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Inglourious Basterds

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    #26
    Inglourious Basterds

    Yeah, I read Truffaut's book earlier this year. It's absolutely fantastic.

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      #27
      Inglourious Basterds

      I must buy another copy. My first boss gave it to me when I left the UK but it got lost in the mix somewhere. It is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in film.

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        #28
        Inglourious Basterds

        Bradshaw does talk some shite sometimes but I have to say I love the idea of an armour plated turkey from hell.

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          #29
          Inglourious Basterds

          Tony, I know you think this is Judgement Day and your soul is on the line, but I can assure you I was not directing that at you. I was saying that to erwin, explaining why I take Ebert's word more strongly than others.

          I disagree with SR's use of playing the humanity card, but he already explained himself.

          AB - Ebert also liked Speed. I've consistently disagreed with him. But when he loves a Tarantino film, I'm on the same exact wavelength. And no one's done more in the country that has made an industry out of producing films to advocate for better-made films and against idiocy.

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            #30
            Inglourious Basterds

            jason voorhees wrote:
            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.
            I really can't take Ebert seriously. He often revises his opinion of films over time.

            Mark Kermode is the only one I really listen to with regards to how good a movie may or may not be.

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              #31
              Inglourious Basterds

              Sir Fartle wrote:

              He [Ebert] often revises his opinion of films over time.
              But that's fair enough, isn't it? You can describe your first impression of a film, and then it's not so strange to have a better or worse impression on the second or third viewing, is it?

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                #32
                Inglourious Basterds

                I tend to agree with JV about Ebert. He's not always the most reliable as a mirror of my taste in films, but he almost always gives me something else to think about. I also appreciate that he tries to review movies against what they are trying to do, rather than against some form of cinematic ideal. Granted, he's work hasn't been as consistently good since his stroke, and he also has a long-held habit of overrating movies whose politics he agrees with (I think Crash is one example of this), but all in all, I think he is a force for good in the world of criticism. I don't think he is as good as Matt Zoller Seitz (link is to his review of Fincher's Zodiac, which is one of my favorites), but that's a high bar.

                Oh, and I really liked IB. I can understand the frustration in the length of those couple of long, scenes, but I found that they effectively played with my level of tension, raising it and lowering it and raising it again without me getting bored or feeling overtly manipulated. I found the Landa scene with the strudel to be fantastic, and it probably wasn't one off my top 3 scenes in the film.

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                  #33
                  Inglourious Basterds

                  As somebody that considers Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction two of my favourite ever films, I thought IB was overlong, morally suspect and dull. And Brad Pitt was laughably bad: his performance reminded me of his cameo in Friends, so stilted and awkwardly delivered, with zero comic timing.

                  The humour was crudely inserted throughout (a daft sight gag ruining the tension of the, otherwise very good, first scene) and didn't have the same zip of Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs, nor did it mesh at all well with the action. The bit with Ryan out of The Office finding out his nickname was hackneyed sitcom fodder that derailed an otherwise good scene.

                  Tarantino is like a spoilt kid. Nobody is going to tell him to cut anything, so we get the ludicrously overstretched basement scene (with minimal payoff), we get the myriad 'foot shots' and we get the cringe inducing bits with Churchill and Goebbels discussing cinema, JUST LIKE A QUESTIN TARANTINO CHARACTER!!! The whole thing reeks of self satisfaction from a director and writer fully capable of making good films if he just stopped being so fucking pleased with both himself and a bullshit mythology of his own creation.

                  SPOILER.....

                  I also think there's something a little sinister in the way the camera revels in the two women dying. Doesn't like women our Quentin, does he?

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                    #34
                    Inglourious Basterds

                    SAME SPOILER

                    It's not exactly like the film doesn't take great pleasure in the deaths of quite a few men.

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                      #35
                      Inglourious Basterds

                      erwin wrote:
                      Sir Fartle wrote:

                      He [Ebert] often revises his opinion of films over time.
                      But that's fair enough, isn't it? You can describe your first impression of a film, and then it's not so strange to have a better or worse impression on the second or third viewing, is it?
                      Yeah, but he has a habit of doing it when a film gets a large following over time.

                      His review of Blade Runner is a prime example.

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                        #36
                        Inglourious Basterds

                        I watched this last night, and it's decent enough, mainly thanks to Woltz's brilliant performance (was it just me, or did anyone else some physical resemblance to Rob Brydon?).Pitt, I believe was miscast and I think there's a point in the last 45 minutes or so where the film loses what spark it had. Rather than be entertainend and sitting on the edge of my seat, I started to get a little bored.
                        The opening chapter however, is absolutely brilliant, as is the stand off midway through. Wonderfully tense.

