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Inglourious Basterds

November 23, 2009 10:14 PM

everal of us went and watched Inglourious Basters a few weekends ago. While the thing wasn't completely unwatchable, it was still pretty fucking bad. This thing currently has an 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which only makes me think that Rotten Tomatoes is completely worthless.

My biggest problem with Basterds--aside from the completely pointless bad spelling--was the fact that literally about 80 percent of the movie consists of conversations around tables. The movie starts with a Nazi Jew hunter and a French farmer sitting at a table. Then a junior Nazi war hero imposes his presence on a Jew-in-hiding at a table. Later, his superiors bring her to a fancy Nazi dinner featuring the Nazi that killer her family and lots of tables. The supposed protagonists have a conversation with some Nazis in a forest clearing and probably think about how much they wish they had a table. Hitler seethes while sitting at a table. The undercover Allies meet a double agent and exchange small talk for what seems like hours while sitting at a table. The Jew hunter takes the undercover Allies to a room, where he sits them at a table and offers his complete surrender. Then a theater burns down and the entire Nazi party, including Hitler, dies. End of war.

The entire movie felt like an extended cut of the terrible, terrible ship's mast conversation in Death Proof. Instead of action, we get conversation. Instead of substance, we get one liners. Instead of plot, we get monologues. I was bored with the first scene after a few minutes, and then the whole rest of the movie was more of the same.

But there were other things that simply didn't make sense. Why, for example, was the movie called Inglourious Basterds to begin with? The Basterds are a group of undercover Allies in occupied France who go around killing Nazis in all manner of gruesome ways, but the movie is much more about Shoshana, the Jew that escapes the Jew hunter at the beginning. She's the character the viewer can probably most identify with. And it's her plan that kills the Germans. For the majority of the movie, the Basterds seem like an afterthought, and they completely fail both times that they have a substantive mission to carry out; by the end, only two survive, and that's only because the Nazi that captures them decides not to kill them.

And that's another thing--why the fuck didn't that guy kill them? Throughout the movie, we are repeatedly shown what a ruthless, untrusting motherfucker this guy is. This is a guy that really thinks that Jews and rats are cut from the same cloth. This is a guy who mercilessly kills Jews and doesn't lose a wink of sleep over it. He doesn't just buy into being a Nazi, he fucking loves it. He relishes it. In this regime, he is given complete freedom to be his sadistic, murderous self. So when he, at the end, decides that he's going to switch sides just because he wants a house on Nantucket, it doesn't make any fucking sense. This guy doesn't want a big house surrounded by old money, he wants a basement torture chamber and an endless supply of pseudo-people to play with. And why--after demonstrating that he's essentially a human lie detector--does he decide that he's going to give the good guys all his weapons and let them tie him up? It's not clever or ironic, it's lazy.

This is a movie so ineptly made that it somehow manages to make Brad Pitt--an actor I can't recall ever not liking--and makes him a one-note caricature. And here again, it's not funny or clever, it's just lazy. And unentertaining.

To review: if you want to see endless table-based conversation punctuated by pointless gore and violence all carried out by characters with absolutely no substance, then this is the movie for you. Otherwise, stay the fuck away.



4 Comments


Santi said:

Fail.

Best movie of the year so far.

November 24, 2009 1:16 AM



Ismael Tapia II said:

That's an absurd statement, man. Seriously. How was it the best movie of the year?

November 24, 2009 1:12 PM



Anne Onnimus said:

So you hate dialogue in general? Or the specific dialogue in the movie? I'm surprised you were unmoved by the tension in all those scenes.

I could be wrong, but I think the movie was preliminarily titled, "One Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France," which clearly would have been far superior.

Despite the single flaw of the title, I thought it was absolutely great. I was completely entertained the entire time.

November 25, 2009 9:59 AM



Anonymous said:

I haven't seen it, but i have to say that you're the first person i know who saw it who didn't like it. i guess it needed more butt rock.

November 28, 2009 8:50 AM



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