Inglourious Basterds - No, this is not spelled incorrectly
dws1982 wrote:If I were one of the Weinstein's, I don't think I'd be wanting to bank on this movie to save my company. I think I'd be more willing to bank on Rob Zombie's upcoming horror film. Not sure what this will mean for Nine.
Nine will be fine; the amount of talent in such a prestige pic could be about as successful as Chicago if opened wide sooner than later. Zombie's H2 might be slightly less successful than the intial reboot, mostly due to negative reception from most horror fans about the origin story and the depiction of Michael in general. Inglorious Basterds will probably be a moderate hit that will do well into September. The only films it really has to fight off, at least in the demographic Tarantino fans are stereotypically in, are H2 and The Final Destination. I think they're investing in the right flick.
Edited By Zahveed on 1244648780
"It's the least most of us can do, but less of us will do more."
The Weinstein Company has handed home video rights off to Universal (who is the international distributor). So Universal distributes it on DVD and Blu-Ray, which is good for fans, since they always do right by their movies on Blu-Ray and DVD.
The Weinstein Ship is sinking, but they're trying to save Inglorious Basterds (although they're pressuring Tarantino to cut 40 minutes) before going under. To do so, they're throwing almost all of the other cargo overboard, by pushing back most of their upcoming release schedule indefinitely. Essentially, they're putting all of their eggs in the Tarantino basket.
If I were one of the Weinstein's, I don't think I'd be wanting to bank on this movie to save my company. I think I'd be more willing to bank on Rob Zombie's upcoming horror film. Not sure what this will mean for Nine.
Edited By dws1982 on 1244644057
The Weinstein Ship is sinking, but they're trying to save Inglorious Basterds (although they're pressuring Tarantino to cut 40 minutes) before going under. To do so, they're throwing almost all of the other cargo overboard, by pushing back most of their upcoming release schedule indefinitely. Essentially, they're putting all of their eggs in the Tarantino basket.
If I were one of the Weinstein's, I don't think I'd be wanting to bank on this movie to save my company. I think I'd be more willing to bank on Rob Zombie's upcoming horror film. Not sure what this will mean for Nine.
Edited By dws1982 on 1244644057
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Inglourious Basterds
(U.S. - Germany)
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
"Inglourious Basterds" is a violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating war saga invests a long-simmering revenge plot with reworkings of innumerable genre conventions, but only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through, after which it's off to the races. By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director. Several explosive scenes and the names of Tarantino and topliner Brad Pitt promise brawny commercial prospects, especially internationally, as the preponderance of subtitled dialogue might put off a certain slice of the prospective domestic audience.
In no meaningful way based upon Enzo G. Castellari's schlock 1978 Italian WWII programmer of the same title, Tarantino's deliberately misspelled namesake has been in the oven for many years, initially as a would-be "The Dirty Dozen"-style bad boys "mission" adventure and until very recently as a massive miniseries-length epic spanning the entire war. The narrow mission focus has prevailed in the end, but not in the way that might have been expected, as the group of Jewish avengers led by Pitt's Tennessee Lt. Aldo Raine rep only one component of a vast ensemble that feeds into a Nazi-foiling plot only a hardcore film buff could have dreamed up.
In fact, the best characters are non-Yanks, all of whom speak their own languages and one or two others to boot. But this commendable gesture toward linguistic accuracy is virtually the only realistic aspect of the picture, which otherwise soars on its flights of fancy and deliberate anachronisms -- the use of David Bowie's "Putting Out the Fire" at a crucial point is particularly inispired -- and flattens out only when Tarantino gets too carried away with over-elaborated dialogue scenes, a problem that could easily be addressed with some slight trimming between now and the skedded August opening.
Never less than enjoyable and more than that in the second half, "Basterds" is divided into five "chapters," the first being "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France." Wording not only reflects the Sergio Leone-style nature of the opening scene, in which notorious Nazi "Jew Hunter" Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a farmhouse to ferret out a hidden Jewish family, but honestly reflects the fantastical nature of the narrative to come.
The long discussion in which Landa engages the nervous farmer establishes, in slightly protracted fashion, Landa's erudition and his relaxed, self-amused way of leading up to the lethal moment. It also provides Waltz, a good-looking 40ish actor who carries off dialogue in four languages with consummate ease, with an early chance to claim the picture as his own, which he does.
One member of the Jewish family, young Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), escapes the massacre, only to surface three years later, in 1944, as the owner of a cinema in occupied Paris. Now a very quickly grown-up blonde, Shosanna endures the unwelcome advances of Nazi war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who calls himself "the German Sgt. York" for his exploits at taking out dozens of Allied soldierssinglehandedly, a feat celebrated in a new German movie, "Nation's Pride," starring Zoller himself.
In short order, Shosanna is compelled to tolerate the company of the infamous Dr. Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) as well that of Landa, who informs her at length that the Nazis want to take over her theater to hold the premiere of Zoller's film, an event to be attended by Nazidom's elite. As difficult as it is for Shosanna to bear these monsters, the event does provide the long-suffering woman the opportunity she's been waiting for to strike back at her family's killer and other Nazis in the bargain.
A notable continuity issue crops up here, as Shosanna is told the gala screening is to be held that very evening. In the next chapter, "Operation Kino," a British commando leader (and former film critic), Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), is told by a general (Mike Myers, amusing and greatly made-over) that the opening will take place three days hence. Quite apart from Shosanna's own plot, the Brits, in league with the Basterds, plan to infiltrate the premiere courtesy of their invaluable secret agent, beauteous German leading lady Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).
Once this mission is set in motion, pic clicks confidently on all cylinders. Before this point, some scenes feel overly attenuated; the leisurely exchange between Landa and Shosanna in a Paris restaurant features needlessly repetitious dialogue has a deadened, airless quality due to the almost total absence of ambient sound and surrounding activity. The Basterds' first appearance, in which they gleefully display their grisly Nazi-scalping technique and which features much twangy, down-home speechifying by Pitt, also proves less amusing than was no doubt intended.
