An excellent film with much structural equivalence to Pulp Fiction

Rating: 10/10 (15 February 2010)

So I finally got a chance to experience Inglourious Basterds. I am a "Basterd" for not having giving Basterds director Quentin Tarantino his due diligence on this Website long since the Nazis lost World War II and a million times again in war films done to death. How could anyone inject fresh life into the stale genre of World War II? Tarantino is not just anyone. Tarantino is the most unique and creative director alive today so far as I know from the foxhole of my Western ethnocentric view. His take on World War II is nothing short of a cinematic pulp blitzkrieg.
Basterds opens with a scene on a French farm and the tension is ratcheted up to such a high level it is enough to make you flinch at the most innocuous of physical events. For instance, the slightest eye movements appear ready to trigger the psychotic Nazi Hans Landa to do something evil. All this tension persists despite nothing really happening to set it up all. Is it because we know what we are in store for in a Tarantino flick? Tarantino is a master of building the unspoken tension. He can tap into that distinctive human intuition that simply knows when two people, who otherwise hate each other, are forced to share the most mundane of surface information with each others, as if nothing else mattered.
So it happens in the opening scene. The "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa (Waltz) arrives at a farm with his entourage and asks himself into the house of a French farmer, where he soon requests a glass of milk. He interrogates the farmer about a Jewish family reported to be hiding out in the vicinity.
This scene is structurally parallel to the opening scene in Pulp Fiction where Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vince Vega (John Travolta) enter a low-rent drug dealer's apartment and do the whole "And I will strike down upon thee" biblical bit. When the farmer is plowing the field and Landa's SS entourage is arriving, it is like a visit from Jules Winnfield and Vince Vega.
The similarities don't end there. In the Pulp Fiction scene, you had the "Big Kahuna burger" as a conversation piece on which to mortar the bricks of potential energy and tension. In Basterds, you have a "glass of milk." Once in the farm house, the SS officer Landa asks a series of rhetorical questions. To paraphrase: " This is farm, is it not?" Yes. "I assume on this farm you would have milk?" Yes. "I'll have some milk." It is the pulp fiction seen transplanted to Nazi Germany.
There is structural similarity with Tarantino's Kill Bill films too. The "girl with the green eyes" is out for revenge. In Kill Bill, it was because "The girl" was left for dead and her wedding party was all killed by Bill and his gang. Here it was because Shoshanna's family was wiped out by Landa and his machine gun-wielding soldiers shortly after the glass of milk.
The more I see of Tarantino, the more I am convinced he was heavily influenced by Sergio Leon, or the western ballads of the 60s, when John Wayne was fading and Clint Eastwood was riding into town with his own brand of six-shooters. Here he makes a western out of a Nazi film, which is no more concerned with the real holocaust as the issue of slavery was a concern of Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which took place amidst the backdrop of the American Civil War.
All is not Nazi gold that glitters. There are a few slow points to Basterds.
Somewhere along the middle of the film, Basterds is plodding. The whole cinema angle took a while to set up. I am not totally convinced story-wise that the beginning farm scene (though cool as it was) was a good place to start the film. We learn that the girl Shoshanna was the one survivor of the farm house massacre (e.g. "The glass of milk" scene) thus presenting the tie-in to the cinema angle later. However, it is still back-story for the cinema plot. She could have easily explained what happened to her in a sentence or two. But, then we would be deprived of our "glass of milk."
The whole climatic scene in the cinema house is really intense. Personally, I think it goes over top. The slaughter of massive groups of humans cannot be seen as something to cheer for in my mind, even if they are Nazis. It makes one think personally if Tarantino is simply lost in his pulp fiction world of entertainment, or I am underestimating him. Perhaps Tarantino deliberately tries to bring out uncomfortable thoughts about revenge by changing the hands on the triggers? In his world, an eye for an eye is something that deserves applause and maybe that reality is our ugly nature.
I had to stew on Basterds for a bit, before I could really think about it whether it was an Ace or a King. In retrospect, seems like an awfully silly question. This film is an Ace.