MetaChat - So! I saw Inglorious Basterds

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29 August 2009

So! I saw Inglorious Basterds Short version: I liked it. Long version has SPOILERS

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If nothing else, it's damn ballsy to start your supposed-action movie with 25 minutes of tense dialogue in French. The reviewers are all over the place, and I don't really get it. It's too meta-movie? Dude, that's the point. Qualms about Alternate-History Nazi-Killing? Dude, that's the point, Nazis are the one people it's totally okay to kill. They even made a point that it was the top brass being slaughtered. It's too long? Not for me, even the hated tavern scene flew by (okay, that could have used some cutting, but SO TENSE).

Whoever is doing Tarantino's cinematography needs a medal cause this was the best looking I saw all year. The. Red. Dress. The David Bowie. The movie being projected onto the smoke of the burning theater. The sound design! This was big movie making about movies and that tickles all my bones. After Kill Bill, Tarantino seems to have found this awesome tone that's someplace between comic books and opera, being Big and Arty About Pop Culture without being draggy or pompous about it. The Venture Brothers kinda have that tone also but more jokey.

Long story short, I loved it, cause there is clearly so much love in the movie for the style and the movies it is drawing from. Passion makes things better! I'm a sucker for Movies that take place In The Movies and this one has people being shot to death in a projection booth but no one notices cause the shots line up with the war movie being shown. If ballet is camp about love and Movies are camp about drama, then that my friends is taking pulp and camp and racking it up to Art, balls out.

Also, the S.S Officer? How can you be arch, courtly, absurd, jokey, and totally fucking scary all at once? Best movie villain in a long time.

post by: The Whelk at: 00:13 | 9 comments

Huh, I really didn't like it, although I noticed much of what you did. I guess to me it is too much Tarentino showing us that he can make this kind of movie and do this kind of thing in a movie, and I spent too much of it going "Wow, yeah, he saw those same movies in the 1970s that I did."

So the meta aspect was a kind of deal breaker for me.

posted by Meatbomb 29 August | 01:37

I really liked it too, for a lot of the same reasons you mentioned.

posted by unsurprising 29 August | 02:06

Yes to everything you said, but I gotta stress his stealing the theme song to "Cat People" for one of his most dramatic moments is one of ballsiest moves he has ever pulled.

posted by Ardiril 29 August | 03:10

Oh, that was the David Bowie tie-in? Sweet. This is on my to-see list, but I may have to wait for video because I don't know if I could sit in a theater for that long right now (sprained back).

posted by Doohickie 29 August | 12:44

You could have cut Brad Pitt and the rest of the Basterds entirely out of the movie and lost nothing at all. I loved the opening scene and the restaurant scene and all the film-related stuff, but...without backstory or character development, I missed the whole point of the Basterds.

posted by ColdChef 30 August | 13:36

Also: Mike Myers? Awesome.

posted by ColdChef 30 August | 13:37

It did feel a bit like two different movies loosely connected by settling, but without the Basterds we wouldn't have the S.S officer literally bursting out laughing at their horrible, ham-fisted attempts to be spies.

posted by The Whelk 30 August | 18:50

Also, the choking, and the playful, sadistic cat and mouse before that. God, that scene is just haunting, it really got how *hard* it is to strangle someone. gah! Christoph Waltz just owns the movie. Brad Pitt was pitch perfect in the *too far one way would be parody, too far the other would be camp* but Waltz just dominates any scene he's in. He made an absurd character real, and fucking scary. Screen Presence! Mélanie Laurent had the same Old Hollywood attitude, faces you just want to look at forever. See the "Cat People" scene when her black veil slowly comes down.

"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!"

posted by The Whelk 30 August | 22:33

Or, another way *god don't let me talk about movies I will talk all night*, my BF left the theatre saying "That was a very satisfying experience."

posted by The Whelk 30 August | 22:37

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