Larger than life in the best cinematic ways

Rating: 9/10 (8 September 2009)

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
We all know by now that Quentin Tarantino is in love with the movies, so it's no surprise that much of this film centers are around an astonishing movie theater. But his love of movies also shows in the way he works with classic ideas and great visual strategies that come from decades of the best of Hollywood. The very first scene is like a remake from some classic Western--John Ford or Sergio Leone, take your pick--with the isolated family seeing trouble coming in, ever so gradually, from the far distance.
And then trouble arrives, and it unfolds here like a croissant in the morning sun, steam slowly rising into the French Provincial air. This, you'll see, or you know already, is film-making at its best, old-school or new-school, it doesn't matter. The suspense, the elegant and fluid camera-work, the astonishing writing and even more astonishing delivery by the two men at this very first juncture, playing a kind of "I know what you are thinking" kind of game, all drawn out in a breathtaking, poetic, nerve-wracking way.
Then all hell breaks loose. This is the other side of Tarantino, the violent violence, where the blood is too red and too balletic to be real. I don't have the ability to step out of this kind of on screen gore and so it shocks me every time, and it seems like the movie might work just as well (or better) with implied violence, rather than splattering it in your face. But this director, I think, sees all of it from a director's point of view--that everything is artifice, including the preceding scene with the two men, where I, for one, was impressed partly by believing it, by being completely sucked in. Which makes the offputting violence that follows all the more upending.
I have no doubt it is this push-pull effect that makes all of Tarantino's films have that energy few others can match. In this case, there is a lot of plain old fun built into seeing the bad guys get what they deserve (I felt a weird pleasure, which I confess and which I don't understand, in seeing one very particular bad guy shot to pieces near the end), and a lot of suspense as you root for the unlikely heroes. The archetypes, like Brad Pitt's good bad guy role with a Kentucky accent (better than your Italian, Brad), and the more original characters, like the young woman who owns the theater and is truly trapped by circumstances, equally make their scenes larger than life.
In fact, Inglourious Basterds is pure Hollywood in the way it makes everything on the screen larger than life. Isn't that what the golden age of Hollywood was all about? Yes. And it is exactly what some directors like Tarantino are still bent on pulling off. A great film. Whatever the problems and the gore, this strikes me as a perfect film the way Fargo is perfect, or Reservoir Dogs. Tastes aside, you have to see it.