Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Okay, let me get this out of the way because I have more important things to discuss: Inglourious Basterds is motherfucking ROCK STAR. God DAMN it, this was a good movie. I’ve read critics who call this a definite art house movie, which I guess it is on some levels, but here is all you need to know: Americans scalping Nazis. If the idea of a Quentin Tarantino movie involving Americans scalping Nazis doesn’t appeal to you, then I would  like to know what planet you are on so that I can send some Starship Troopers your way.

Anyway, what intrigues me about this movie is this: normally, I hate history-based films that don’t care too much about history. The Patriot, for example, is something that fills my brain with bad thoughts every time I think of it. From the British acting like, ironically, Nazis to the exploding shells on the battlefield (solid shot was the name of the game for this historical period), it just… ugh. And Pearl Harbor… don’t get me started. Don’t even get me started. But Basterds was if anything even worse with the history than those movies and yet it still managed to be aWesome. Why is that?

I think it has something to do with Tarantino’s attitude towards the period being “hey, man. This isn’t even going to try to be a realistic recreation of… anything from that period. I just think Hitler and the Nazis are fucking awesome bad guys and I want to make a movie where Americans beat the living shit out of them.” That can’t explain it all, though; that attitude is really, if you think about it, not far off from “Pearl Harbor is a great American tragedy… and therefore a great story of American triumph! Let’s add some more explosions, as if there weren’t enough explosions at Pearl Harbor already! And we need a love interest for the chixors!” Bear with me here. Both are at root saying “real life is not fun enough to make into a good movie so we have to spice it up”.

I guess the real difference is that one makes no bones about being fantasy whereas the other still tries to pretend that it’s telling a true story or something. Even that, though… Amistad and Schindler’s List got a bunch of things wrong but are nowhere near as offensive to my History Sense as Kate and Leopold and Titanic, both of which were “historical fiction” or something like it. Maybe the answer is verisimilitude, although that’s a $5 word that in this case means ‘I was sucked into the one but not the other and I can’t really explain why’.

So, leaving that aside, I wanted to get into the screenplay a little bit. There are a couple of scenes where a character gets a big build-up and then dies or disappears a couple minutes later. Now, I really enjoyed this – it gave a movie an angle of the unexpected even though it was derived from the sorts of films where you could see the ending coming about 3 minutes into the thing – but when Melville did this to his character in Moby Dick early in the story (what was that character’s name again?) it was looked upon as a mistake. Apparently they didn’t “do” drafts in Melville’s era or something. Anyway, it seems to work in Basterds in large part *because* it’s such an obvious mistake – it’s clear that Tarantino did it on purpose and so you have to look for its meaning.

One final semi-random point I wanted to add… Tarantino has likened this to spaghetti Westerns, only set in World War II. I think it was Roger Ebert who went so far as to say this was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in WW2 outfits. I don’t really see that at all, although there is one parallel I can find: Aldo Raine, Brad Pitt’s character, is Blondie. This parallel I think only really works with TGTGATU, but here it is: the only reason these guys are heroic at all is because the film tells us they are and also they are played by a heroic actor. If you put Steve Buscemi or Robin Williams into the Raine role, the tenor of the film changes quite a bit. As it stands, it comes about as close as you can get to feeling sorry for Nazis. But again… if Americans scalping Nazis is not enough to make a movie for you, I suggest you go back to your Connect Four game.

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