Quentin Tarantino Inglourious Basterds (2009)

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Op zondag 5 april 2009 17:18 schreef Frenkel het volgende:

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Op vrijdag 10 april 2009 09:54 schreef Ruder het volgende:
Op deze film verheug ik me al zo lang he

Tarentino weer terug op niveau

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Op vrijdag 10 april 2009 14:04 schreef Gillingham het volgende:

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Waar concludeer je uit dat Tarantino weer op oud niveau (neem aan dat je het niveau van RD en PF bedoelt) zit?

Ik begin eigenlijk steeds meer twijfels te krijgen bij dit project, maar ik word graag verrast.

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Op donderdag 16 april 2009 21:52 schreef fratsman het volgende:
Ik ben wel benieuwd naar de muziek, wat zou Tarantino voor zo'n film aan muziek uitkiezen...?

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Op donderdag 16 april 2009 21:59 schreef Oksel het volgende:
Ik ga hem zeker in de bioscoop kijken. In Duitsland..

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Op donderdag 16 april 2009 22:25 schreef 7eVeNL het volgende:

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Waaat? jij verkiest de Nagesynchroniseerde versie boven het origineel dan...

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Op dinsdag 5 mei 2009 13:31 schreef TheGeneral het volgende:
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Op donderdag 7 mei 2009 18:04 schreef jimjim1983 het volgende:
tis toch bastard?

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Op donderdag 7 mei 2009 18:04 schreef jimjim1983 het volgende:
tis toch bastard?

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You might notice that both words are misspelled [...]. That is the official title of the film, likely in an attempt to distinguish itself from the 1978 Enzo Castellari film which inspired Tarantino.
_Bron

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Op dinsdag 19 mei 2009 19:38 schreef Oksel het volgende:
Waar blijven de berichten uit Cannes?

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I was frogmarched into Inglourious Basterds expecting the worst. I’d enjoyed what I’d seen of the script, but that first trailer terrified me more than a wet shave from Mr Blonde listening to K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ‘70s.

Quentin Tarantino had started shooting this thing in October ’08, and it showed. The footage looked cheap, rushed, shot on locations they’d stumbled upon in the woods.

I had been led into the Lumiere against my will. I haven’t loved a QT flick since Jackie Brown, and here I was, expected to sit through two hours and forty minutes of what appeared to be a hobby movie, featuring Eli Roth barking orders in a whiny voice at a bunch of TV actors?

Well, I was wrong to be cynical. Completely and totally.

Not only did I love every minute, if the French projectionist wanted to cue it up and roll it again from the start, I would have sat through the whole film again, with the biggest grin on my face.

This is Quentin’s best film since Jackie Brown. It might even be his best film since Pulp Fiction.

From the opening image of a French farmer chopping wood from a distance, you’re thrown face first into a war movie that looks and feels like a spaghetti western.

From there we’re led into a ten-minute sequence that’s the equal to anything Tarantino has shot, scripted and scored.

Hans Landa steps into the frame, grabs the film roughly by the arm and dominates it for the full duration.

Make no mistake, this is Landa’s film. He is the Blonde Jules of the movie; the stand-out character that will be on everyone’s lips when they’re walking out of the screen.

It would be a star-making performance if it wasn’t for the fact that Christoph Waltz is already a star in his native Austria. When he’s on form, Tarantino sure knows how to pluck an actor.

Which is why it’s such a shame that Eli Roth is a Basterd. He’s the only weak link I could spot, and I was searching for flaws like a projectionist examining a film reel.

Tellingly, his character’s big scene in the script has been cut from the finished flick. Why, we’ll never know, but let’s just say it’s a relief whenever he’s offscreen.

But that minor quibble can’t take away from a film that’s this incredible. It contains Tarantino dialogue at its best – the subtitle gags, and nods to the Cannes audience betray the film’s origins; surely this is the first film shot specifically for a film festival – but that’s not all.

QT’s magpie eye has never been sharper, swooping down on Italian cinema and plucking the very best shots, framing and music to create a deserving homage to the spaghetti westerns of my youth.

But Basterds is packed with images and moments that could only have come from Quentin’s manic mind. I can’t tell you about my favourite frames, for fear of ruining the conclusion, but look out for a red dress moment at one point, and some laughing smoke at another and you’ll see two reasons why I loved it so much.

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Well, I was wrong to be cynical. Completely and totally

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Empire has just seen Quentin Tarantino's eagerly-awaited WWII flick, Inglourious Basterds, and it's rather brilliant. Every bit as idiosyncratic as the spelling of its title, it's a wonderfully-acted movie that subverts expectation at every turn. And it may represent the most confident, audacious writing and directing of QT's career.

Forget what you think you know is such a cliché, but here it more than applies. Tarantino has made a career out of subverting expectations – this is the man who made a heist flick without a heist, after all – but he’s outdone himself with Basterds. It’s an action movie that has barely any action. The Basterds themselves, including Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, are off-screen for long periods of time. And it takes wild liberties with history.

