Inglourious Basterds (2009) Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth, and Mélanie Laurent. Continuing out love for this month’s Lamb Movie of the Month, here are my 5 Favorite Things about Inglourious Basterds.
5. This film helped Michael Fassbinder and Christoph Waltz’s careers by launching them into international recognition. Both actors are tremendous and Waltz even walked away with an oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
4. If there is one thing Quentin Tarrantino is great at, it’s immortalizing the characters he’s created. From the slow motion walk of the Resveroir Dogs to the roaring rampage of revenge by the Bride, Quentin adds another character to the roster as Donny Donowitz, The Bear Jew, enters the screen clanking his bat along a decrepit wall. The tangs ring from the brick sending shivers up your spine as this “golem” takes the screen and obliges anyman willing to die for his country.
3. Tarantino films are known for a lot of dialogue. One thing this film does is switch through four languages, rapid-fire Tarantino style, but not once are you putt-off by the subtitles nor are you lost in the story. He’s able to mesh the languages so well that it keeps the audience captivated. The writing is so well done in fact that it garnered not only a Best Screenplay oscar nomination (which I believe he should have won), but a Best Picture oscar nomination as well.
2. Violence. This film is soaked in gritty and sometimes excessive violence but at the end of the day, it’s just badass. It’s never boring or cliché as The Bear Jew and Huggo Stiglitz breathe their own variety of death into this (World-War-Two-Spaghetti-Western-Explotation?) film.
1. Whether you realize this or not, this film is a reminder of the power of film. The climax of the film takes place in a cinema while it showcases a Nazi propaganda film. While the film focuses on a Shoshana’s survival of Nazi-occupied France and the tale of the Inglorious Basterds involvement in Operation Kino, at its core, it’s about the power and influence a film can have over it’s audience; for better or worse.