By contrast, a long tavern sequence in which the group of reveling spies -- including Bridget, Hicox, Til Schweiger's renegade German and Gedeon Burkhard's undercover corporal -- party on until coming under the suspicion of a Gestapo officer (August Diehl, excellent), is vintage Tarantino, brimming with delicious dialogue, wonderful linguistic mixing, lively group interplay and tension slowly built to a convulsive climax. Scene vaults the picture straight into its grand climax, in which all the top Nazis, including Goebbels, Goerring and, crazily enough, Hitler himself, conveniently place themselves under one roof awaiting the madly inventive fate devised for them by Shosanna.
While World War II has probably inspired as much fiction as any other single topic in film history, "Inglourious Basterds" is one of the few to have brazenly altered history to such an extent. Because he carefully sets up the approach at the outset, as well as through his sense of style, Tarantino gets away with it, and is in a position to fine-tune the picture before locking a final cut. Other scenes ripe for pruning are all those featuring Hitler prior to the grand finale, interludes that come off as cartoony, unconvincing and unnecessary.
In a true ensemble picture, Waltz stands head and shoulders above the rest with a lusty performance in the juiciest role. Laurent is appealingly thoughtful and observant as the young lady awaiting her chance, Fassbender cuts a dashing figure, speaks with a wonderfully clipped accent and rather resembles Daniel Day-Lewis here, and Kruger is far more engaging and animated than she's heretofore been in her big international pictures. Pitt clearly enjoys rolling his former moonshine runner's accent around in his mouth, although his performance is overly defined by constantly jutting jaw and furrowed brow. Inferring a measure of self-evaluation by Tarantino, some viewers will take exception to the film's final line, in which Aldo admires his climactic bit of brutal handiwork: "I think this just might be my masterpiece."
Shot almost entirely at Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin, with brief location work in Paris, pic features terrific production values across the boards, from David Wasco's rich production design and Anna Sheppard's fine costumes to Robert Richardson's clear-eyed, beautifully framed lensing and Sally Menke's sharply timed editing. Tarantino eschews a traditional score in favor of a crazy stew of source music, ranging eclectically from Dimitri Tiomkin's "The Green Leaves of Summer" from "The Alamo" and some Mike Curb motorcycle movie music to eight selections from the Ennio Morricone library.
Basterd Eli Roth shot the black-and-white battle footage from the "Nation's Pride" film-within-a-film, which features glimpses of original "Inglorious Bastards" star Bo Swenson.
(U.S. - Germany)
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety
"Inglourious Basterds" is a violent fairy tale, an increasingly entertaining fantasia in which the history of World War II is wildly reimagined so that the cinema can play the decisive role in destroying the Third Reich. Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating war saga invests a long-simmering revenge plot with reworkings of innumerable genre conventions, but only fully finds its tonal footing about halfway through, after which it's off to the races. By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director. Several explosive scenes and the names of Tarantino and topliner Brad Pitt promise brawny commercial prospects, especially internationally, as the preponderance of subtitled dialogue might put off a certain slice of the prospective domestic audience.
In no meaningful way based upon Enzo G. Castellari's schlock 1978 Italian WWII programmer of the same title, Tarantino's deliberately misspelled namesake has been in the oven for many years, initially as a would-be "The Dirty Dozen"-style bad boys "mission" adventure and until very recently as a massive miniseries-length epic spanning the entire war. The narrow mission focus has prevailed in the end, but not in the way that might have been expected, as the group of Jewish avengers led by Pitt's Tennessee Lt. Aldo Raine rep only one component of a vast ensemble that feeds into a Nazi-foiling plot only a hardcore film buff could have dreamed up.
In fact, the best characters are non-Yanks, all of whom speak their own languages and one or two others to boot. But this commendable gesture toward linguistic accuracy is virtually the only realistic aspect of the picture, which otherwise soars on its flights of fancy and deliberate anachronisms -- the use of David Bowie's "Putting Out the Fire" at a crucial point is particularly inispired -- and flattens out only when Tarantino gets too carried away with over-elaborated dialogue scenes, a problem that could easily be addressed with some slight trimming between now and the skedded August opening.
Never less than enjoyable and more than that in the second half, "Basterds" is divided into five "chapters," the first being "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France." Wording not only reflects the Sergio Leone-style nature of the opening scene, in which notorious Nazi "Jew Hunter" Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a farmhouse to ferret out a hidden Jewish family, but honestly reflects the fantastical nature of the narrative to come.
The long discussion in which Landa engages the nervous farmer establishes, in slightly protracted fashion, Landa's erudition and his relaxed, self-amused way of leading up to the lethal moment. It also provides Waltz, a good-looking 40ish actor who carries off dialogue in four languages with consummate ease, with an early chance to claim the picture as his own, which he does.
One member of the Jewish family, young Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), escapes the massacre, only to surface three years later, in 1944, as the owner of a cinema in occupied Paris. Now a very quickly grown-up blonde, Shosanna endures the unwelcome advances of Nazi war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who calls himself "the German Sgt. York" for his exploits at taking out dozens of Allied soldierssinglehandedly, a feat celebrated in a new German movie, "Nation's Pride," starring Zoller himself.
In short order, Shosanna is compelled to tolerate the company of the infamous Dr. Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) as well that of Landa, who informs her at length that the Nazis want to take over her theater to hold the premiere of Zoller's film, an event to be attended by Nazidom's elite. As difficult as it is for Shosanna to bear these monsters, the event does provide the long-suffering woman the opportunity she's been waiting for to strike back at her family's killer and other Nazis in the bargain.
