MAJOR SPOILERS!

I waited until this week to catch Inglourious Basterds with my friend Teighlor---partially because I am so embarrassingly broke right now that I can’t even afford a fucking matinee in this town (she paid my way in, natch), but also because I was a little curious as to what the reviews would be like a week later. Tarantino took such a savage thrashing on GRINDHOUSE (only partially deserved when you consider he was TRYING to make a bad movie that time) and I openly despised both KILL BILL movies as the empty-headed action movie hodgepodges they were—brilliant though the action itself mostly was. My first impression of this new WWII thing of his when I caught the trailers was one of utter disbelief—THIS was the legendary war opus it took him damn-near ten years to write? To me, it looked like the silliest movie ever made.

But, hey . . . trailers can be misleading, right? I would wait and see.

The slew of reviews for this film collated over at Rotten Tomatoes are almost unanimously, overwhelmingly positive—but one thing I’ve noticed about even the most enthusiastic of them, such as this bad boy here by professional media dick smoker Rex Reed (http://www.observer.com/20..09/movies/i-had-helluva-ti..me-watching-inglourious-ba..sterds) is that they all seem to be smirking in some weird “oh, YOU!” kind of way while they bend over backwards to admire the emperor’s new clothes. And now that I have seen the film, I can say without reservation that The Emperor is indeed, Stark Fucking Naked. In fact, let’s face it, folks: this guy hasn’t had any clothes on for years.

Don’t get me wrong. The smart money is still on QT. He WILL be great again. He has no choice. Here’s a guy in LOVE with movies, a guy with real passion about the history of the medium and the form of filmmaking—but I’m not sure at this point in his career if he cares all that much about actually MAKING movies. Inglourious Basterds smacks of laziness, misguided self-worship, over-the-top fanboy syndrome . . . and what seems like some sort of bizarre Attention Deficit Disorder in the scenes that matter the most . . . and that’s to say nothing of the elements in this fucking thing that expose him as an uneducated high-school dropout who not only revels in the number of dramatic blunders and war movie clichés he can cram into one film (while still making THE most tedious exercise in cinematic nothingness of his entire career), but is bloody well ARROGANT in his ignorance. The guy can’t even SPELL for fuck’s sake. Does anybody really buy that this was done on purpose? There’s only the weakest explanation for the title blunder in the film, and it’s SO weak that it speaks rightly to the condition of Inglourious Basterds on almost every other level.

Don’t be fooled. All the critics have taken clear leave of their senses. My friends who all told me to run out at see this thing . . . well, I love you guys . . . but you are wrong. Very wrong. And here is why:

PULP FICTION and RESERVOIR DOGS are still Tarantino’s best, most engaging, most suspenseful, most original films. JACKIE BROWN is great also, but it owes its entire existence to the Elmore Leonard novel upon which it’s based, down to the last bit of dialogue. (All Q did was add a few nigger jokes, a couple of hip film references and cut out the boring parts.) As is evidenced by KILL BILL, DEATH PROOF and now this thing, Tarantino is not now, nor has he ever been an “idea man.” Inglourious Basterds is the icing on the cake—or maybe the mayo on the shit sandwich?

The film has no twists and turns, no clever narrative structure—in fact, it has no center at all, no defining message whatsoever, at least none I could discern. That would be fine if this were another DEATH PROOF—maybe—but it isn’t. It’s supposed to be a war movie and it’s clear from the impressive opening scene and the subsequent verisimilitude he ladles on with both hands by having his characters speak in their native tongues throughout the remainder of the film (with subtitles, natch), that he wants to be taken seriously. But by screaming “I gotta be me” once too often with jarring KILL BILL-ish style lapses—during which I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to laugh or feel sorry for the poor shmuck—he jettisons any serious credibility with such extreme prejudice that the “seriousness” of the rest of the film falls flatter than a sauerkraut sandwich crushed by a steamroller.

It’s a series of clever scenes that play like an anthology rather than a forward driving narrative—and while this might have worked with a better, more intriguing premise and story, here it doesn’t because Q is clearly out of his element, his scenes are top heavy and tedious, and some of his “plotting” is incredibly stupid. Why, for example, do our heroes race to their doom on a secret mission that requires the Tenessee good-old-boy Aldo Raine—Brad Pitt in a stunning lapse (he was better as the stoner in TRUE ROMANCE)—to speak to Germans in at least “halfway decent” Italian, and when it all comes down, he blows it so bad that even someone blind, deaf and DEAD could spot him right off for the phony he is? So guess what---the Germans spot him right off and capture his ass. Weak, Q. Really fucking weak.