But that’s all set up by the opening title card (the film is divided into five chapters), ‘Once Upon A Time In… Nazi-Occupied France’. Not only does that allow Tarantino to use Spaghetti Western-esque musical cues and swipe the odd shot and convention from the likes of Sergio Leone, but it frees him up to take those liberties. This is a fairytale world, in which American soldiers can ghost behind enemy lines, scalp hundreds of Nazis and never get caught. And in which… no, we won’t go there. Not yet. But the ending is so thrillingly audacious that this reporter laughed out loud when it happened. Even when, having read the script, I knew it was coming.

The performances are superb across-the-board. Pitt is hilarious throughout, lending his lines that air of cocky movie-star insouciance that was a touchstone of his turns in the Ocean’s movies. But the standouts for me were Michael Fassbender, who deserves to become a star on the basis of his turn as British officer Lt. Archie Hicox, and Christoph Waltz, as the movie’s villain, Col. Hans Landa, aka The Jew Hunter.

A complex creation, refined, calculating and yet utterly monstrous when the time comes, Landa was the role that Tarantino struggled to fill, so much so that he might have had to pass on making the movie had he not filled it. But in Waltz, he’s found gold. He may look like an evil Rob Brydon, but the Austrian actor is fantastic: oleaginous, chilling and often devilishly charming. He may be a shoo-in for a Best Supporting Oscar nom, and even though it’s mighty early yet, he could become the first actor to win for a Tarantino film.

There are flaws, of course – what film doesn’t have flaws? But they may be exaggerated depending on your feelings about Tarantino. Some of his Grindhouse flourishes – large captions stamped on screen, the usual flirting with structure and chronology, offbeat musical cues (a David Bowie track shows up at one point) and the sudden introduction of a hip narrator (Samuel L. Jackson) – may irk some, but this movie-movie approach has been Tarantino’s forte since Uma Thurman drew a box on the screen in Pulp Fiction.

It’s certainly very talky, and there’s no doubt that Tarantino is in love with the sound of his characters’ voices, but QT dialogue is so much better than most other screenwriters that it’s hard to quibble. If all scenes in movies are about control, Tarantino understands that perhaps better than anybody, and some of the scenes here – the opening exchange between Landa and a French dairy farmer, and the Reservoir Dogs-esque scene in French bar, La Louisiane – are masterclasses in how to switch control from character to character. Indeed, both scenes are as tense as anything Tarantino has ever done in his career.

Remember, though: this is not the official Empire review, simply a reaction to this morning’s screening. Empire’s official verdict may differ from mine, so bear that in mind.

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it's rather brilliant

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Inglourious Basterds finished 20 minutes ago. That’s 20 minutes that’s been filled with argument and counter-argument between TF staffers Jonathan Dean and Sam Ashurst.

As you will see from Sam’s post, he is a Basterd – a lover of Quentin Tarantino’s latest that just received its world premiere in Cannes. But I am less effusive.

While the opening, gripping chapter – set in a French peasant house in 1941 – is excellent and a final cinema (where else?) foyer scene is epic in its grandeur with sweeping cameras and impeccable set design, much of Basterds felt flat, with a schizophrenic spaghetti western style that blasts Ennio Morricone at the start and then David Bowie later on.

It is hugely confident, sure, with Tarantino clearly making the film he wanted complete with much blood, more gore, lengthy chats and even his mate Eli Roth and the humour works more often than not. This is confidence that will be of massive appeal to QT’s yes-men fanboys.

Acting-wise, no one disappoints – even if Pitt and the American contingent are acted off the screen by the exceptional scene-stealing Christoph Waltz (SS Colonel Hans Landa) and there are even witty newsreel asides and plenty of playful subtitle gags – always bound to go down well over here in Cannes.

But that the applause at the end was muted at best says a lot. This is a film debuting in Cannes that includes the line “I am French. We respect directors in this country” and yet when the huge, OTT final scene ends, where you’d expect big cheers and standing ovations, there was a deathly silence.

Perhaps this is nothing to do with Tarantinos’ filmmaking touch – still unique, always inventive – or even the director of Hostel taking second billing, but rather the tone of the movie itself.

It is – and QT would have to admit this– immature. From Pitt’s ’tache to a mad hatter Hitler, it’s war seen through the eyes of a film geek, taking outrageous liberties with history and national sensibilities.

Thus, the Germans leer, the Americans are brave and the Brits posh. Enjoyable? Sure. But for 2 hours and 40 minutes it’s a big ask to keep brattishness exhilarating.

So well worth watching and admirably ambitious and single-minded, but as you can see from totalfilm.com, Inglourious Basterds will split viewers. We’re going to mull it over for a bit longer and video diary a debate later on.

This is war.