A notable continuity issue crops up here, as Shosanna is told the gala screening is to be held that very evening. In the next chapter, "Operation Kino," a British commando leader (and former film critic), Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), is told by a general (Mike Myers, amusing and greatly made-over) that the opening will take place three days hence. Quite apart from Shosanna's own plot, the Brits, in league with the Basterds, plan to infiltrate the premiere courtesy of their invaluable secret agent, beauteous German leading lady Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).
Once this mission is set in motion, pic clicks confidently on all cylinders. Before this point, some scenes feel overly attenuated; the leisurely exchange between Landa and Shosanna in a Paris restaurant features needlessly repetitious dialogue has a deadened, airless quality due to the almost total absence of ambient sound and surrounding activity. The Basterds' first appearance, in which they gleefully display their grisly Nazi-scalping technique and which features much twangy, down-home speechifying by Pitt, also proves less amusing than was no doubt intended.
By contrast, a long tavern sequence in which the group of reveling spies -- including Bridget, Hicox, Til Schweiger's renegade German and Gedeon Burkhard's undercover corporal -- party on until coming under the suspicion of a Gestapo officer (August Diehl, excellent), is vintage Tarantino, brimming with delicious dialogue, wonderful linguistic mixing, lively group interplay and tension slowly built to a convulsive climax. Scene vaults the picture straight into its grand climax, in which all the top Nazis, including Goebbels, Goerring and, crazily enough, Hitler himself, conveniently place themselves under one roof awaiting the madly inventive fate devised for them by Shosanna.
While World War II has probably inspired as much fiction as any other single topic in film history, "Inglourious Basterds" is one of the few to have brazenly altered history to such an extent. Because he carefully sets up the approach at the outset, as well as through his sense of style, Tarantino gets away with it, and is in a position to fine-tune the picture before locking a final cut. Other scenes ripe for pruning are all those featuring Hitler prior to the grand finale, interludes that come off as cartoony, unconvincing and unnecessary.
In a true ensemble picture, Waltz stands head and shoulders above the rest with a lusty performance in the juiciest role. Laurent is appealingly thoughtful and observant as the young lady awaiting her chance, Fassbender cuts a dashing figure, speaks with a wonderfully clipped accent and rather resembles Daniel Day-Lewis here, and Kruger is far more engaging and animated than she's heretofore been in her big international pictures. Pitt clearly enjoys rolling his former moonshine runner's accent around in his mouth, although his performance is overly defined by constantly jutting jaw and furrowed brow. Inferring a measure of self-evaluation by Tarantino, some viewers will take exception to the film's final line, in which Aldo admires his climactic bit of brutal handiwork: "I think this just might be my masterpiece."
Shot almost entirely at Babelsberg Studio outside Berlin, with brief location work in Paris, pic features terrific production values across the boards, from David Wasco's rich production design and Anna Sheppard's fine costumes to Robert Richardson's clear-eyed, beautifully framed lensing and Sally Menke's sharply timed editing. Tarantino eschews a traditional score in favor of a crazy stew of source music, ranging eclectically from Dimitri Tiomkin's "The Green Leaves of Summer" from "The Alamo" and some Mike Curb motorcycle movie music to eight selections from the Ennio Morricone library.
Basterd Eli Roth shot the black-and-white battle footage from the "Nation's Pride" film-within-a-film, which features glimpses of original "Inglorious Bastards" star Bo Swenson.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
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Falling Short of Tarantino’s Own High Bar, “Inglorious” Goes Bubblegum
by Eric Kohn
indieWire
A scene from Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds." Image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.Given what the world expects from Quentin Tarantino - the man, the myth, the pastiche-driven movie machine - his latest feature, “Inglorious Basterds,” stands out for its seemingly low ambition. Talked about for years by the filmmaker as his epic “guys-on-a-mission” movie, the final product, unveiled this morning in Cannes, certainly meets those standards. The story of Nazi-hunting Jewish soldiers delivers on the colorful brand of unserious entertainment implied by the plot, but no matter how much extreme contextualization and heavily stylized techniques Tarantino introduced to the production, “Inglorious Basterds” feels like a bubblegum sidedish to the heavy dinner plate of his career. While not intentionally a rudimentary project, it automatically becomes one by the limits of its design.
In the opening scene, Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a house in the French countryside, where he interrogates a man about hiding Jews in his basement. The sequence culminates with the Nazis discovering the family hidden beneath the floorboards, killing all of them except for a young woman named Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), who dashes into the forest. Except that’s not really the opening scene, because the first image of “Basterds” arrives on the heels of credits that beg to be considered as the true narrative introduction. Written in block letter aping the title cards associated with Sergio Leone Westerns, while the jangly soundtrack follows suit, they set the stage for the barrage of genre references to follow. Despite a World War II setting, “Inglorious Basterds” mainly feels like an homage to crime and thriller movies, using Nazis as cardboard villains in a facile manner akin to the “Indiana Jones” franchise.
As the story shoots forward, building into an espionage drama, Tarantino churns out the most conventional accomplishment of his career, “Jackie Brown” included. Sure, you can tear apart the layers of references to countless genres from multiple eras, but not with the same relish allowed by “Kill Bill” or “Pulp Fiction,” where reading into the text and digging its natural flow were not mutually exclusive.
That’s hardly the case here. To watch “Basterds” without considering Tarantino’s implementation of enyclopedic movie knowledge makes it into a breezy, insignificant experience. After introducing Shoshanna’s plight, Tarantino shifts to the antics of the “basterds,” a group of Jewish soldiers led by the fierce Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Merrily capturing Nazis, gleefully bashing their skulls and pocketing the scalps, the basterds provide the makings of a typical revenge fantasy. Tarantino wittily cast scrawny Jewish men (“Hostel” director Eli Roth and “The Office” star B.J. Novak among them) as the movie’s principle musclemen, but that subtly ironic joke never reaches its potential.
