My Masterpiece

An Inglorious Mess

A review of “Inglorious Basterds” dir. Quentin Tarantino

By Ernest M. Whiteman III

Prologue:

Okay, I was wrong. About “Inglorious Basterds”, I was wrong. I admit it.

So, Tarantino did NOT ape Samuel Fueller’s better WWII movies. I was wrong about that.

Still, it was as though if he was jiggling shiny keys at our big, fat baby faces, with each key representing one of his tried and true tricks of movie making.

PART One:

When I step out from the theater, the movies that I really love and which get my highest recommendation will have me smiling and thinking about making my own movies, going over what I can do, what I want to do and how the movie I just seen influences that.

I had that feeling walking out of “The Hurt Locker” earlier this year. (Easily one of the great war movies in the last decade.) I had it walking out of “The Dark Knight” last year. Hell, I had that feeling after watching “Red Cliff” on my DVD player at home; I was so joyous and happy about that movie that I grinned the rest of the day thinking about it. I had that feeling twice over after viewing “Red Cliff 2” on my DVD player. I want to share these movies. I want to make these movies. And I still smile now like a loon thinking about them.

Unfortunately, I did not get that feeling walking out of “Inglorious Basterds”. It did not make me smile or joyous about movies. I did not go in looking for blemishes so I could dismiss the movie. I went in expecting to be surprised and enthralled of his vision. I was not. Sure, I was entertained, I even laughed at the funny stuff, but I was never enthralled. I went in with the expectation that Tarantino’s talent grew, that it went far beyond aping other movies, better movies.

I was wrong about that.

PART Two:

Aldo “The Apache” Raines is the first problem. People will gravitate to this character, laughing at his ways, his accent (Which wavers between “bored doing it” and cartoon dog throughout the movie.) and will be quoting his lines ad nausea. In the end though, Lieutenant Aldo “The (pause) Apache” Raines was a pretty shallow part. All twang and no substance. Actually, the character gives you that escape hatch that all similar goofy characters do, that you do not have to take the movie so seriously.

Another big problem is that all these characters are introduced without any real introduction, or worse, a really cool introduction and we do not stay with them for very long. I felt no empathy for any of the characters. Even for Shosana, whom we are curve-balled into thinking the whole movie was about her. I felt no empathy for her despite her shocking, if drawn-out and glaringly Leone-esque introduction.

Here is another failing of Tarantino’s talent; I should not be able to recognize whom he is aping. The reference should be there but the scene should be all Taratino. So, from there I simply knew that she would run into Colonel Landa again in some tension-filled scene later on. This hook was so obvious. The reason their scene together never worked for me is because I know, even upon second viewing that Landa NEVER laid eyes on Shosana.

Glaring in its misuse is the character Stiglitz, whom is representative of this general problem of the film. He simply should have been in it more, as he was the most interesting character I found from his awesome, titled introduction. But the only purpose for him I could tell was so that audience members could invest something in his character, because he is such a cool character, that when he is killed (so uselessly I might add), that we are tricked into thinking that we have to take this movie so seriously for doing so.

Characters appear and vanish without leaving any impression and the only ones who do are the ones doing the “Cool Things” like bashing Nazis with a bat, or killing Nazi officers for no reason, or running a “cinema” in Nazi-occupied France, or knowing about the film industry of the times. But none leave resonance. None made me care about them. Therefore the scenes in which everyone praised the tension, I found tedious and wanting to just get to the point. For a lesson in film tension, I highly recommend “The Hurt Locker” and that tension was mounted without words!

As an annoyed footnote, I felt as if Tarantino was pressing the whole African experience in America a bit much as if trying to win the African American audience back, even going as far as having Samuel L. Jackson serve as the narrator for no other purpose than to have Samuel L. Jackson serve as the narrator because we all remember Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and his tiny part in Kill Bill. Simply, it is cool to hear Samuel L. Jackson saying cool shit. Just another jangly key.

