Summer of Netflix Day 58 - Inglourious Basterds

Joel: Honestly, what we have here is a really amazing cast doing what they can with a pretty subpar script. Christoph Waltz is amazing. He did deserve the Oscar he won for this movie. But the acting in this movie elevates the script higher than it has any right to be. The script is long and awkwardly paced. Things that should happen quickly are long and get sidetracked because Tarantino had to insert a conversation about milk. It’s a great example of a script where telling, not showing, runs rampant throughout, where the movie has to grind to a halt so that information can be given. But the acting is just so good. It’s almost worth it to watch just to see what the actors are able to do with the material given to them. The only downside of that is you’ll have to also sit through the material they’ve been given.

Chris: I’m going to be completely honest, here. I went through a Tarantino phase after being introduced to Kill Bill Vol. 1 when I was in high school. I went back and watched all of his movies and enjoyed the vast majority of them. Although, my the time I made it to Kill Bill Vol. 2’s released, I suddenly found myself getting over Tarantino because of how disappointed I was the Bill simply fell over dead (spoiler?) instead of his heart exploding out of his chest in typical Tarantino fashion. But I was willing to give IB a chance on opening night with several college friends. I’m not sure if John was with me when I saw it but I soon witnessed (over and over again for years) the full extent of John’s hatred for both IB and Tarantino. It’s a beautiful rant that gets recreated every so often when the subject comes up at holiday parties and I wanted that rant on Irrelevant But Awesome, somehow. I’m not going to say that getting this rant was the sole reason for Summer of Netflix happening but it is one of the first ideas i had to do over these 3 months, I’ve just been waiting for John to become available to rewatch and review.

Oh yeah, I guess I should share my thoughts on the movie. Honestly, I always kinda liked this movie and there was a certain charm about the characters that I didn’t mind the goofy changing of history, Eli Roth’s awkward delivery of Tarantino’s clunky dialogue, or the sometimes masturbatory (actual word John has used to describe Tarantino in the past) conversations that do little to further the plot. But IB did make me pay attention to Michael Fassbender for the first time and I’m now a huge fan of his so there’s that. Also, IB introduced Christoph Waltz to the English-speaking world and was easily the brightest thing about the movie even if his acting was on the verge of scene chewing at moments.

But enough about what I think. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, John’s infamous Tarantino rant. You’re welcome.

John: Do you remember the first movie you truly loathed? Not the first movie you didn’t like or the first movie you wanted to walk out of but the first movie that caused a physical, visceral reaction every time it’s mentioned? For me, that movie was Inglorious Basterds, directed by Quentin Tarantino (who has the chin of Jay Leno but has replaced family-friendly humor for a penchant for racial slurs and a mistaken belief violence equals art). I watched the oh-so-cleverly misspelled Tarantino’s love-letter to himself six years ago when it took the movie-going public (i.e., men between the ages of 17-35) by storm and hated all 153 tortious minutes. As a favor to Chris, I promised to repeat viewing to see if my opinion had changed. 

I couldn’t make it past the opening credits.

From the second the 1940’s western music (how artsy) warbled over the hand-scribbled title cards (so original) it brought back every horrifying moment of that wasted afternoon in 2009. From the painfully long opening scene where Christoph Waltz drinks milk before massacring some hiding Jews to the completely unnecessary detour where Waltz talks about strudel for 10 minutes, it all came flooding back like a long-repressed nightmare. Basterds (it never gets old), like every other Tarantino film, suffers from the over-inflated ego of the wannabe auteur from behind the camera. Where story, characters, themes and common decency are swept aside in order to show how clever the director is. And for the record, I fail to see how long, meandering dialogue scenes intercut with scenes of violence so grotesque it would make the creepy guy from Saw say “take it down a notch” qualifies as innovative filmmaking. It’s the artistic equivalent of doing your taxes and getting punched in the gut every 15 minutes except it gets Tarantino Oscars and gives Harvey Weinstein heart palpitations. 

But where such cinematic self-aggrandizing is a mild annoyance in Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs, it becomes far more offensive in a movie about World War II. From 1939-1945, anywhere from 50-80 million people died as a direct result of WWII which, at the time, was around 3% of the world’s population. Many of those killed were civilians. Women, children, and the elderly who had committed no crime other than being of a certain nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation. It was the greatest single source of human misery in recorded history. So what does our emotionally-stunted Tarantino do? He uses this miserable backdrop as his playground, changing history in order to play out his bizarre fantasies. It takes a special kind of narcissist to think you’re the guy who can make a movie where Hitler is killed, the good guys win and we all go home. I’m frankly shocked he didn’t make a pilgrimage to Israel with the expectation that he should be thanked for making everything all better. 

That’s not to say any WWII movie must be made with utmost reverence and pin-point historical accuracy. Charlie Chaplin’s "The Great Dictator” is a perfect example of how humor can be used to give insightful, meaningful commentary. The difference here is that Chaplin used Hitler and the Nazis to satirize the Axis Powers and comment on the danger nationalism can pose generally. What Tarantino did in Basterds, and what he always does in his movies, is use the film to highlight his own perceived brilliance.  

Thankfully Tarantino’s delusional belief that he can go back and remedy historical horrors is a one-time thing. I mean, can you imagine if he tried to do it again? Like with, say, slavery? And wrote a script where he used the n-word 113 times? That would be just crazy.