Inglorious Bastards

[seriousfic]

So I watched Inglorious Bastards and I’ve been digesting it for a few days and to be honest, it’s a pretty disappointing product. It’s well-executed, but the plotting is just… way off. You’d think after the panning Death Proof got (and I know some of you probably liked it, but let’s face it, you fast-forward to Zoë Bell when you watch the DVD), he’d go back to the drawing board determined to be less self-indulgent and talky. But if anyone, Inglorious Bastards is more talky and self-indulgent then his other stuff.

There are just way more scenes of people talking about doing stuff than people doing stuff. And I know that’s kind of Tarantino’s thing, but seriously, way overboard on the talking. Even Death Proof—it had a lot of build-up, but then it had that amazing car chase at the end. Inglorious Bastards has about a minute of Nazi-killing action, tops.

You get things like Aldo Raines talking about how they’re going to kill a bunch of Nazis, then you only see one scene of that. Then there’s this long scene where a British movie critic talks about how he’s going to parachute into Nazi-occupied France and meet up with the Bastards, and they immediately cut to him in the bar doing his chat with the Bastards.

Now, admittedly, Tarantino does infuse these talking scenes with a lot of tension and suspense, but even that has a limit. Which is that pretty much all the time, they cut away from the Bastards to show this Jewish woman named Shoshana who is hiding out in France and gets mixed up with the Nazis. And you kind of tolerate it because you think, hey, this must be building up to something. It’s not. At all. You could cut away her entire half of the movie and it would not affect the story one bit. And let’s face it, she’s just not as much fun to spend time with as Brad Pitt and Eli Roth and their kooky Nazi-killing Jews. At least Reservoir Dogs was ABOUT the Reservoir Dogs.

To get into spoilers, the endgame of this entire Shoshana plotline is that she locks all the Nazis in her theater and then burns it down while the projection booth plays a movie of her saying, pretty much, “neiner neiner neiner, I’m a Jew, enjoy my fiery revenge.” Which, since the premise is that it’s a COMMANDO TEAM of Jewish-American soldiers going into Nazi territory and killing Germans, did we really need to spell it out? Do we really need for Hitler to be blown up AND shot AND burnt to death?

And her plotline takes so much time away from the Bastards that it’s like you’ve barely spent any time with them. It’s like Tarantino takes a few minutes to introduce one of the cool Bastards, then he gets killed, and it ends up having no emotional impact on you because you never spent any time with him. Because you were spending all your time with Shoshana, who… doesn’t really have any personality. She hates Nazis and wants to get revenge for her family’s death. That’s it. There’s no real deeper insight into her. She’s one of the least memorable Tarantino characters I’ve ever seen and she’s almost the film’s protagonist. Just a major, major misfire there.

Another thing that grated was that Tarantino makes some motions towards critiquing the Bastards. They’re all war criminals and torturers, which you know from the premise, but hey, they’re killing Nazis, who cares? And the movie makes a stab at subverting that by dropping a “dead Americans” movie in the middle of the “dead Nazi” movie and by making some of the Nazis sympathetic, but it doesn’t really amount to anything. By the end, the film is plainly cheering the Bastards on (they KILL HITLER!), so it comes off as insincere as a “don’t steal!” message at the end of Reservoir Dogs. Yes, we know, it’s pulp, you don’t have to excuse it. To me, it almost comes off like Tarantino is covering his ass because, in the current political climate, you can’t make a movie about a bunch of US soldiers maiming their enemies and not have it come off a little… Jack Bauer.

So I feel we all would’ve been better off if instead of trying to quantify his ‘men on a mission’ war movie and apologize for it and place it in a longer context and say “hey, Holocaust victims are the real heroes” (or whatever the hell the point was of the Shoshana boredom, because that is going to lose so much replay value), he had just made a movie about the Inglorious Bastards.

Comments

[severefun.livejournal.com]

That's weird, I'd have figured a huge film buff like you would have zeroed in all all the movie magic/public perception/sense of identity stuff going on with the Shoshanna half of the movie. I mean, Tarantino almost never makes a pure shootin' and 'sploding movie (I think From Dusk Til Dawn is as close as he's come), his characters always have some kind of inner turmoil or conflict of interest driving them on. The Basterds are not complicated dudes-- they're practically a deus ex machina. Shosanna and Landa were clearly the real main characters-- they're the ones the movie begins with!

I also didn't think the movie was sending a super mixed message-- yeah, obviously the Nazis were evil (which doesn't preclude them from being human, or even charming, like the guys in the bar, or Wilhelm, or even Landa). Killing them was not an unforgivable sin. But just killing Nazis and being done with it is different from sinking to their level and becoming torturers. It's kind of funny that you're disappointed that a movie called Inglorious Bastards (more or less) actually starred a bunch of bastards who didn't cover themselves in glory.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

I got that the Shoshana half of the film was where the subtext lived, but it didn't really amount to anything for me. He should've either gone all the way and developed that idea, or gone the other way and done something with the Bastards. Who aren't deus ex machina, as deus ex machinas at least affect the plot. It almost felt as though Tarantino knew he couldn't get butts in seats with a Jewish revenge flick, so he came up with this elaborate subplot about the Bastards and phoned it in so he could trick people into theaters for the Shoshana show. And that kind of bait and switch works with From Dusk Til Dawn, because the heist movie and the vampire shoot 'em up movie are at least in the same family. But merging the action-comedy of the Bastards with this tragic suspense story drama of Shoshana just kind of doubly underwhelms. I didn't feel anything when either Shoshana or Hugo died.

And I wouldn't have a problem if the movie either said "Screw it, they're Nazis, who cares if we scalp them?" or "Hey, it's even wrong to scalp a Nazi," but the movie tried to have it both ways and like with the Shoshana/Bastards split, it just ended up being nothing. Like, it's a touch interesting that all the Bastards really end up accomplishing is giving Landa immunity for his crimes, but if the message is that the Bastards are, in the end, ineffectual, why does the movie spend so much time cheering for them? Why are they portrayed as just as effective as Shoshana? As far as accusations against war criminals go, "they're redundant" isn't too damning.

The_Lurker

[(Anonymous)]

Didn't care for the film that much myself. Too much dialog that go on and on and on trying to be cool and hip and stuff. Movies being a visual medium what the hell happened to show don't tell? Or you know that thing they used to call acting.