That’s because “Basterds” isn’t really a jokefest; it’s a talk-fest. Anyone familiar with the Tarantino touch will testify that the director likes to make his characters talk, and talk, and talk - and sometimes so that it ends up absorbing the spotlight. In “Basterds,” we see the worst side-effects of this tendency, as much of the movie relies on chatter to propel it along the basic trajectory of a spy movie. Shoshanna emerges in the disguise of a non-Jewish theater owner in Paris, where she manages to infiltrate the Nazis and scheme with the basterds to them out.
The ludicrous plot heads straight for a fiery climax that finds our heroes on a straightforward path to killing off Adolph Hitler, Joesph Goebbels and prettty much everyone else at the head of the Third Reich. In an nice bit of self-referential irony, they aim to pull it off at a movie theater while the Nazis view a screening of their own propaganda. So “Basterds” makes viewers watch a movie about killing Nazis in which Nazis watch a movie and get killed. Setting the stage for a slaughterfest, Tarantino wants to craft an old-school entertainment by way of his favorite examples, but the multiple layers prevent it from holding interest from scene to scene. “Basterds” has an arbitrary progression: As Shoshanna plans her glorious retribution, dialogue scenes go on and on, people gets shot, lavish music cues make way for interstitial moments of contemplation, and so on. Get around to it, already.
Despite the injection of content from a variety of directions, “Basterds” lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino’s other efforts, mainly because he can’t seem to tie the whole package together. Why does Samuel L. Jackson suddenly pop up on the soundtrack to narrate a fleeting background of the basterd’s evolution? If the movie pays tribute to Westerns, how come we never get a single man-on-man confronation, the sort of climax that magically concluded “Kill Bill”? The disconnected ingredients don’t mean that the movie lacks the ability to deliver a good time, but simply that it never rises above the sense of a juvenile cinephilic rush job, and everyone knows Tarantino can do better than that.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242830163
by Eric Kohn
indieWire
A scene from Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds." Image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.Given what the world expects from Quentin Tarantino - the man, the myth, the pastiche-driven movie machine - his latest feature, “Inglorious Basterds,” stands out for its seemingly low ambition. Talked about for years by the filmmaker as his epic “guys-on-a-mission” movie, the final product, unveiled this morning in Cannes, certainly meets those standards. The story of Nazi-hunting Jewish soldiers delivers on the colorful brand of unserious entertainment implied by the plot, but no matter how much extreme contextualization and heavily stylized techniques Tarantino introduced to the production, “Inglorious Basterds” feels like a bubblegum sidedish to the heavy dinner plate of his career. While not intentionally a rudimentary project, it automatically becomes one by the limits of its design.
In the opening scene, Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a house in the French countryside, where he interrogates a man about hiding Jews in his basement. The sequence culminates with the Nazis discovering the family hidden beneath the floorboards, killing all of them except for a young woman named Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), who dashes into the forest. Except that’s not really the opening scene, because the first image of “Basterds” arrives on the heels of credits that beg to be considered as the true narrative introduction. Written in block letter aping the title cards associated with Sergio Leone Westerns, while the jangly soundtrack follows suit, they set the stage for the barrage of genre references to follow. Despite a World War II setting, “Inglorious Basterds” mainly feels like an homage to crime and thriller movies, using Nazis as cardboard villains in a facile manner akin to the “Indiana Jones” franchise.
As the story shoots forward, building into an espionage drama, Tarantino churns out the most conventional accomplishment of his career, “Jackie Brown” included. Sure, you can tear apart the layers of references to countless genres from multiple eras, but not with the same relish allowed by “Kill Bill” or “Pulp Fiction,” where reading into the text and digging its natural flow were not mutually exclusive.
That’s hardly the case here. To watch “Basterds” without considering Tarantino’s implementation of enyclopedic movie knowledge makes it into a breezy, insignificant experience. After introducing Shoshanna’s plight, Tarantino shifts to the antics of the “basterds,” a group of Jewish soldiers led by the fierce Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). Merrily capturing Nazis, gleefully bashing their skulls and pocketing the scalps, the basterds provide the makings of a typical revenge fantasy. Tarantino wittily cast scrawny Jewish men (“Hostel” director Eli Roth and “The Office” star B.J. Novak among them) as the movie’s principle musclemen, but that subtly ironic joke never reaches its potential.
That’s because “Basterds” isn’t really a jokefest; it’s a talk-fest. Anyone familiar with the Tarantino touch will testify that the director likes to make his characters talk, and talk, and talk - and sometimes so that it ends up absorbing the spotlight. In “Basterds,” we see the worst side-effects of this tendency, as much of the movie relies on chatter to propel it along the basic trajectory of a spy movie. Shoshanna emerges in the disguise of a non-Jewish theater owner in Paris, where she manages to infiltrate the Nazis and scheme with the basterds to them out.
The ludicrous plot heads straight for a fiery climax that finds our heroes on a straightforward path to killing off Adolph Hitler, Joesph Goebbels and prettty much everyone else at the head of the Third Reich. In an nice bit of self-referential irony, they aim to pull it off at a movie theater while the Nazis view a screening of their own propaganda. So “Basterds” makes viewers watch a movie about killing Nazis in which Nazis watch a movie and get killed. Setting the stage for a slaughterfest, Tarantino wants to craft an old-school entertainment by way of his favorite examples, but the multiple layers prevent it from holding interest from scene to scene. “Basterds” has an arbitrary progression: As Shoshanna plans her glorious retribution, dialogue scenes go on and on, people gets shot, lavish music cues make way for interstitial moments of contemplation, and so on. Get around to it, already.
