Let's go kill some Nat-zee

Rating: 8/10 (22 August 2009)

The strongest part of Quentin Tarantino's new flick, "Inglorious Basterds", is surprisingly the talk. Sure, there is blood aplenty and lots of gruesome looking sights but Tarantino does his best work in the drawn-out, talky scenes (and most of the movie is either in German, Italian, or French subtitles, but you won't seem to mind), usually keeping the audience in rapt attention and never letting-down in terms of payoff.
And there is no one better at shaping Tarantino's dialogue here than Christoph Waltz, playing Col. Landa, a Nazi-hunter during World War 2 promoted by Hitler to round-up French Jews. Waltz creates a villain of outstanding cunning, talking pleasantly and allowing some comfort before he unleashes the underlying snake within. The movie opens on one of many outstandingly well-written scenes, where Landa faces a man suspected of harboring Jews. After his speech comparing Jews to rats, the man is in tears and the audience's skin is crawling. This is how every villain should be introduced.
Other highlights come later. Melanie Laurent is gut-wrenching as Shosanna, a Jew who got away from a slaughter, initiated by Landa, but her family was not so lucky. Years later, she's hiding her Jewish roots while running her own cinema in France. This is a chance for Tarantino to let his love of movies play a big role, referencing facts of 40's German film, like propagandist Joseph Goebbels, making a movie critic one of the heroes, and setting the finale in Shosanna's theater as Goebbels plans on premiering his war hero film there. This puts Shosanna face to face with Landa, in a suspenseful and haunting scene. Shosanna agrees to host the event, but only so she can set the theater, populated with Nazi bigwigs, ablaze.
A second plot hatched involves the Basterds, a group of Nazi killers led by Brad Pitt. They are involved in Operation Keno, the brainchild of a traitorous German actress (Diane Kruger) to blow up the theater. A barroom rendezvous between some Basterds dressed as Nazis and the actress unfolds in fantastic plotting and tension, as the bar is unexpectedly overrun with drunk Nazi's. A German soldier who can tell a phony German accent, a guessing game, and some drinking keeps the suspense simmering and keeps the audience fully involved before Tarantino finally lets it boil over into the violence.
He's brought the idea of the Western standoff to other genres before and does the same thing here. The trumpeting music, stare-downs, and conversations in between moments of scalpings, head-bashings and carvings, throat cuttings, and other gruesome ordeals only serve to make the eventual violence that much more fun. And it all explodes off the screen by the finale, in which flames, tommy guns, double crosses, and all-out mayhem ensues.
Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances, playing all-American Tennessee-boy Aldo Raines. After his opening anti-Nazi rant, he tells every member of the Basterds that he wants 100 Nazi scalps from each of them. Pitt is in great form here, putting on a rough monotone and coming off like a bloodthirsty John Wayne. He also gets some of the best dialogue. "Were in the killin Nazi business, and business is a-boomin." Some other notable Basterds are the Bear Jew (Hostel director Eli Roth), a character who likes to beat Nazi to death with a bat, and Stiglitz (Til Scheiger), a German who killed 13 Nazi soldiers and then got recruited by the Basterds. As Raines points out, when it comes to killin Nazi, he has "great talent." Tarantino's trademark foot fetish leads to another great scene later on and a David Bowie song nicely sets up the last act. And the movie is funny. Aldo and some of his cronies pretending to be Italian filmmakers (with the southern-accented Aldo massacring the language) is a comic highlight, as is Mike Myers in a cameo as a General.
"Inglorious Basterds" never lets you forget that Tarantino is a consummate filmmaker, plotting everything with originality and tremendous cool. This is by far one of the best films of the year.