While Inglourious Basterds is not some sort of colossal event movie failure on the order of, say, TRANSFORMERS 2 or whatever, it comes shockingly close on a another, somewhat similar level of juvenile golly-gee-whizness. Maybe old Q needs to go back to ripping off his old buddies for story ideas or adapting novels—say SURVIVOR by Chuck Palahniuk. (Now THAT would be a really cool Tarantino film, man!) There’s not a heroic character to be found in this film who is engaging or even reasonably well-developed beyond stock archetypes, and they are all—and I mean, every single one of them—upstaged by the head bad guy, who isn’t even Hitler, but a scary hatchet man played by Christoph Waltz.

Which, believe it or not, brings me to some positive commentary.

The opening of the film is staged beautifully, elegantly, in a style that suggests Tarantino may have actually read his history books and has elevated his approach to an all-new level. The scene is brilliantly layered and unfolds in skillful phases, as something benign and unthreatening becomes a life-or-death situation . . . and even the device of having his French and German characters switch to English midway through is brilliant, because it sets up the tragedy to come, in which innocent Jews hiding out under the floor are brutally machinegunned—and the poor Jews have no idea it’s coming because THEY DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH. Bravo! Not only is the scene one of Tarantino’s best . . . but he finds a real muse in Waltz as Nazi Col. Hans Landa, a very charming, villainous “Jaw Hunter,” who turns out to be not only the most enjoyable character of the film, but the real hero in the end—which involves a terrific historical fantasy conceit. But the conceit doesn’t work at all by the time we get there, because Waltz is surrounded by terrific actors scrambling on a treadmill to salvage a weak screenplay that tells us nothing at all about who these other people are.

In fact, the main focus of the film seems to be on a sort of doomed anti-romance between Shoshana, a Jew hiding out in plain view in France as a cinema owner and Frederick Zoller, her would-be suitor, a war hero who is currently the subject a new propaganda film about to be released in Europe. This war hero (who somehow comes off a bit too much like a bumbling schoolboy to be completely believable) is so smitten with the beautiful Shoshana that he convinces everyone around him that the premiere of his film must be held at her theatre—Hitler himself will even be in attandance---and that is basically the fucking PLOT of the entire movie. The Basterds, of course, get wind of this, and the whole thing kind of devolves into a comedy of errors that plays eerily like some demented, ultra-violent Marx Brothers movie. And not in a good way. It's just bad.

The Basterds themselves are not given NEARLY enough screen time to make their exploits truly legendary or even horrific—we should be torn by the cruelties they inflict and asked important questions about how far is too far when war becomes hell, as in some of Q's other work. Here, the very notion of what these guys do is jettisoned as so much useless deadweight and we’re left with not much to identify these Basterds. In fact, the key shootout sequence mid-point in the film hardly involves any of them at all, coming at the merciful end of a yawn-inducing twenty minute long dialogue sequence in a basement barroom which neither provides suspense nor furthers any character development whatsoever. In the gory finale of the scene, which, in complete jarring contrast to the dull-as-hell setup, has so much visceral impact as to be virtually indecipherable, we see one Bastard stab the hell out of a smug Nazi and then . . . Umm, I guess he gets shot or something? I couldn’t really tell. (I can tell you that pretty much everyone was dead when the gunsmoke cleared.)

In fact, the whole movie is like this. One scene after another of long dialogues exchanges, in which someone appears to know something about some other guy (or gal), some verbal sparring is traded, and, if we are very lucky---BLAM! Someone gets shot. But that doesn’t always happen. The climax of one of these scenes is two people eating whipped cream off apple strudel in micro-closeup. No fooling. That’s in there.

The one time we get to see the Basterds in all their sadistic glory, the scene is sabotaged by Tarantino’s tedious build up to the Big Jew Bear (or whatever the hell his name was) . . . who turns out to be that fucking guy who directed HOSTEL! I don’t know about you, but Eli Roth does not frighten me. At all. And when that’s not enough to kill his movie deader than dogshit, for some insane reason, Tarantino attempts to color his most stoic Basterd (the guy who later stabs the Nazi in the neck during the basement shootout) by laying on some incredibly out-of-the-clear-blue-fuck..ing-sky blaxploitation titling and flashback montage, all set to the theme from Jim Brown’s classic exploitation film SLAUGHTER and some narration by SAMUEL L. JACKSON. (What the fuck?) The flashback which then occurs gives some lip service to how this guy was blown out of a Nazi jail to join the Basterds—another visceral scene in which I’m not exactly sure what happened—but the real question I kept pondering for the rest of the film was this: if it was good enough for this one fucking guy, what about the REST of the BASTERDS. Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine is so devoid of any depth or back-story that you want to scream. How did he start the Basterds? Why is the name misspelled? Why does he wear the scar of a hangman’s noose around his neck? All missed dramatic opportunities that leave Raine himself as one of the most unlikable, unsympathetic and, ultimately, un-HEROIC “heroes” in the history of war movies. He mostly comes off like a sadistic, blundering hayseed.

