Friday 8 January 2010

Inglorious Basterds

Your reviewer hasn't yet walked out of a film before the conclusion, but the drastic step was certainly considered half an hour into this. Not that the film's bad; in fact it's not far from being one of the best films of the past year. Tarantino is a master at unravelling scenes, blocking the action, building up tension through seemingly meaningless dialogue (even if he may never break the habit of having every single character talking like mid-30's white male nerds). The potential walk out was rather over the glorification of violence the film proffers.
For the rest of the movie, even with this consideration in the back of the mind, the film was greatly enjoyable, the long running time skipped by without complaint. The counter argument of course runs that it's obviously a Comic Book style movie, i.e. the violence is deliberately ridiculous, it's nothing more than a revenge fantasy, which would be fine by this reviewer. However, the problem with Inglorious is that it's rather too good to be simply a cartoonish reveller in wish-fulfillment violence. Daniel Bruhl, Christopher Waltz, the Goebbels characterisation, all let us in (largely due to terrific acting, though give Quentin some credit there too) to full believable characters, so the director's denying their rights by promoting their horrendous demises seems slightly off colour. An interesting film to consider, and you can't give much higher praise than that.
And, we need the occasional reminder to counteract all the rubbish surrounding, Brad Pitt is a fine actor.

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