Inglorious Bastards

Tarantino is one of those directors whose work generally interests me, even if I can't stand to listen to him outside of his works. His movies are generally worth at least one watch on the simple basis that, no matter the genre, you never really know what is going to happen. Generally speaking there are very few surprises left in movies, but Tarantino is still able to routinely craft stories with unexpected twists and turns. You never really know who will live, who will die and who will shoot a random person completely by accident. His characters tend to not die nobly... they just die, often after very bloody, very short battles. He also has a knack for writing some of the finest dialogue you'll find -- which makes his inability to speak coherently outside of his movies all the more perplexing (a trait also shared by a one J.K. Rowling, incidentally).

His latest film, Inglorious Bastards, takes Tarantino out of his gangster lineage -- although not far -- and into Nazi-occupied France. A band of pissed off Jewish-American soldiers, led by Brad Pitt, is dropped behind enemy lines and wrecks unholy havoc on the Nazis. Pitt is an actor who, despite my better judgment, has actually grown on me over the years -- ever since I saw him in Fight Club and Snatch. He works best in quirky roles, and this is about as quirky as they come this side of Guy Ritchie.

Like most Tarantino movies, though, the real star is the villain -- in this case Christopher Waltz as Hans Landa, an SS officer. He gets most of the best lines, and his delivery is so silky perfect that you can't stop loving and hating him all at the same time. He is very much the calm, sophisticated predator who traps his opponents before they even know that they're in a fight. It is brilliantly done, and his monologue about rats and squirrels is one of the best in the movie (just a few steps down from Carradine's Superman monologue in Kill Bill).

My major complaint with Bastards, as it is with most Tarantino films, is that he is in dire need of an editor willing to slice away the run time. Two hours and thirty minutes is a long time to be sitting in a theater doing nothing, even for a very good movie. This is not a complain I level strictly at Tarantino, of course, as I can name several other directors off hand who suffer from the same affliction, but with Taratino it's a bit more pronounces since he does such a good job of building details through reaction rather than action (for instance, we only ever see the Bastards at work once or twice, but we know from the German reactions just how effective their campaign has been).

There's also the rather strange throwbacks he tosses into his movies -- one of the Bastards gets an introduction with giant, 70's groovy-stylized yellow text across the entire screen. For certain projects, like Kill Bill and Grindhouse, this works perfectly, for Bastards it's just strange. I know he's doing it as a mock tribute to the films of yester-year, but there's a time and place for them -- I honestly don't think Bastards was one of those times or places.

Ultimately those are minor things compared to all the things that he does right in his movies. Inglorious Bastards is fun, quirky, and it provides you with what it claims on the label: Jewish soldiers getting revenge against the Nazis. Don't go looking for brutally accurate historical details, since Tarantino gleefully tosses the history books out the windows and just does what he wants. There are enough fact-based (or revisionist fact-based, if you prefer) movies set in World War 2 out there... it is sometimes nice to see a writer just do his own thing every once in a while.

You might have noticed that I refer to the movie as Inglorious Bastards, when the title is officially Inglourious Basterds. The reason for this is simple: when he was asked by a reporter about the misspelling in the title, Tarantino's reply was "Here's the thing. I'm never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to explain it would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place." As far as I'm concerned that's a bloody moronic thing to say (see my first paragraph), and is frankly kind of insulting. On David Letterman he admitted he had no purpose to it except to make people wonder about it. I'm fine with artists who ask "what does it say to you?" so long as they have a clearly defined idea of what it means to them; in this case, though, it's very much a situation of him being a prat and then claiming it's artistry. Please, Mr. Tarantino, keep making your movies, but keep your yap shut while you're making them.