Inglourious Basterds (2-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray] Review
INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is brilliantly scripted, has two of the best acting jobs all year, and is purely Tarantino. If you've seen any of the Kill Bill series or The Grindhouse films, you'll know to expect a bit of blood and brutality. This is, however, Tarantino's first dip into alternate history, and he does a great job at it. However I do think he toned down the bloodshed a tad. Perhaps he's becoming more aware of it, or perhaps he just didn't feel the film warranted it. Whatever the reason, it balanced out nicely ...compared to his other films which tended to go overboard on the crimson.
The alternate history involves three unique perspectives: Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) aka The Jew Hunter. Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, Burn After Reading). And Shosanna (Melanie Laurent). All three of these perspectives are taken to extremes (no surprise, again, considering we're talking about a Tarantino movie) during WW II in which we see a persecuted Jew get her just dessert by killing Hitler in her own version of "The Final Solution." We get to see Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt) gather a group of ruthless "Gnat-see" killers and carve swastikas into their foreheads. And finally we get the cream of the crop, Jew Hunter Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz) who's ability to sniff out hiding Jews have given him his title.
Without Christoph Waltz and Brad Pitt in their respective roles, I feel this film wouldn't have been a fraction as good as it was; probably a testament to the casting heads. But specifically to Waltz as Landa, who played the slimy Nazi brutalist only interested in saving his own skin by the end of the war. I think he deserved top billing, not Pitt (although Pitt did his usual extraordinarily great job). Waltz was so key to the entire film that he really held the reins of the story throughout its length. And his range of emotions, from anger to giddiness, was astoundingly disturbing. I loved every second he was on-screen. The fact that the Hollywood Foreign Press gave him a Golden Globe for his supporting role was most appropriate (and I noticed he's garnered praise from many other award ceremonies and, I'm hoping, the Academy Award roster will list him this year).
Brad Pitt as the countryfied, American Nazi-hunter was great. But most of his notable lines are delivered whenever he's on-screen with Waltz. The ending sequence in the woods with Lt. Raines' knife and Col. Landa's ...umm ...life, are wonderfully vicious.
Of course, we cannot leave out French actress Melanie Laurent as the persecuted Shosanna who is forced to watch her family slaughtered by Landa then flee to Paris and blend in with society. Only later does she learn that her new life and career sets her up perfectly to exact revenge on the Nazi party ...and its top leaders; the very top, in fact. She also is forced to fight off the advances of a German soldier whom she finds both endearing and loathsome.
By the end of Inglorious Basterds, you feel like you've been on a wild ride at a theme park, until you realize you've never left your seat. It's a remarkable film that is cast exceptionally well. This one's worth owning for sure.
Inglourious Basterds (2-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray] Overview
Brad Pitt takes no prisoners in Quentin Tarantino’s high-octane WWII revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds. As war rages in Europe, a Nazi-scalping squad of American soldiers, known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” is on a daring mission to take down the leaders of the Third Reich. Bursting with “action, hair-trigger suspense and a machine-gun spray of killer dialogue” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone), Inglourious Basterds is “another Tarantino masterpiece” (Jake Hamilton, CBS-TV)!
Inglourious Basterds (2-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray] Specifications
Although Quentin Tarantino has cherished Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 "macaroni" war flick The Inglorious Bastards for most of his film-geek life, his own Inglourious Basterds is no remake. Instead, as hinted by the Tarantino-esque misspelling, this is a lunatic fantasia of WWII, a brazen re-imagining of both history and the behind-enemy-lines war film subgenre. There's a Dirty Not-Quite-Dozen of mostly Jewish commandos, led by a Tennessee good ol' boy named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who reckons each warrior owes him one hundred Nazi scalps--and he means that literally. Even as Raine's band strikes terror into the Nazi occupiers of France, a diabolically smart and self-assured German officer named Landa (Christoph Waltz) is busy validating his own legend as "The Jew Hunter." Along the way, he wipes out the rural family of a grave young girl (Melanie Laurent) who will reappear years later in Paris, dreaming of vengeance on an epic scale.
Now, this isn't one more big-screen comic book. As the masterly opening sequence reaffirms, Tarantino is a true filmmaker, with a deep respect for the integrity of screen space and the tension that can accumulate in contemplating two men seated at a table having a polite conversation. IB reunites QT with cinematographer Robert Richardson (who shot Kill Bill), and the colors and textures they serve up can be riveting, from the eerie red-hot glow of a tabletop in Adolf Hitler's den, to the creamy swirl of a Parisian pastry in which Landa parks his cigarette. The action has been divided, Pulp Fiction-like, into five chapters, each featuring at least one spellbinding set-piece. It's testimony to the integrity we mentioned that Tarantino can lock in the ferocious suspense of a scene for minutes on end, then explode the situation almost faster than the eye and ear can register, and then take the rest of the sequence to a new, wholly unanticipated level within seconds.
Again, be warned: This is not your "Greatest Generation," Saving Private Ryan WWII. The sadism of Raine and his boys can be as unsavory as the Nazi variety; Tarantino's latest cinematic protégé, Eli (director of Hostel) Roth, is aptly cast as a self-styled "golem" fond of pulping Nazis with a baseball bat. But get past that, and the sometimes disconcerting shifts to another location and another set of characters, and the movie should gather you up like a growing floodtide. Tarantino told the Cannes Film Festival audience that he wanted to show "Adolf Hitler defeated by cinema." Cinema wins. --Richard T. Jameson
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