Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is filled with vicious Nazis, British spies, American commandos and French collaborators all deceiving and destroying one another in occupied Paris. But it’s not a movie about the war. It’s a movie about war movies.
Of course, for some film fans, that’ll be evident from the onset. The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 WWII film. In Tarantino’s version, a small group of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine terrorizes Nazi soldiers in Occupied France, performing shocking acts of savagery and corpse mutilations. How close they come to war crimes is unclear because, in a very un-Tarantino manner, he shows little more than a few scalpings that earn Aldo the nickname “Apache” from the Germans and one execution by a baseball bat.
But is it any good? Well, it’s a QT film: a lot of the time, that can break up people into two distinctly diverse groupings. Of course, those people either love anything done by him or hate anything done by him. Now, for everyone else, the question still remains about the quality of the movie.
Guess I’m going to show some of my own “basterd” behavior and make you hit the jump to find out that answer. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Inglourious Basterds’