Despite the injection of content from a variety of directions, “Basterds” lacks the crackly excitement of Tarantino’s other efforts, mainly because he can’t seem to tie the whole package together. Why does Samuel L. Jackson suddenly pop up on the soundtrack to narrate a fleeting background of the basterd’s evolution? If the movie pays tribute to Westerns, how come we never get a single man-on-man confronation, the sort of climax that magically concluded “Kill Bill”? The disconnected ingredients don’t mean that the movie lacks the ability to deliver a good time, but simply that it never rises above the sense of a juvenile cinephilic rush job, and everyone knows Tarantino can do better than that.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242830163
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
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Cannes review: Tarantino's Basterds is an armour-plated turkey
Peter Bradshaw at the Cannes film festival guardian.co.uk
Like the loyal German bourgeoisie in 1945, trying to keep patriotically cheerful despite the distant ominous rumblings of Russian tanks, we Tarantino fans have kept loyally optimistic on the Croisette this week. We ignored the rumourmongers, the alarmists and defeatists, and insisted that the Master would at the last moment fire a devastating V1 rocket of a movie which would lay waste to his, and our, detractors. But today the full catastrophe of his new film arrived like some colossal armour-plated turkey from hell. The city of our hopes is in flames.
Quentin Tarantino's cod-WW2 shlocker about a Jewish-American revenge squad intent on killing Nazis in German-occupied France is awful. It is achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn't funny; it isn't exciting; it isn't a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn't emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that. Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life, with a permanent smirk as if he's had the left side of his jaw injected with cement, and which he must uncomfortably maintain for long scenes on camera without dialogue.
And those all-important movie allusions are entirely without zing, being to stately stuff such as the wartime German UFA studio, GW Pabst etc, for which Tarantino has no feeling, displaying just a solemn Euro-cinephilia that his heart isn't in. The expression on my face in the auditorium as the lights finally went up was like that of the first-night's audience at Springtime for Hitler. Except that there is no one from Dusseldorf called Rolf to cheer us up.
Pitt plays Lt Aldo Raine, the leader of an anti-Nazi commando unit whose avowed mission is to get 100 Kraut scalps apiece; we see the scalpings in full, gruesome detail, yet that figure is entirely forgotten about by the end. Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman whose family were slaughtered by SS Col Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz. She got away and (somehow) attained not only a new identity, but also ownership of a Paris cinema which is to play host to the premiere of Dr Goebbels's latest propaganda movie, in the presence of the Führer himself. Her plan is to incinerate the entire first-night audience by bolting the doors and igniting her vast inflammable stock of nitrate film. Meanwhile Lt Raine has his own plans for killing Hitler at the movie theatre and the Brits get involved too, in the form of suave Michael Fassbender as Archie Hicox, a crack commando making contact with exotic spy Bridget von Hammersmark, played by Diane Kruger.
There are some nice-ish performances, particularly from Fassbender and Waltz, but everything is just so boring. I was hoping for Shosanna at least to get a satisfying revenge on the unspeakable Col Landa. But no. The two Hitler-assassination plots cancel each other out dramatically and the director's moderate reserves of narrative interest are exhausted way before the end. He should perhaps go back to making cheerfully inventive outrageous films like Kill Bill. Because Kill Adolf hasn't worked out.
• Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic
Peter Bradshaw at the Cannes film festival guardian.co.uk
Like the loyal German bourgeoisie in 1945, trying to keep patriotically cheerful despite the distant ominous rumblings of Russian tanks, we Tarantino fans have kept loyally optimistic on the Croisette this week. We ignored the rumourmongers, the alarmists and defeatists, and insisted that the Master would at the last moment fire a devastating V1 rocket of a movie which would lay waste to his, and our, detractors. But today the full catastrophe of his new film arrived like some colossal armour-plated turkey from hell. The city of our hopes is in flames.
Quentin Tarantino's cod-WW2 shlocker about a Jewish-American revenge squad intent on killing Nazis in German-occupied France is awful. It is achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn't funny; it isn't exciting; it isn't a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn't emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that. Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life, with a permanent smirk as if he's had the left side of his jaw injected with cement, and which he must uncomfortably maintain for long scenes on camera without dialogue.
And those all-important movie allusions are entirely without zing, being to stately stuff such as the wartime German UFA studio, GW Pabst etc, for which Tarantino has no feeling, displaying just a solemn Euro-cinephilia that his heart isn't in. The expression on my face in the auditorium as the lights finally went up was like that of the first-night's audience at Springtime for Hitler. Except that there is no one from Dusseldorf called Rolf to cheer us up.
Pitt plays Lt Aldo Raine, the leader of an anti-Nazi commando unit whose avowed mission is to get 100 Kraut scalps apiece; we see the scalpings in full, gruesome detail, yet that figure is entirely forgotten about by the end. Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman whose family were slaughtered by SS Col Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz. She got away and (somehow) attained not only a new identity, but also ownership of a Paris cinema which is to play host to the premiere of Dr Goebbels's latest propaganda movie, in the presence of the Führer himself. Her plan is to incinerate the entire first-night audience by bolting the doors and igniting her vast inflammable stock of nitrate film. Meanwhile Lt Raine has his own plans for killing Hitler at the movie theatre and the Brits get involved too, in the form of suave Michael Fassbender as Archie Hicox, a crack commando making contact with exotic spy Bridget von Hammersmark, played by Diane Kruger.
There are some nice-ish performances, particularly from Fassbender and Waltz, but everything is just so boring. I was hoping for Shosanna at least to get a satisfying revenge on the unspeakable Col Landa. But no. The two Hitler-assassination plots cancel each other out dramatically and the director's moderate reserves of narrative interest are exhausted way before the end. He should perhaps go back to making cheerfully inventive outrageous films like Kill Bill. Because Kill Adolf hasn't worked out.
• Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
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Reviews from Screendaily and Hollywood Reporter. Spoilers included:
Inglourious Basterds
20 May, 2009 | By Mike Goodridge
Screendaily
Dir/scr: Quentin Tarantino. 2009. US/Germany. 154 minutes.
An intermittently-inspired World War II epic which illustrates both Quentin Tarantino’s brilliance and his tendency towards indulgence, Inglourious Basterds is composed of a series of long-running vignettes strung together by a slender story thread. The problem is that no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, and, with some of the scenes running up to half an hour each, the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing.
