Quentin Tarantino Is One Glourious Basterd

Rating: 9/10 (11 September 2009)

"Inglourious Basterds" ain't your grandfather's WWII picture. And Quentin Tarantino would most definitely take that as a compliment.
Tarantino has made a career out of making art out of trash, and he does so again with his latest combustible and outrageously entertaining movie. He throws a bunch of B-movie tropes, some anachronistic music and his own version of historical events into a blender to make a WWII movie for a new generation.
Tarantino gives us several narrative threads to follow, and then, in a wink to his love of movies and to the delight of us cinephiles, has them converge in a Parisian movie theater during the debut of an epic Nazi propaganda film, where two separate groups have planned a mass assassination of the Third Reich's major leaders (yes, Hitler included).
One of these groups is the owner of the cinema, a Jew in hiding named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), and her lover, who plan to use heaps of nitrate film stock to burn the theater down as payback for the murder of her family by the Nazis. The other group consists of the basterds of the film's title, a dirty dozen style tribe of Nazi haters who scalp most of the Nazis they come across and whose leader is a redneck American called the Apache and played by Brad Pitt. Bridging these two narrative threads is the character of Hans Landa, played ferociously by Christoph Waltz in an Award-worthy performance, a detective working for the Reich who was responsible for the murder of Shosanna's family and wants nothing more than to wipe out the basterds.
As usual, Tarantino's love of movies is apparent in every frame, but I think "Inglourious Basterds," to the extent that it's about anything, is about not just the adoration of an art form but also respect for its power. The use of film as propaganda is a recurring motif throughout the movie, and the climax is nothing but one sustained image of the film's power made literal.
People who want to dislike this movie will have no problem doing so, as Tarantino certainly does not make movies that set out to please the masses. Groups will undoubtedly bristle at the disrespect with which Tarantino treats history, and I suppose they're entitled to do so, but I also think they'll be missing the point. Tarantino isn't out to make a historical document; he's out to make a movie and he asks us to have fun with it. I for one found it easy to oblige.
Grade: A