Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I knew I was in love with Quentin Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS from the opening sequence… hell, maybe even the opening shot. Whenever it was that I registered that the opening scene to this movie was THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY except instead of Lee Van Cleef riding up to a small adobe house on horseback it was Christoph Waltz riding up to a small French cottage in his Nazi jeep… that’s when I knew I was in for a good time.

I have avoided spoiling this experience for myself, so that may have had something to do with my adoration of this film. I had access to the script, but I’ve read the script to every movie Tarantino has directed since PULP FICTION (and in JACKIE BROWN’s case I read Elmore Leonard’s RUM PUNCH) and this time out I just wanted to go in and let the film be my first exposure to Tarantino’s vision.

It also bears admitting that I’m a sucker for WW2 movies. Even the most standard WW2 flick holds some amount of interest for me just because of the extraordinary moment in time being recreated. There’s never been a real life villain like the Third Reich, there’s never been such a wide and varied war documented from the Pacific to Russia and France, Britain, Germany and the rest of Europe. I love the iconography of this war, both for the heroes, the villains and everybody in-between.

And Tarantino milks that iconography for all it’s worth with a lot of help from his DoP Robert Richardson. There’s nothing like a Tarantino film from a technical standpoint. You can argue his talent as a writer night and day, but you can’t argue that his flicks always look incredible. You can see his film appreciation transcend homage. BASTERDS actually looks and feels like a movie made in the early ‘70s and a well-made one at that, not a cheap exploitation flick.

There has been a lot of talk of the actual Basterds not comprising much of the movie and it is true that Brad Pitt’s team of Nazi-hunting Jews isn’t the whole movie. We also have another Basterd in Melanie Laurent and Tarantino seems to split the movie between her character, a hiding Jew who runs a movie theater, and Pitt’s Basterds, which might seem a little off-balance considering Pitt’s Basterds are a good dozen plus characters and Laurent is just one.

Neither are aware of the other, but they both hatch the same plan… to kill every high ranking Nazi in the theater during the world premiere of NATION’S PRIDE, a propaganda film surrounding a sniper named Fredrick Zoller who killed over a hundred Allied troops from his sniper’s nest.

Daniel Bruhl plays Zoller as a complex man, which is the key to this film. As ridiculous as the premise, as much as this film goes into an alternate history timeline, there’s a complexity and realism to the characters. Zoller is kind of embarrassed by his celebrity, but at the same time milks it, trying to impress the hot girl who runs the local cinema. Who could blame him? Laurent is a goddess.

And on Laurent’s part she is attracted to this man who represents everything she hates. It was a man like him who murdered her family. Now I’m making an assumption here. Her character never really has a romantic scene with Zoller, but the way Laurent plays it that’s the impression I got.

More surface level are Pitt’s Aldo Raine (obviously a play on the name of actor Aldo Ray) and Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa (The Jew Hunter), but that’s exactly as it should be. They both play the hell out of their ridiculous characters taking them beyond a sort of parody. Waltz especially knocks it out of the park. His opening interrogation scene is a work of art… how he can play the good guy, the likable guy, while getting everything he wants out of his subject and then, like a switch is flipped, he can be a cold blooded murderer.

I was like many of you out there when I first saw the trailer. I didn’t really get Pitt’s accent, but I have to say that I love the choice. When you see the movie you’ll realize there’s a reason for it, a story reason, and that it pays off. But even if it didn’t the accent still makes Pitt’s Aldo Raine a kind of bigger than life legend, which is what his character needs to be for the Nazis he’s hunting.

Would I have liked to see a whole movie that was just Pitt’s Basterds in a Men-On-A-Mission Dirty Dozen-ish scenario from beginning to end? Yeah, I’d love that. Til Schweiger’s quiet Nazi-killing badass is great, but doesn’t quite get the chance to establish himself before we’re done with the movie. Eli Roth’s Donny Donowitz is funny and psychotic. I’d like to see more of them both.

But that’s not the story told here and I wouldn’t want to give up Laurent’s storyline, which is the meat of the movie.

I also have to put in a special mention of Diane Kruger’s double-agent character, famous German actress Bridget von Hammersmark. There’s a big scene introducing her character smack dab in the middle of the movie that is one of my favorites of the film, although I predict it will be one that turns a few people off as it feels like a 20 minute island unto itself in the middle of the flick.

I was most happy that the film didn’t feel rushed despite the crazy time-table Tarantino imposed on himself. A lot of that has to do with the amount of time BASTERDS has been gestating for him, I think. He still had time to hone the script, story and characters.

And yes, I’m extremely happy I didn’t read the script going into this even though I’ve heard it changed drastically. I can go into that now with my first impression being the film itself.

Writing this up has given me an itch to see the flick again. Thankfully I timed this well as I’m mere hours away from the Alamo’s Cinemapocalypse, a dusk till dawn movie marathon which kicks off with Tarantino in person presenting INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS then following that up with two vintage flicks that were influences on his Basterds… then we go until morning under the crazy guidance of the Alamo Drafthouse programmers. Gonna be a great night and I can’t wait to rewatch the movie.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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