08-27-09 Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds

Noncommercially, a new series of So Bad They're Good movies starts next Wednesday with The Room, described by its sponsors as uncategorizeable in practically every way as it tries everything from horror to comedy to action to sports to love, failing in every try. If you want to be assured that YOU could have done better, go to The Shadow, 555 North Rock Road, next Wednesday at 8. Or if you want quality, you could try the Blank Page Sunday at 7:30, with Samuel Fuller's very seldom seen White Dog, in which Kristy McNichol adopts a stray dog without realizing it has been trained to kill black people; in 1982, Paramount didn't even dare to release White Dog in the United States, and the television edit was very censored.

Or you might prefer Quentin Tarantino's peculiarly misspelled Inglourious Basterds. Spelling is not the only peculiar thing about , which features a wonderfully unhistorical plot and an interesting inversion of heroic and villainous roles that at one point has our supposed hero torturing our wounded heroine and apparently enjoying it as much as he does all the other cruelties the revenge plot obligates him to employ. There is little more morality than there is history in Inglourious Basterds.

What there is, as in all Tarantino movies, is a whole lot of other movies, the only subject Tarantino ever seems to have in mind. You can feel superior and even sophisticated as you remember who Brigitte Helm was and recognize the Big Face shot from wither 1984 or Metropolis and that famous Super Bowl commercial, and you can bring legal pad to note down all the echos and distortions of other movies, characters, plot twists, shots, maybe even lines of dialogue; the only world you'll be in is the movie world, but you'll feel like a time traveler in that.

Or maybe not. No matter how silly Inglourious Basterds basic materials are, there is no getting away from the skill with which they are used. Instead of the snips and pieces that are the common style instead of actual scenes, Tarantino uses long scenes in which there is frequently nothing but dialogue, but with each with its twists and turns of plot, sudden revelations, traps and escapes, and a steady increase in tension as the menace grows and disaster, though not as much, in this case, as reviews and previews led me to expect. About the only thing Tarantino does not reproduce from old movies is boredom; whatever you think of him and his work, it's hard to get your mind off the screen.

But there are no people there. The best role is the villainous Nazi detective, and he's a slice of good old-fashioned ham of the kind Charles Laughton and Robert Newton used to use so entertainingly. Brad Pitt as what could have been the hero has a really odd hillbilly accent, no suggestion of nerves, and a streak of sadism that would fit the Saw and Hostel franchises. Hitler and Goebbels and the supposedly sympathetic character called the Bear are apparently insane, while Diane Kruger seems to have Marlene Dietrich in mind and her would-be Nazi lover is explicitly compared to Sergeant York.

All this is perhaps connected to the humor that a lot of other people claim to see in Tarantino, but if the things the audience was giggling at were supposed to be comical, I'm glad the jokes escaped me.

But Tarantino is a master of technique; I just wish he had an interest in human life, and he might make a masterpiece.