Above-the-title star Brad Pitt plays the captain of a troupe of Jewish American renegades dubbed the Inglorious Bastards, but Pitt is far from the centre of attention and both French actress Melanie Laurent and German actor Christoph Waltz both have more screen time and juicier roles. That, combined with the fact that most of the film is in French and German, will limit the film’s box office prospects, principally in the subtitle-wary US where The Weinstein Company is opening wide on August 21. A big launch weekend should be guaranteed on the names of Pitt and Tarantino and the strong advance campaign which has been building on the internet, but like the Kill Bill films, it might fall fast in subsequent weeks.
Universal Pictures co-financed the film in return for international where audiences will be more receptive, especially in Europe. Results in Germany are unpredictable. A version of the script was leaked on the internet last year and already caused a firestorm in the German media, especially since the film – in which ordinary German soldiers are seen beaten and scalped – received considerable public funding from the government.
The Cannes world premiere ran to a shorter-than-expected 154 minutes but it still offers considerable challenges to the attention span of mainstream audiences. Even though there is some action and a fair smattering of Tarantino’s customary blood-spilling, the film-maker devotes much of the running time to dialogue. As might be expected, Tarantino, the screenwriter shows off his ear for a witty back-and-forth or monologue with flamboyant frequency, often to the detriment of dramatic momentum.
And while much of the camerawork is tighter and more restrained than usual in a Tarantino opus, as befits the period, he still can’t resist imposing a myriad of ostentatious references to other films on his original story (only the title is borrowed from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 film). From constant references to Pabst and Riefenstahl to pieces of score from Dimitri Tiomkin (The Alamo), Ennio Morricone (multiple Italian scores, The Battle Of Algiers) and even snatches of music lifted from more recent horror movies like The Entity and Cat People (David Bowie’s song Putting Out Fire) to hints of every war movie ever made, Tarantino once again insists on wearing his cinephilia on his sleeve. Some film lovers might appreciate his homages, others might view it as an obtrusive demonstration of a dearth of original ideas.
The opening scene alone, in which SS colonel Hans Landa (Waltz, perfectly evil) intimidates a French farmer (played by Denis Menochet) in 1941, runs to over 20 minutes, an indication of how the film is to continue. The result of the “friendly” interrogation is the massacre of a Jewish family hiding out under the floorboards although the teenage daughter of the family Shosanna (Laurent) escapes.
The second scene – already previewed in trailers – sees Lt Aldo Raine (Pitt, one-note in heavy Tennessee accent) briefing 12 Jewish American soldiers on their upcoming mission which is to fly behind enemy lines and kill as many Nazis as possible. Each is charged with collecting 100 Nazi scalps. Among the group are Sgt Donny Donowitz (Roth) who becomes famous for beating his victims to death with a baseball bat and a German soldier who has defected to the Allied side called Hugo Stiglitz (Schweiger, who doesn’t say a word in the film).
The drama, scattered among so many characters as it is, eventually evolves into a 1944 plot called Operation Kino to blow up Goebbels, Goring, Bormann and other members of the German High Command at a cinema in Paris where a Goebbels propaganda film starring “the German Sergeant York” Daniel Bruhl is to have its premiere. The cinema is owned by Sosanna, now masquerading as a gentile, who has attracted the unwanted romantic advances of Bruhl.
The most brilliant section of the film sees a British spy (Fassbender) and two of the Bastards arriving in an underground bar to rendezvous with German film star and double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Kruger). But when they arrive, they unexpectedly find a party of Nazis getting drunk and playing games. When the British spy’s accent is questioned by one of the soldiers, a senior German major (Diehl) emerges from the shadows and a tense face off ensues.
Ironically Tarantino’s dialogue here is not as tricksy or self- consciously clever as in other sections and the scene works through sheer tension and the skills of the excellent ensemble.
Other supporting players include Mike Myers, somewhat ridiculous as an upper-crust English general, Martin Wuttke as Hitler, the venerable Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill and cameos by Inglorious Bastards star Bo Svenson and Castellari himself. Tarantino regular Samuel L Jackson contributes a jarring voiceover midway through.
The cinema-set finale – which contains more than one fantastical turn of events – is suitably dramatic, and although Tarantino ends the film with Pitt, the real heroes of the film are women – namely the characters played by Laurent and Kruger, both giving showy star turns before grisly demises. With those two on the poster, the film could have been sold as Kill Adolf, Parts 1 & 2.
---------------------------------------
Film Review: Inglourious Basterds
Hollywood Reporter
(I'm guessing this is by Honeycutt.)
CANNES -- History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino. While his "Pulp Fiction" arrived late at the Festival de Cannes and swept away the Palme d'Or in 1994, his World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds" merely continues the string of disappointments in this year's Competition.
The film is by no means terrible -- its running time of two hours and 32 minutes races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.
Boxoffice expectations for this co-production that will see the Weinstein Co. handling domestic and Universal handling international distribution will still be considerable, but there isn't much chance of the kind of repeat business Tarantino normally attracts.
The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari's 1978 World War II 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 since, 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.
As a matter of fact, for a war movie there is very little action. People talk, soldiers scheme, and a German war hero pesters a French woman in Paris. Otherwise, the action comes in short bursts such as the machine-gunning of a hiding Jewish family through a farmhouse floorboards and a shootout in a bistro.
Reportedly, Tarantino has been having a go at this script for over a decade, and it looks like he never licked the dramatic problems. The "Basterds" are formed in 1941, then suddenly it's 1944 and they have firmly established their reputation. But only one scene gives the flavor of what they do to deserve it.
Unlike Tarantino's previous films, "Inglourious Basterds" does not build to a climax through a series of ingenuous episodes, each one upping the stakes and the tension, but rather it rolls the dice on one major operation.