                        I'd say it was just about worth 3 out of 5 stars, and I enjoyed it more than Death Proof for sure.

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                          #37
                          Inglourious Basterds

                          Music was fantastic; the gore was so painfully, funnily over the top; the ending was great (because it was so unexpected and reminded us that this is a work of fiction). The tension was curdling, particularly the opening scene.

                          Ahistorical in other parts too: one of the SS in a black uniform: historically inaccurate, but completely true to our collective memory of war films and boys' comics.

                          Mind-numbingly good, side-achingly funny and completely over the top. Go, see it.

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                            #38
                            Inglourious Basterds

                            I concur with Chirpy. Whoever said, up thread, that there was no humour, was surely not watching the same film as me. And I loved the way it ended, mostly for the fact that it was so surprising for those of us who'd not read reviews before seeing it.

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                              #39
                              Inglourious Basterds

                              A very good film, impressive even, but not in the sense that I could actually warm to it. But an hugely enjoyable work, nontheless

                              The accusation that it's long-winded and boring is probably one made on the assumption that it would be a roller-coaster ride of non-stop Nazi-slaying bloodbaths, where, on the contrary, it quickly becomes apparent in the first few minutes that it's going to be a film reliant - and fascinatingly so - on character dialogue, performance and, as SR pointed out around the start of this thread, tension.

                              Pulp Fiction was like this, Jackie Brown also drew upon long, languid character studies instead of endless shoot-em-ups, so why think that Inglourious Basterds would be any different? In fact, the sequences in the French cottage and the drinking parlour are the best in the film, building up a suspenceful atmosphere where the build-up to moments of violence (in the latter, the more you watch the Hugo Stiglitz character, the more the 'oh-oh' factor rises) become sharper and gain momentum. Instead of all the usual camera tricks and film cuts, Tarantino uses dialogue and character, and it's much more effective that way.

                              Without trying to give too much away, the film also reverses expectations about characters who should last the course of the story, and there are no easy pay-offs (one plot concerning the psychotic Landa and the vengeful Soshanna never ends as I thought it would - and the drinking parlour sequence had me raising my eyebrows at its outcome). The climax in the cinema has Tarantino giving the finger - perhaps in a refreshing way - to historical fact. Other films preserve events in aspic, yet QT goes for all-out wish fulfilment.

                              The performances are all up to scratch with special mention to Michael Fassbender as the ex-film critic turned covert espionage officer, Melanie Laurent as Soshanna, Daniel Bruhl as the puppy-like Zoller (that soon changes) and, cripes, even Brad Pitt's somewhat overdone thuggish Clark Gable turn becomes engaging as the film goes on.

                              But, as many have pointed out, Christoph Waltz steals the show. Fuck me, what a performance: funny, mesmerising, charming, savage and worrying. Apparently he was a staple of German television before Tarantino gave him the role of Hans Landa, and, on this evidence, the question 'where the fuck was this man?' is worth asking. He is, in a word, brilliant. A find.

                              I did have small problems, though, with the score. Yes, the cribbed tracks are effective, but a specially-composed one would've given the film, musically, a unifying aspect that these admittedly impactful seperate pieces lacked a little. And the David Bowie song in the sequence where Soshanna looks out of the window had '1980's music video' stamped all over it - as incongruous as Harry Redknapp's face would be if on the cover of Vogue.

                              And did anyone think 'David Mitchell' when Mike Myers popped up?

                              For all that, and if you can expect a steady ride instead of a Spielbergian rollercoaster, highly recommended.

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                                #40
                                Inglourious Basterds

                                I liked the score precisely because of that cobbled-together quality. The film itself whilset totally original is a collection of borrowings from a range of other films from Leone to Robert Aldrich to Tarantino himself. A set of set pieces rather than a coherent story- and none the worse for that. I think it reminded us of the fact that the film was dealing with fiction all the time, at the same time dealing with symbolic truths, as is made clear at the end. I read an interesting interview with Eli Roth -whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors- in which he said how much he and the German actors got from being involved symbolically killing Nazis together.

                                It is a very knowing film, playing on our expectations, of scenes and of cinema and using our expectations to surprise us. And yet it's vigour and energy is inspiring.

                                The actors were excellent. Tarantino gets very good performances from actors who in other films seem mediocre. That I think partly explains Waltz's performance. Incidentally he was cast because he was probably the only actor in Europe with the necessary language skills - the script demands that he can speak fluently German French English and Italian.

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