A friend and I took in Quentin Tarentino's newest movie "Inglourious Basterds," on Saturday evening. I have only a few things to say about the film.
The dialogue is the finest Tarentino has ever written and the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz deserves serious consideration for an Oscar. The movie itself is a failure for one simple reason: senseless and wanton violence.
Despite the readily apparent homages to the spaghetti western genre in the plot, the music and the dialogue (to say nothing of the fact that most of the film is in German and French), QT has forgotten that cinema violence serves a purpose for the plot otherwise it is simply pornographic. The classic spaghetti westerns also eschewed graphic violence for the most part, while QT obviously enjoys the idea of two men shooting one another in the testes. What one remembers after leaving the film is the graphic, porn-style close-ups of violence and its aftermath, not its more redeeming characteristics.
This is a shame, because the dialogue and the characters, particular that of SS officer Hans Lander are finely crafted, compelling and often quite humorous.
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Strange that we both would return from the ether on the same day. Haven't seen IB, a might not until DVD. I forget the publication I saw this in, but the description that seemed most apt was: "Tarantino embraces the violence he once parodied."
ReplyDeletei want to see both IB and District 9... but netflix will likely save me the trouble (money?) of seeing either in theaters.
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