The head of Germany's film business Joseph Goebbels wants to hold the premiere of a movie celebrating the exploits of the army's finest sharpshooter, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), in Paris. All the top Nazi brass will be in attendance, including Hitler. A British lieutenant (Michael Fassbender) parachutes behind enemy lines to organize the Basterds to blow up the cinema.
Unbeknownst to the Allies, however, the cinema's owner, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jew who seeks revenge for the execution of her family, has the same general idea only she wants to locks the doors and set the theater on fire. Best of all for her, the head of security for the event is none other than the villainous Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who killed her family.
The maneuvering by both groups, the Basterds and Shosanna and her lover-assistant Marcel (Jacky Ido), with the Germans always seeming to be one step away from discovering the schemes, occupies most of the movie leading up to the premiere. Then Tarantino rewrites the end of World War II.
There are a few moments of classic Tarantino tension in the farmhouse when Col. Landa interrogates the French farmer hiding a Jewish family, in the bistro where an SS officer grows suspicious of a Basterd's German accent and at the premiere where Col Landa appears to uncover one of the plots.
Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B-movies as he was with "Grindhouse" nor riffing on cinema as with "Pulp Fiction" and the "Kill Bill" films.
Tarantino has been quoted as saying of "Inglourious Basterds," "This ain't your daddy's World War II movie." In fact, it pretty much is. His scalp-hunters are any Dirty Dozen on a mission, the bread and butter of war movies. The major difference is that some fine European actors simply aren't given enough to do.
Diane Kruger's role as a German movie star is close to being unnecessary. Bruhl does have a key role as the war hero who plays himself in a German propaganda movie but Til Schweiger is little more than a dress extra. On the other hand, Tarantino can waste time on a scene back in England, where the British officer receives his orders, simply for the opportunity to g et Mike Myers into makeup and prosthetics that make him unrecognizable.
Even Pitt, sporting a somewhat overdone Southern accent, and Laurent, the film's two leads, don't get a chance to explore their characters in any depth. They are who they are the minute they appear on screen and nothing much changes through the film.
In fact, in your daddy's war movies, men and women often did undergo interesting transformations. So perhaps Tarantino is right.
Inglourious Basterds
20 May, 2009 | By Mike Goodridge
Screendaily
Dir/scr: Quentin Tarantino. 2009. US/Germany. 154 minutes.
An intermittently-inspired World War II epic which illustrates both Quentin Tarantino’s brilliance and his tendency towards indulgence, Inglourious Basterds is composed of a series of long-running vignettes strung together by a slender story thread. The problem is that no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, and, with some of the scenes running up to half an hour each, the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing.
Above-the-title star Brad Pitt plays the captain of a troupe of Jewish American renegades dubbed the Inglorious Bastards, but Pitt is far from the centre of attention and both French actress Melanie Laurent and German actor Christoph Waltz both have more screen time and juicier roles. That, combined with the fact that most of the film is in French and German, will limit the film’s box office prospects, principally in the subtitle-wary US where The Weinstein Company is opening wide on August 21. A big launch weekend should be guaranteed on the names of Pitt and Tarantino and the strong advance campaign which has been building on the internet, but like the Kill Bill films, it might fall fast in subsequent weeks.
Universal Pictures co-financed the film in return for international where audiences will be more receptive, especially in Europe. Results in Germany are unpredictable. A version of the script was leaked on the internet last year and already caused a firestorm in the German media, especially since the film – in which ordinary German soldiers are seen beaten and scalped – received considerable public funding from the government.
The Cannes world premiere ran to a shorter-than-expected 154 minutes but it still offers considerable challenges to the attention span of mainstream audiences. Even though there is some action and a fair smattering of Tarantino’s customary blood-spilling, the film-maker devotes much of the running time to dialogue. As might be expected, Tarantino, the screenwriter shows off his ear for a witty back-and-forth or monologue with flamboyant frequency, often to the detriment of dramatic momentum.
And while much of the camerawork is tighter and more restrained than usual in a Tarantino opus, as befits the period, he still can’t resist imposing a myriad of ostentatious references to other films on his original story (only the title is borrowed from Enzo Castellari’s 1978 film). From constant references to Pabst and Riefenstahl to pieces of score from Dimitri Tiomkin (The Alamo), Ennio Morricone (multiple Italian scores, The Battle Of Algiers) and even snatches of music lifted from more recent horror movies like The Entity and Cat People (David Bowie’s song Putting Out Fire) to hints of every war movie ever made, Tarantino once again insists on wearing his cinephilia on his sleeve. Some film lovers might appreciate his homages, others might view it as an obtrusive demonstration of a dearth of original ideas.
The opening scene alone, in which SS colonel Hans Landa (Waltz, perfectly evil) intimidates a French farmer (played by Denis Menochet) in 1941, runs to over 20 minutes, an indication of how the film is to continue. The result of the “friendly” interrogation is the massacre of a Jewish family hiding out under the floorboards although the teenage daughter of the family Shosanna (Laurent) escapes.
The second scene – already previewed in trailers – sees Lt Aldo Raine (Pitt, one-note in heavy Tennessee accent) briefing 12 Jewish American soldiers on their upcoming mission which is to fly behind enemy lines and kill as many Nazis as possible. Each is charged with collecting 100 Nazi scalps. Among the group are Sgt Donny Donowitz (Roth) who becomes famous for beating his victims to death with a baseball bat and a German soldier who has defected to the Allied side called Hugo Stiglitz (Schweiger, who doesn’t say a word in the film).
The drama, scattered among so many characters as it is, eventually evolves into a 1944 plot called Operation Kino to blow up Goebbels, Goring, Bormann and other members of the German High Command at a cinema in Paris where a Goebbels propaganda film starring “the German Sergeant York” Daniel Bruhl is to have its premiere. The cinema is owned by Sosanna, now masquerading as a gentile, who has attracted the unwanted romantic advances of Bruhl.
