshadowed by Melanie Laurent. She plays the role of Shoshanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman who seeks revenge on the Nazis following the slaughter of her family. Though she disappears for the third and fourth acts of the film, her desire for vengeance echoes through the finale. Her performance is more real than I could imagine anyone else achieving, and I have to give extra Kudos to Tarantino to using a real French Jew to play this crucial role. It also helps that this woman is incredibly gorgeous.

Just...wow

I have, however, been dancing around naming the true driving star of this film, who in the end ties Raine's Basterds with Shoshanna's revenge story. This is the man who killed that young woman's family, an SS agent named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Landa is a man who tiptoes on the edge of parody while maintaining a deep and penetrating menace. He never speaks without a smile, but through that smile is a mind which is calculating the best way to expose and destroy the enemies of his state. Playing a mindless and destructive Nazi is easy, but portraying the darkest side of the SS through such a pleasant facade is truly marvelous. I will be shocked if Waltz is not at least nominated for the Academy's best actor award.

A man with a pipe this ridiculous is always hiding something that is truly disturbing

In regard the direction, this is Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. As expected, he stretches the normal boundaries of a 1940's time-piece through its homages to spaghetti-westerns, 1970's war films, and even Blaxploitation flicks. The soundtrack includes pieces which vary from orchestral movements to a David Bowie song, but none of it feels out of place within the context of this film. He also maintains a good pace all throughout the movie, though it is a pace that varies from the chillingly protracted conversation between Landa and a Frenchman who is harboring Jewish refugees to a shootout between a dozen people that is over within seconds. Finally, I should mention that for those who are curious he DID find a way to include Samuel L. Jackson, and the results are (in)glorious.

Go watch this film while its still in theaters, the experience won't quite be the same when its released on DVD, but I can guarantee that I'll still be at Wal-mart on that morning to pick up my copy.