Okay, you heard it here first: Quentin Tarantino is a movie-maker's movie-maker. When Hollywood threatens to collapse under its own weight, it's peeps like Tarantino who keep things afloat with bold originality and brash wittiness. It's peeps like him who bring freshness and interestingness amidst all the staleness. He and others of his ilk are in a league of their own, where he rules as top dog hands down.
You have to be if you can pull off something like Inglourious Basterds by sidestepping any and all of the proverbial landmines of which movies depicting Nazis and Jews in the same frame are fraught with. You have to be if you can make a dollop of cream look larger than life, a glass of milk like the tastiest drink in the world, the noise of the prosaic act of eating a strudel pregnant with possibilities, violence explode violently. Dialogue purl like a cool stream in the mountains on a pleasant summer day. It's cinema as cinema was meant to be made.
Tarantino is, after all, all about being cinematic. He knows what a movie can and can't do, what a movie does best, what each movie element brings to the table. All while keeping a finger on the audience's pulse: whatever it is you go through during a specific scene, it's because he wants you to; if you find yourself filling in blanks in between scenes, it's also because he wants you to.
In Inglourious Basterds we follow three parallel storylines, all set in the early 1940s of Nazi-occupied France: the first one follows the exploits of SS Col. Hans "The Jew Hunter" Landa (Christoph Waltz), the second one the fate of French-Jewish country girl Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), and the third one the mission of Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Raine (Brad Pitt) and his eight basterds (including Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz, Til Schweiger as Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz, and B.J. Novak as Pfc. Smithson "The Little Man" Utivich). The second and third storylines intertwine with the first one, but never with each other. The overall storyline of betrayal and retribution then climaxes in an inferno that would do Carrie White proud.
A masterpiece. *sheathes bowie knife*
(Running time: 153 minutes)
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