Fiasco

Rating: 1/10 (27 March 2010)

"Inglorious Basterds" is a movie so clueless, so sloppy, so jam-packed full of half-ass characters and shock-value violence, so relentlessly terrible that I can't even muster the rage and indignation that most intelligent film fans feel toward Quentin Tarantino.
I just pity him.
American soldiers engaging in acts of deplorable violence against Nazi soldiers is not only justified- it's hilarious! And admirable. Just look at Hugo Stiglitz' statistics from the 1942-43 season in a flashback segment narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Yes, Samuel L. Jackson. The idea that we're supposed to derive satisfaction from the torture of Nazis is just as abhorrent as a Nazi relishing the torture of a Jew. Let me tell Quentin something he should have learned in grade school: two loathsome evils do not make a right.
Brad Pitt- one of my favorite actors- gives the worst performance of his career as a loudmouth macho bloodthirsty cartoon... I'll never look at him the same way again. He also looked particularly angry... for some reason I get the feeling he and Tarantino didn't quite get along. I can picture Brad slapping him silly between takes. Next time slap harder.
Quentin has finally gone off the deep end and become the hack we all feared he would. He doesn't know if he's making a war movie, a parody of a war movie, an outrageous B-movie bloodbath or a documentary about milk & strudel. This is the definitive shrug by an artist who has nothing to say and insists on saying it loud.
The one standout in the film is supposed to be Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa, the icy, intelligent, brutally-violent Nazi commander. (There's a character we've never seen before.) His only crime seems to be the masterful use of conversation as an indirect threat of violence. The only reason for this of course is that Tarantino hasn't bothered to create any genuine tension or conflict, so we as an audience are forced to watch characters being forced to listen to Landa's menacing monologues. Dinner with a Nazi is scary enough... but by the time we get to his fifth interrogation I simply stopped caring.
Who gets the award for worst stunt casting: human dingleberry BJ Novak from "The Office" or Mike Myers as British General Winthorp J. Starchington, III? I'd have to give the award to Myers, since his absurd makeup and wandering accent are funnier than Austin Powers on his best day.
By the film's finale even the fundamentals of film-making have been abandoned and all sense of reality obliterated. We enter a small French movie theater so full of Nazi officers and SS propaganda that it might as well be Hitler's disco. Quentin has forgotten to introduce key characters earlier in the film, so now he compensates by scrawling their names in on-screen title cards, using hand-drawn arrows to identify them in the crowd shots. (Even with this pathetically sloppy device we have no idea who these people are- or why we should care.) Then Tarantino plays a David Bowie song on the soundtrack that was recorded 40 years after the film takes place! Your guess is as good as mine.
A movie this awful does raise a lot of questions: Do most teenage refugees own and operate their own cinema? Are nonstop subtitles good for your eyes? Do war heroes play themselves in motion pictures? Do Nazis kidnap women and buy them dinner? Does Der Fuhrer pay full price for a matinée?
Does a dying German soldier have just enough energy left to shoot our heroine? Would any high-ranking Nazi ever surrender to enemy soldiers after HE captured THEM? Should you try to masquerade as Italian when you can't speak the language?
Was Hitler really gunned down in a movie theater?
Of course not.
Of course not.
GRADE: F