Inglourious Basterds

Rating: 10/10 (19 March 2012)

Inglourious Basterds
"That's a bingo!" A line used by the ironic winner of the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Christoph Waltz, for his role as the German version of the over investigative Sherlock Holmes, Col. Hans Landa. Bingo! Is definitely what this film acquired with a perplexed yet astounding cast including the ever so talented Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine and the director/actor Eli Roth as the coined name, "The Bear Jew" a berserk home run hitting leader in Nazi's. Quentin Tarantino took an everlasting ten years to complete the screenplay for this fictitious outlook of Nazi Germany in World War II and released it in 2009. The enduring story is about a group of American born Jews, known as the Inglorious Basterds, who are shipped behind enemy lines to do one thing, kill Nazi's. Shot in settings such as France, Germany, and England, this Tarantinoesque film is an eye-catching, blistering, yet excessively heavy ingeniously dialogued representation of what to expect when watching a movie by Quentin. This flick by far takes a warm seat in my top ten films of all time, for the reason that the music plays a major role in many scenes and the acting on all fronts, no pun intended, is exceptionally, as Hitler would put it, Aryan.
Music in this film signifies the intensities of a lot of the scenes. Scenes of intensification such as the farm house scene is a great example of how music is used to augment the suspicion of what is about to happen. As Col. Landa (Waltz) figures out that Jews are hiding under the floorboards, the music begins at the start of what will build to the peak of a massacre. The way I see it, music in this film is used as a bridge to connect objects or people that have a disturbing flaw against one another. A scene that caught my attention was one that used music so perfectly as well as camera movement, is a scene when "The Bear Jew" is called upon to beat down on a Nazi. The scene flips back and forth slowly moving in closer to the face of the Nazi and the dark shadows that "The Bear Jew" is supposed to emerge out of, and while this is all happening the music is gradually increasing to give the setting a eerie feeling.
Music may have been a major factor for this film, but the acting surpasses that by a long run. Each actor had a certain style, Brad Pitt plays a straight to the point Tennessee cocaine snorting kind of guy, while on the other side, Christoph Waltz plays a sarcastic over- achieving Nazi detective. These different roles play a major part in the film because it gives the movie an overall amount of balance. The actors also had an exuberant amount of dialogue to rehearse, and I believe the way the dialogue was presented, adapted perfectly with Tarantino's famous style of "Mexican Standoffs". The overall acting is superb and going into a Tarantino film, I knew that the way he sets up his actors, will always be performances to remember.
Nominated eight times at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, Inglorious Basterds is a riveting thrill ride that everyone should try. Yes there are long dialogue scenes but the direction of Tarantino is a unique style of art that can't get passed by; if at the Louvre would you pass the Mona Lisa without looking at it? Go rent Inglourious Basterds on DVD, and when you take it out of your tray, you'll be screaming, "That's a Bingo!"

Marcel Urena

5/5