Movie Details
| Title: | Inglorious Basterds | |
| Director: | Quentin Tarantino | |
| Year: | 2009 | |
| Genre: | Nazisploitation | |
| Times Seen: | 2 | |
| Last Seen: | 08.22.09 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- Jackie Brown
- Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 08.22.09 | Studio Movie Grill | I've been looking forward to re-watching this all week, and my wife agreed to see it with me. Major spoilers below. . . . . . So... upon second viewing, my criticisms of Myers and Roth still stand. During the Myers scene, my wife looked over at me and rolled her eyes... the crowd was eating up his look-at-the-camera-and-smirk delivery, though. But just because people have been trained to laugh at that Myers-ism doesn't mean he's actually being effective. More importantly, that scene isn't (as far as I can tell) supposed to be played for laughs. And Roth... man... I'm sure he's a nice guy, but he's just awful here. His first scene... the bit where Pitt is talking about how the Basterds are going to be cruel to the Germans, the gives this pedo-creepy smile that completely fails at the badass grimace I assume he was going for. And then his first line "Did you get this for killing Jews?" is just whiny and uninspiring. Then after he kills the first German (more on that killing below), he goes into that rant about knocking it out of the ballpark. Both times I've seen this movie, that rant caused the audience to go completely silent... they were cheering when he beat the hell out of the Nazi, but his awkward delivery of his follow-up lines completely kills the mood. The same happens during the "Basterds talk about why you shouldn't fight in a basement" scene. Everything is chugging along, then he delivers some redundant lines about why the Fraulein decided to stick them in a basement. It's a really bad line reading... completely took me out of the film. I thought he was good during the Operation Kino scenes, and liked how they screwed with his eyes to make them all black, but other than that... Enough of what I didn't like. I want to talk about a small moment in the film I noticed the first time around, and really focused on this time: the German officer who the Bear Jew beats to death at the beginning of Chapter 2. I love this guy. The first few times Donny beats his bat against the wall of the tunnel, the German flinches, despite himself. But after 2 or 3 bat-beats, he straightens his back, squares his soldier, and looks wide-eyed into what he has to know is the bringer of his death. He's a complete badass, even knowing he's about to die horribly. It's a great performance, and one of my favorite moments in the movie. The other thing I really focused on this time around is how much of the movie takes place off camera. On The Treatment this week, QT pointed out how Shosanna lived an entire movie between chapter 1 and 3. The same is true for Pitt's character before we first see him. And for Landa between Chapters 1 and 5. And the Basterds themselves... there's a line in the script during the "Basterds talk about why to not fight in a basement" scene where it simply says "all of the Basterds that you saw in the opening scene that aren't here have died." And I'm 99% sure that Samm Levine was in that scene, but then isn't ever shown again... I assume that he was with B.J. Novak's character during Operation Kino, and that however B.J. got captured resulted in Levine's death. In other words, I think it is a good idea to go into this movie expecting to actively imagine what is taking place outside the frame, and to invite yourself to fill in the gaps. That isn't something that we're asked to do very often in cinema (at least not to this degree), but it is a fun exercise to engage in once you realize that QT has given you license to do so. So... yeah... great movie still, with just a few cast-based misfires. And for the record, I my favorite line is still "Nah, I'll get chewed out... and I've been chewed out." And oh yeah... this audience ate up every line and snarl that Hugo Stiglitz delivered... what a fun character. |
| 08.15.09 | Alamo Ritz | This Screening is part of event: Cinemapocalypse 2009 It is 4:40 Sunday afternoon right now and I've been up since ~10 Saturday morning. If I take a nap now it'll just make things worse tomorrow, so how about I just type up these Cinemapocalypse notes! I've got a sixer of Lone Star that I'll be working my way though as I type, so chalk up any typos to that and the lack of sleep. I'm not proofing this bad boy. For those who've never read my write-up of a festival in general and a QT fest in specific, these write-ups generally tend to be more detailed about the events of the festival and less about the films themselves. I'll warn you if there are any spoilers. Ok... so I left Dallas around 2 Saturday afternoon and made it to Austin just before 6. I went over to the Drafthouse, got my wristband, and found out that they weren't going to be seating until some time after 8. The cool thing about this event (or, to be more specific, one of the cool things about this event) is that the seats were assigned, which means you were free to wonder around the lobby (or sixth street) without having to worry about lining up to get a great seat. I was hungry, so I went across the street to a place called Paradise where I had a pretty excellent teriyaki chicken. Then it was back across to the Ritz, where I ran into plenty of people that I hadn't seen since the last time I was in Austin for a Drafthouse event. It was great catching up with everyone and meeting new fellow film geeks, and before I knew it, they were letting us into the theater. I ended up being assigned a seat next to Blake, who runs cinemaisdope.com and who I knew from past QT Fests, among other things. We even split a hotel room the weekend Eli Wallach came into town for The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, if memory serves right. So that was cool. Plus there were plenty of other people sitting on my row that I knew. I was two or three rows from the back of the theater (or 11 rows from the front if you want to count that way) and right in the middle of the row. Pretty excellent seats. Quentin was there before the posted starting time of 9 p.m., so I think he took the stage pretty close to when they'd estimated he would. Actually, before he got up, Eli Roth introduced him and pre-introduced the film by saying it was "for cinema lovers and Nazi haters." He also said that this movie was impossible to describe in a commercial/trailer (a sentiment Blake echoed... he'd seen this at Cannes and said it wasn't at all what he was expecting (i.e., a men-on-a-mission movie)), so we should "let you expectations go and hang on for the ride of your fucking life." He concluded by saying that the movie "isn't history, but I'm pretty sure it's historic." Then QT took the stage and asked how many people were planning on staying the entire night. Every cheered, of course, to which he just laughed and replied "you fucking pussies... you're all lying." (In total, I'd say about half the theater stayed until the end of the last film... QT and Eli Roth were not among them). He then asked who'd been to a QT fest before, and said that with Inglorious Basterds he'd tried to squeeze "a whole QT fest into one movie." There was a little more intro chatter about how he'd programmed the two films following this one, and that if we didn't like IB we could by tomatoes in the lobby by the bushel for the post-film Q&A, then he said "Are you ready to see some Basterds!" and slammed the mic into the ground, as he does for each and every QT Fest intro I've ever been to. Trailers: Operation Eichmann, Ski Troop Attack (featuring pre-Bond skiing GIs!... "They turned a white hell red... with enemy blood), 36 Hours ("See it from the beginning... every second counts"), & Operation Amsterdam. Film: Well hell... I really liked this. I was never interested in revisiting Death Proof, but I think I'll actually go see this again in the theater next week. Kill Bill was the only other QT movie I saw first run in a theater, and I remember that it took a few on-DVD viewings to fully warm up to it. I actively enjoyed this movie the entire time I was watching it (with the exception of the three things below I didn't like), but I'm guessing that some of the drawn-out relationshipy stuff with Shosanna isn't going to age as well as Kill Bill. But then last 30-60 minutes... man... it just builds and builds and builds and goes batshit crazy and never hits a wrong note. And the final shot?... perfect. Is it bad to admit that as the credits started rolling I thought.. hmmm... "QT could die now and it'd be OK"? Yeah, that's bad. I thought it though... of course, I don't want him to die. I'm just saying if he did... nevermind. I'm going to be talking in general terms about the movie, so if you haven't read the script or anything, I'd recommend just skipping to the next entry until you watch the movie. I'd consider the rest of this entry to be mild spoilers. This movie actually features a *lot* of non-Basterds time. And of the Basterds group (of which there are just 10, counting Pitt), very few other than Pitt get much screen time. I think there are a few who don't ever even talk. The only non-Pitt one who does get a full backstory is Hugo Stiglitz, and he's in the film for way too short of a time. He's one of my favorite things about the movie, and I'd love to see a comic or animation with more of his backstory. I've been trying to put my finger on where most of the film's non-Basterds runtime goes, and I'm having a hard time isolating it right now. There's a lot with Shosanna, and although she's wonderful, I think most of the interest with her role was not knowing where her character was heading. Now that I know how it ends up, I don't know that I'd be that interested in her the next time around. Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa is a shitload of fun, though he borders on self-hysterical parody the last half of the film. If SNL was in season right now we could be a skit away from having "It's a bingooooo!" be the new "I drink your milkshake." But... yeah... it's an incredibly fun (and often scary) performance. Kudos to the milk-farmer at the beginning as well... it's an amazing opening sequence. Here's the three things I didn't like, all of which took me out of the movie. 1: Mike Myers. I have no idea what he was doing here, but it seemed he was playing a character from Austin Powers. I mentioned in an earlier writeup this week that it'd be funny if QT put in an old-fashioned "chip-chip-cheerio" brit in this movie. He did, and it's this part. It doesn't work. Luckily it is brief. 2: There is an 80's style montage with Shosanna putting on make-up that is uber-cheesy. 3: Eli Roth has this vacant look for most of the movie that I never got a bead on. Next time around I've concocted a backstory that I think will make it work a bit more. But first time around... pretty distracting. But the bottom line is that I really enjoyed this. It feels like junk food pop-culture cinema, but then again, I think Pulp Fiction is junk food pop-culture cinema too. Oh... haven't mentioned Pitt yet... his jaw-jutting performance was classic. I really liked it, and if I wasn't so beat, I'd talk about it more. Last thing... there's a moment during the film when the Nazis take over a Paris cinema. In the film, they hang giant Nazi banners in the cinema entryway. Just when they do, Tim rigged four *massive* Nazi banners to drop from the ceiling, two on each wall. It was a great interactive-cinema moment, but it was very weird to be flanked by the flags for the next two hours. Ok... enough about IB. During the Q&A Quentin talked about how he'd originally worked this story out as a 12-hour miniseries, and that he was going to do it on TV. "The first for an auteur in that medium," he said. Only... he mentioned it to Luc Besson, who said that QT was one of the only directors who made him want to go to the cinema, so he'd be bummed if he had to wait 5 years for another QT movie. "And there's some shit... once you hear it, it can't be unheard... this was one of those things." There was a lot of other Q&A (including questions about his favorite of his films and what was in the briefcase (ugh) and a massive rambling question about propaganda that had the whole audience getting antsy) but I'm thinking it'll get posted online at some point. The last thing I'll mention here is that QT teased a QT fest in April. Fingers crossed. |