Has anyone seen this yet? I'm keen to see it just because it's Tarantino, but it's got a pretty terrible review from Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.
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Nah, you shouldn't be. He's joined the ranks of the serial disappointers.I'm keen to see it just because it's Tarantino
Mark Kermode said it was all over the place. -
Inglourious Basterds
The Tarantino movie with the women in the muscle cars ("Death Proof") was pretty entertaining, it referenced good early 70s classic American muscle car B-movies. The rest of his recent stuff, not so much...
This one is probably going to be a bad remake of the Dirty Dozen. It's going to be all over the free movie net outlets just about now, I wouldn't bother paying money to sit through this.Comment
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And what's with the stupid spelling? Molesworth was decades ago.Comment
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Went to see this last night. In brief: very good.
Didn't feel like a Tarantino in many ways, although there were a few reminders (like yet another Mexican stand-off, two in fact, and the way that certain new characters were introduced with comic-book scrawl on the screen and arrows pointing to them), and the dialogue was pretty distinctively QT.
What he does spectacularly well in this film is create tension. 4 or 5 scenes have an incredible will-they-won't-they-get-caught edge to them.
What's almost as impressive is that he's managed to make a mainstream Hollywood film in which long, long periods are conducted in French or German with subtitles, and you almost don't notice. (Watch out for a couple of amusingly corny pretexts for switching into English...)
Christoph Waltz was absolutely brilliant as Colonel Landa, the fastidious, intimidating and slightly camp 'Jew Hunter', and deserves his Best Actor at Cannes. Shame we haven't seen him in more Anglophone flicks.
The one thing I didn't like, and here I must be very careful of spoileration, is that Tarantino broke one of the golden rules of (loosely) historical narratives. If you've seen it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Very popular with large sections of the audience, but to me it didn't feel right.
One other minor grumble is that he has an English character using the word 'momentarily' the way an American would use it. Oh, and the cameo by Austin Powers was an unnecessary distraction, raising titters from the cheap seats.
Apart from that, highly recommended. Not "his masterpiece" by a mile (whatever one of the main characters may say at the end), but good knockabout fun. And the daunting - to me, anyway - running time of 153 mins just flew by.Comment
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Well, I've just got back from watching this and while 'that's two and a half hours of my life I won't get back' is a rather hackneyed and much overused statement it pretty much reflects how I feel right now.
Curiously I have tended to agree with a great deal of the comments posted by SR in the film/tv threads over the years and I have never had much time for Peter Bradshaw (I'm an Anthony Quinn man) but on this occasion I'm firmly in Bradshaw's corner.
God, it's so boring - never a statement I could previously ever see me throwing at a Tarantino movie. A couple of the scenes particularly - with the French farmer at the beginning and the cellar scene - were excrutiatingly long-winded and the whole thing would have benefited from having about forty minutes trimmed from it without losing anything in the way of plot or character development.
The whole thing is based around a yarn that - as Bradshaw suggests - doesn't ever quite make up its mind about which genre it belongs to, and it ends up as neither one thing nor the other: never a comedy (no humour), never a gripping drama (too long-winded) and certainly of no historical relevance (it played fast and loose with any sense of history). But it is pretty violent with quite a lot of shooting and scalping.
Funnily enough, though, the people who might gain most enjoyment from this - the Saw/Hostel young male teen demograhic - will be too young to be admitted for the cinema release.Comment
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If this movie isn't a pretty big success, it is likely to take the studio with it.Comment
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I'm with SR on this (Hi, by the way): he builds tension beautifully in a number of scenes. I mean, I've never seen a glass of milk look so menacing before (outside of a convention for the lactose intolerant, of course, but that's by the bye). I agree it's a bit long-winded in places, but the sheer giggle-some joy I got from most of the set-pieces more than made up for that. It's all over the place, mind, but that was half the fun for me. Good 'tache on Brad Pitt, too.Comment
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Tarantino is the Damien Duff of cinema.Comment
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I cannot believe Tony C thinks Inglourious Basterds, and especially the opening scene with the dairy farmer, is 'boring'. In fact, I'd actually question the humanity and sentience of anyone who was bored during that scene. Fuck me.Comment
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You question my humanity?
What a ridiculous overreaction to a difference of opinion of this kind.
Fuck me indeed.Comment
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Well, wait a minute Tony, what do you think I'm actually saying here?
Do you think I'm saying you're some kind of lower species? Or do you think I'm saying "If that scene didn't thrill you, check that you have a pulse"?
Come on.Comment
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The problem with Tarantino is that he concentrates too much on these overly long monologues and puts too much focus on tiny (sometimes insignificant) details.
The opening bit where the French farmer and the German soldier is one such scene which could have been trimmed a little. It just seems to go on forever. Its a novelty at first but then you'd just wish that things would get moving.
IB was alright, a lot better than the vastly overrated Kill Bill but nowhere near the quality of his first three films (and Death Proof). From Dusk Till Dawn was another great movie, but didn't direct that, he just wrote the screenplay.Comment
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Yes. On balance - I really liked it. I enjoyed it, rather. You're right about the running time flying by - this is the first time since I think Dogville that I've looked at the clock at the end and actually thought, no, that can't be right. Hugely involving and absorbing film. That shaggy dog layered from all sides narrative is just the sort of thing I love, especially in a WWI or WWII setting (Black Book, Les Miserables, Big Red One, Colonel Blimp, oh so many more)- really satisfying.