Or maybe he’s not the hero, after all?

As I mentioned, the focus seems mostly on the characters of Shoshana and Zoller, the war hero who bumbles like a schoolboy for her affections. . . but, though they are the most well “developed” characters in the film, they still come off as bitter, unlikable, uninteresting and . . . well, just assholes. Our bumbling schoolboy is a spoiled child who may be a date-rapist waiting to happen. Shoshana is just a stone cold bitch with a death wish. This is vintage Tarantino just waiting to explode. The most emotionally engaging and affecting scene in the entire film, in fact, is when the two of them finally go head to head in the flaming climax . . . but unlike other Tarantino films, where he takes a bad situation and makes it worse, elevating the tension until it is unbearable . . . here it’s just a quick finish to a plot thread that could have—and SHOULD have—been so much more. Faster than you can say “missed opportunity,” they’re both dead.

Then again, if these two jerks were our heroes . . . why the fuck is Brad Pitt’s name above the title?

And the music. On my god, people. Someone tell QT to hire a fucking COMPOSER!!!!

Some critic I read actually talked about the use of “Putting Out Fire”—David Bowie's theme from the 1982 re-make of CAT PEOPLE (not the single version he recorded with Stevie Ray Vaughn on LET’S DANCE, but the actual movie version produced by 1980s disco king Giorgio Moroder)—as some sort of “inspired” choice for the pre-finale montage. (“Street Life” from the soundtrack of SHARKY’S MACHINE was the big production number in JACKIE BROWN—with far better results.) Me, I'm a real nerd when it comes to this sort of thing, and this “inspired choice” just yanked me right out of the movie, like the confounding use of the blaxploitation music. What the fuck are David Bowie and Billy Preston doing on the soundtrack of a WWII epic for FUCK’S SAKE? This would all be silly enough, but the entire score is a oh-so-hip, nerd-o-ramic mashup of “temp tracks” from other films—everything from Ennio Morricone (of course) to the “rape music” from a 1980s horror flick called THE ENTITY—all of which pulled me out of the film. Of course, the score choices do point towards Tarantino’s legendary obsessive love for the movies, sure . . . but it's not cute anymore after THREE FILMS LOADED WITH THIS SHIT . . . it is a misguided love . . . and also points towards a stunning lack of inventiveness and/or originality which has been plaguing his work since KILL BILL.

I couldn’t give fuck one about the “historical rewrites” going on here, or the overboard film geek-ism within the story (our heroine kills everybody at the end by locking them in the theatre and setting fire to her vintage collection of Nazi propaganda film prints, which also happen to be three times more flammable than paper, while Eli Roth guns down Hitler in gory closeup) . . . this is just the STORY, and let the nerd be a nerd, why doncha? The problems this movie has go way beyond any of that shit. To make a film worth a damn, you have to focus on SOMETHING. This film focuses on nothing. And even though it clocks in at 133 minutes or so, I found myself thinking I’d just watched a series of TV episodes and wondering when the real ending was gonna happen. Also, someone needs to tell old Q that it’s very unwise to mutter “this may be my masterpiece” to the audience seconds before you flash you director’s credit across the screen. In that case, you are either the most insecure egomaniac that ever drew breath . . . or your new clothes are completely invisible.

Okay, so what the fuck? Has everyone lost their minds? Why is this film getting such good reviews? It’s a godamned mess, whether or not it has a few cool things going for it, which it does. Those few things give me hope that, someday, reason will return to the old boy’s skull, he’ll burn his ego card and start working with collaborators at the screenwriting phase. With a really great script—PLUS his obvious skill as a director and passion for film, we’ll eventually get his masterpiece. But this ain’t it, people. Not even close.

STEPHEN

This is the best review I found on Rotten Tomatoes, BTW. It really nails it for me:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk../culture/film/filmreviews/..6060344/Inglourious-Baster..ds-review.html