PART Three:

Here’s the plot-twist: I enjoyed it. I did. I laughed at the funny bits and enjoyed what action there was. In essence, Tarantino simply made a WWII Caper Film. Which is fine. I rather enjoyed his caper films. He is great at making caper films, i.e. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown are all caper films. Plus, I did like the revisionist twist he put on WWII, such as the Basterds getting a chance to end the war early, and the death of the Nazi leadership.

And there are the small moments that I enjoyed. Such as when Danowitz wants to leave after finding Hilter’s box, but his companion doesn’t want to leave the movie. Their exchange made me chuckle.

But he stuffed this one with so many grand characterizations, not characters mind you, but archetypes, really, that having not spent any time with them I felt no suspense in any of the suspense scenes because I did not invest anything in the characters to begin with. Just jangly keys.

Yes, I knew Shosana was out for revenge.

And yes, I knew the Basterds “keel nat-zees”.

But the two plots just lie side-by-side with no integration. A better, experienced director would have found a way to intertwine them. In fact, upon watching it again, (To give it another chance) I realized that Shosana never meets the Basterds nor does she get to have her moment of revenge, actually getting killed even before her plot unfolds.

I guess Tarantino had two different WWII movies in his head that he simply could not flesh out into longer movies, so he jammed them together. His writing feels lazy in this one. He uses tricks, the jangly keys, to trick us into empathy for the characters when solid writing and characterization should do that.

The conceit of jamming Shosana and Landa in a scene together only tricks us into to make us feel something for Shosana because of her violent intro. Would it have been more tense if Landa did recognize her and asked more pointed questions while under the table Shosana was drawing a weapon, a knife perhaps, to kill the eye of her vengeance but is worried she is not fast enough to outmatch him drawing his pistol? Instead, they eat truffle and she cries.

I thought that he wrote the whole basement scene simply to lead up to that three-fingered giveaway and to give Aldo more cool lines to speak like, “…you’re fighting in a basement”. And, in the end, it all seemed that Tarantino was writing the movie for cool lines for his fans to quote, for that final line in the film in particular and simply placed a whole WWII scenario around it.

EPILOGUE:

So I was walking out of the theater after seeing this movie when I overheard, “I really didn’t like it but I’ll recommend simply because, hey, it’s Tarantino.” Herein lies my problem, with this movie. Too many people excuse it because it is simply a Tarantino movie. The excuse of “It is what it is” does not work for me. Not this time, because if he had a vast catalogue of films, it might, but after the years of hype he put into it himself. Andrew Horton, a friend of mine made the point of, if Tarantino were making a movie a year, it might be acceptable. I agree. But he is not, so it is not.

But most people do not want Tarantino to fail, because he represents their own tastes, or perceived tastes in film. A taste on the outside of the Hollywood mainstream, which is where we all want to be, as smart and as knowledgeable in movies as QT, yet, we still line up to pay money to see the Revenge of the Fallens and the New Moons and the Old Dogs and the Antichrists. Hell, we still line up to pay money to see ANY movie.

We all have our tastes in film, and taste is the enemy of art.

I know what you’re thinking. You expected one thing from my review, you either got what you expected, overly-critical cynicism that maybe was bit entertaining, maybe you chuckled but in the end was nothing new or surprising, or, maybe you got something even more disappointing than all that after all my promising that it was more than that.

Well then, you got exactly what I got from “Inglorious Basterds”

Recommended, but only if you like funny un-war movies like M*A*S*H or Kelly’s Heroes, and are satisfied without seeing the Be-All-End-All of the Tarantino Catalogue.

Highly recommended if you like something akin to a cover band aping the work of their betters while making a huge show with their own laser light flourishes.

Or bright shiny keys jangled in your big fat baby face.

PS: A Quick Review of “A Nation’s Pride”, the film-within-the-film included on the DVD: Why would hard-bitten, Texas actors, play American Army Colonels in a Nazi Propaganda Movie?

© 2010 Ernest M. Whiteman III