It's very trademark QT- the music, the graphics, the little look-at-me directorial flourishes, te revenge theme, the confidence that the long, rambling speeches (everything's highly artificial, I think, so it seems an appropriate term) are going to draw the viewer in, the assured way that you know that QT knows exactly when you're about to think 'enough!' So you get the time and space for that kind of pure enjoyment of storytelling without the film losing its grip. And it does grip hard.
And I have to say the production and costume design is so lovely. That one scene where Melanie Laurent (whose face is everywhere at the minute, she's also in Jusqu'a toi) is putting on that '40s makeup, that just exmplifies the gorgeousness of the whole thing. Frocks, shoes, jackboots, those little guns, the vintage bottle of Chartreuse on the shelf - so nicely done. And you could have expected QT to go overboard on the fetishising of the Nazi aesthetic- the uniforms, the flags, the propaganda posters,it's a perfect realisation of our vision of the time. A masterclass in reception. So there's no attempt at any sort of 'realism'. The lovingly assembled wealth of detail is all from war films, from fiction about war. That's not so unusual but what QT does is avoid any pretence of using this sorry but intertextuality as something on top of his story, some sort of validating reassuring yes this is a war film, it follows generic conventions but it's more, honest - for QT the surface gloss is the film,and he makes it work because he knows that this is just as interesting.
Having said all that I thibnk I know it's going to be like Pulp Fiction and KillBill- tremendously exciting the first time, but the next time you really wantto fast forward through the rambles, the Esteban and the Christopher Walken bits; it's like the surface sparkle is there, but even as I'm admiring it, experience tells me the fizz will go flat and I don't know if there's any way to get it back. One-time only films, I call them Magnolias.Comment
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Heh. Here all films are subtitled in French and German together anyway. Whenever someone spoke French or German, that was replaced by English plus the other one, and for Italian we had all 3 languages at once. And I know only too well what a nightmare the process would have been. hats off to the people at Titra, I only noticed 3 or 4 mistakes.What's almost as impressive is that he's managed to make a mainstream Hollywood film in which long, long periods are conducted in French or German with subtitles, and you almost don't notice. (Watch out for a couple of amusingly corny pretexts for switching into English...)Comment
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I've never seen a glass of milk look so menacing before
Two words: Hitchcock, Suspicion.Comment
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I'm sceptical of the respect shown to Ebert, I must admit ... but then who am I?
However, and although I often look at Bradshaw for a first indication of quality (or not), his assertion that 'slow' necessarily = 'boring' is very debatable. I wonder what his verdict on 'Once Upon A Time In The West' was. Glowing, I expect.Comment
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The problem as I experienced it was that Tarantino built suspense - as in the first scene - then allowed it to drift away in an overlong swathe of small talk. The cat-and-mouse game deployed by the German officer here lost its tension as it became overlong. The scene initially gripped me and then let me go to the extent that instead of thinking 'My God, what's going to happen next?' I was thinking 'For God's sake let something happen'.
The beer cellar scene was even more excessively drawn out and would have been so much better with substantial editing. Instead it was allowed to drift into monotony by which time even Tarantino's trademark Mexican stand-off couldn't save it.Comment
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Having read books of film criticism from age 10, I can safely say that Ebert wins by 3 in a football match, 40 in a gridiron match, 30 in a basketball match, and 90 in an Australian Rules Football match over every critic in the entire world. Writing skills, metaphors, application to real life, and understanding all aspects of the technical-writing-performing-emotional sides of cinema.Comment
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In which case must apologise for my clear deficiency in appreciating the "writing skills, metaphors, application to real life, and understanding all aspects of the technical-writing-performing-emotional sides of cinema".
I must have been wrong about 'Inglourious Baterds'. Perhaps one day when I've fully honed my critical skills I may be mature enough to see it as a masterpiece.Comment
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Roger Ebert thinks that Babel, Crash and In America are great films. I wouldn't really take his word for anything.Comment
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Amor de Cosmos wrote:
Tbey had a light in the milk to make it seem even more menacing. It's a fantastic scene, one of my favourite Hitchcock moments.I've never seen a glass of milk look so menacing before
Two words: Hitchcock, Suspicion.
I don't always agree with Ebert. I find his reviews are best read after you've watched the film yourself. One thing he does better than any other critic is explain exactly why he likes the film and often he will touch upon something I haven't considered yet. Sometimes that changes my view of the film, sometimes I think his workings are bogus but his reviews always inspire further thought. He does seem a little generous with his star system, you need to majorly fuck up to not get at least three stars out of four from him.
As for taking apart his reviews of certain films: the guy has reviewed more than 5,000 films at this stage, there is bound to be a few that we disagree with. I could add his four star reviews from this year of The Girlfriend Experience, Sin Nombre, Sita Sings The Blues, Everlasting Moments and Gomorrah as stuff that I disagree are great movies but I think he will rate things highly that have little box office chance in the US in order for them to be more widely seen.Comment
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erwin wrote:
As it happens he reviewed the re-issue on the Guardian film podcast recently. His verdict was that it was excellent but wondered if it could have got to where it was going a litter faster without losing anything.I'm sceptical of the respect shown to Ebert, I must admit ... but then who am I?
However, and although I often look at Bradshaw for a first indication of quality (or not), his assertion that 'slow' necessarily = 'boring' is very debatable. I wonder what his verdict on 'Once Upon A Time In The West' was. Glowing, I expect.Comment
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Tbey had a light in the milk to make it seem even more menacing. It's a fantastic scene, one of my favourite Hitchcock moments.
Indeed, he explains it in detail in Truffaut's book. It's one of those scenes too that illustrates superbly the advantage black and white photography can have over colour.Comment
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