The most brilliant section of the film sees a British spy (Fassbender) and two of the Bastards arriving in an underground bar to rendezvous with German film star and double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Kruger). But when they arrive, they unexpectedly find a party of Nazis getting drunk and playing games. When the British spy’s accent is questioned by one of the soldiers, a senior German major (Diehl) emerges from the shadows and a tense face off ensues.
Ironically Tarantino’s dialogue here is not as tricksy or self- consciously clever as in other sections and the scene works through sheer tension and the skills of the excellent ensemble.
Other supporting players include Mike Myers, somewhat ridiculous as an upper-crust English general, Martin Wuttke as Hitler, the venerable Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill and cameos by Inglorious Bastards star Bo Svenson and Castellari himself. Tarantino regular Samuel L Jackson contributes a jarring voiceover midway through.
The cinema-set finale – which contains more than one fantastical turn of events – is suitably dramatic, and although Tarantino ends the film with Pitt, the real heroes of the film are women – namely the characters played by Laurent and Kruger, both giving showy star turns before grisly demises. With those two on the poster, the film could have been sold as Kill Adolf, Parts 1 & 2.
---------------------------------------
Film Review: Inglourious Basterds
Hollywood Reporter
(I'm guessing this is by Honeycutt.)
CANNES -- History will not repeat itself for Quentin Tarantino. While his "Pulp Fiction" arrived late at the Festival de Cannes and swept away the Palme d'Or in 1994, his World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds" merely continues the string of disappointments in this year's Competition.
The film is by no means terrible -- its running time of two hours and 32 minutes races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.
Boxoffice expectations for this co-production that will see the Weinstein Co. handling domestic and Universal handling international distribution will still be considerable, but there isn't much chance of the kind of repeat business Tarantino normally attracts.
The film borrows its title but little else from Enzo Castellari's 1978 World War II 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 since, 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.
As a matter of fact, for a war movie there is very little action. People talk, soldiers scheme, and a German war hero pesters a French woman in Paris. Otherwise, the action comes in short bursts such as the machine-gunning of a hiding Jewish family through a farmhouse floorboards and a shootout in a bistro.
Reportedly, Tarantino has been having a go at this script for over a decade, and it looks like he never licked the dramatic problems. The "Basterds" are formed in 1941, then suddenly it's 1944 and they have firmly established their reputation. But only one scene gives the flavor of what they do to deserve it.
Unlike Tarantino's previous films, "Inglourious Basterds" does not build to a climax through a series of ingenuous episodes, each one upping the stakes and the tension, but rather it rolls the dice on one major operation.
The head of Germany's film business Joseph Goebbels wants to hold the premiere of a movie celebrating the exploits of the army's finest sharpshooter, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), in Paris. All the top Nazi brass will be in attendance, including Hitler. A British lieutenant (Michael Fassbender) parachutes behind enemy lines to organize the Basterds to blow up the cinema.
Unbeknownst to the Allies, however, the cinema's owner, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jew who seeks revenge for the execution of her family, has the same general idea only she wants to locks the doors and set the theater on fire. Best of all for her, the head of security for the event is none other than the villainous Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who killed her family.
The maneuvering by both groups, the Basterds and Shosanna and her lover-assistant Marcel (Jacky Ido), with the Germans always seeming to be one step away from discovering the schemes, occupies most of the movie leading up to the premiere. Then Tarantino rewrites the end of World War II.
There are a few moments of classic Tarantino tension in the farmhouse when Col. Landa interrogates the French farmer hiding a Jewish family, in the bistro where an SS officer grows suspicious of a Basterd's German accent and at the premiere where Col Landa appears to uncover one of the plots.
Otherwise the film lacks not only tension but those juicy sequences where actors deliver lines loaded with subtext and characters drip menace with icy wit. Tarantino never finds a way to introduce his vivid sense of pulp fiction within the context of a war movie. He is not kidding B-movies as he was with "Grindhouse" nor riffing on cinema as with "Pulp Fiction" and the "Kill Bill" films.
Tarantino has been quoted as saying of "Inglourious Basterds," "This ain't your daddy's World War II movie." In fact, it pretty much is. His scalp-hunters are any Dirty Dozen on a mission, the bread and butter of war movies. The major difference is that some fine European actors simply aren't given enough to do.
Diane Kruger's role as a German movie star is close to being unnecessary. Bruhl does have a key role as the war hero who plays himself in a German propaganda movie but Til Schweiger is little more than a dress extra. On the other hand, Tarantino can waste time on a scene back in England, where the British officer receives his orders, simply for the opportunity to g et Mike Myers into makeup and prosthetics that make him unrecognizable.
Even Pitt, sporting a somewhat overdone Southern accent, and Laurent, the film's two leads, don't get a chance to explore their characters in any depth. They are who they are the minute they appear on screen and nothing much changes through the film.
In fact, in your daddy's war movies, men and women often did undergo interesting transformations. So perhaps Tarantino is right.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
This could be another hit from Tarantino.
Inglourious Basterds trailer
Inglourious Basterds trailer
"It's the least most of us can do, but less of us will do more."
I hope his mother didn't fuck him...Sabin wrote:I think Quentin Tarantino has met three different kinds of women in his life: women who wouldn't fuck him when he wasn't famous, women who fucked him too easily when he was famous, and his mother.
"It's the least most of us can do, but less of us will do more."
Death Proof is an interesting failure, a very subversive film but ultimately a rather pointless one. He clearly loves the idea of empowering women but these are not women. They are the idea of women. I don't think he knows women. I think Quentin Tarantino has met three different kinds of women in his life: women who wouldn't fuck him when he wasn't famous, women who fucked him too easily when he was famous, and his mother.
"How's the despair?"
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OscarGuy
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I understand what Tarantino was doing with Death Proof, but I think it did drag a great deal, though the female performances were interesting enough to keep watching.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin