An inevitable drawback of a newspaper's commitment to the timely surfaces in the film reviews. With so many extraordinary movies doomed to commercial failure and oblivion, how can a responsible columnist capitulate to review the most recent, but lesser, material—passing over its predecessors in silence? Two gifts bestowed to the bride are something old and something new. They bless a happy marriage.
"Inglourious Basterds", the eighth and one-fourth film in Quentin Tarantino's oeuvre, is reputedly based on "Inglorious Bastards," an Italian World War II exploitation film circa 1978. In fact, they really have nothing in common.
Tarantino returns to his favorite theme, this time transposing the indulgent mood of vengeance à la high school '80s films onto Jews, blacks and freedom fighters in Nazi-occupied Germany. A crack combat team of Jews, led by a puffy-jowled Brad Pitt (delivering a flat impression of a Tennessean), dynamite, tommy-gun, scalp and get medieval on Hitler's Reich with a spirit of self-sacrifice closer to a computer game avatar's than Simone Weil's.
Tarantino's vision of the war, the stylization of the combat sequences, the rendering of idyllic French farm country and forties sheik velvet, are boldly rendered from Call of Duty 4. When characters aren't indulging in formulaic violence, they exchange the same wise guy intimidation antics that had put Tarantino on the map.
Unknown talent Christoph Waltz (Colonel Landa) does his part to redeem the ensemble act, delivering an excellent performance as a painfully polite Nazi you'd want as your eccentric European uncle. Melanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus, movie theater owner and martyr for the cause) plays a poor man's Catherine Deneuve, an otherwise successful role ruined by a few valley girl one-liners, a whorish red dress, and an MTV music sequence. These are just a few of Tarantino's usual flourishes which stand out—to the film's detriment—from an otherwise engaging if incoherent script.
And of course, the film references keep coming...Tarantino does us this favor, at least, for the UFA German cinema and French occupation films he references are undeniably better than his own. Namely, Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Le Corbeau" (1943), the French occupation paranoia classic, which appears on the marquee of Shosanna Dreyfus's theater. But that's not the film we'll measure against this one.
In 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville, French gangster flick guru responsible for "Le Cercle Rouge" (1970), "Le Samourai" (1967) and "Les Enfants Terribles" (1950), directed "L'armée des Ombres" (aka Army of Shadows). The famous first shot of a victorious Reich marching in front of the Arc de Triumph sets a fatalist mood of Bressonian proportions and brilliantly transitions to a microcosmic horror of war: how to murder a man in a room with nothing but a towel?
The film traces the inevitable martyrdoms of French freedom fighters who replace Melville's typical heroic petty gangsters and who fight neither for vengeance nor self preservation but the war's encroachment on human dignity. Filmed in Melville's cool color palette, the filmic equivalent of Picasso's blue period, the struggle eclipses Tarantino's, capturing true cosmic despair.
Not to say "Inglourious Basterds" doesn't strike a peculiar cord. In the wake of terrorist bombings and religious fundamentalism, the 21st century West countenances anyone who would blow himself up, laughing, for a cause with an ambiguous apprehension. Tarantino's film shockingly returns us to a political climate of a simple polarity of good versus evil. Imagine an ecstatic Eli Roth, producer of Hostile, indiscriminately spraying bullets into a cinema crowd while the time bomb strapped to his gam ticks away. And he's one of the good guys.
Tarantino offers the trappings of nostalgia, a bathos vendetta against racism, and a self-satisfied seediness. I recommend "Inglourious Basterds" to those who learned German from Medal of Honor: no ma, I can't hold a conversation, but I can run a concentration camp. Otherwise, be the first to rent "Army of Shadows" at Bart and Greg's.