Inglourious-basterds movie trailer in HD

Quentin Tarantino can’t have been the first person to wish that the Third Reich had ended not in a bunker below the Reich Chancellory in Berlin, with no outsiders watching, but in a public area made for mass entertainment: a Paris movie theater. And that the Jews, Hitler’s special victims, might have had a crucial hand in his defeat — indeed, that a French Jewess could have ignited her own holocaust of the Führer and his top aides with the words: “My name is Shoshanna Dreyfus. And this is the face of Jewish vengeance.”
Anyway, he’s the first director we know of to spin this sweet fantasy out into a 2½-hr., four-language epic. Receiving its world premiere on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival, Inglourious Basterds — first word as in “glower,” second as in “turds” — is an alternative history of World War II from the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, the Palme d’Or winner 15 years ago. As with all of his recent work — the two Kill Bill movies and Death Proof — Basterds draws portraits of strong women facing down evil men; and in Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) and Third Reich screen star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) he’s created two of his fullest female portraits. But Basterds is long and, for the hypercharged auteur, surprisingly wan. It has to be declared a misfire.

Inglorious bastards movie cast and crew

Directed by

Quentin Tarantino
Eli Roth

Brad Pitt

Mélanie Laurent

Christoph Waltz

Eli Roth

Michael Fassbender

Diane Kruger

Daniel Brühl

Til Schweiger

Gedeon Burkhard

Jacky Ido

Inglorious bastards movie images

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Inglorious bastards movie overview

Quentin Tarantino can’t have been the first person to wish that the Third Reich had ended not in a bunker below the Reich Chancellory in Berlin, with no outsiders watching, but in a public area made for mass entertainment: a Paris movie theater. And that the Jews, Hitler’s special victims, might have had a crucial hand in his defeat — indeed, that a French Jewess could have ignited her own holocaust of the Führer and his top aides with the words: “My name is Shoshanna Dreyfus. And this is the face of Jewish vengeance.”
Anyway, he’s the first director we know of to spin this sweet fantasy out into a 2½-hr., four-language epic. Receiving its world premiere on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival, Inglourious Basterds — first word as in “glower,” second as in “turds” — is an alternative history of World War II from the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, the Palme d’Or winner 15 years ago. As with all of his recent work — the two Kill Bill movies and Death Proof — Basterds draws portraits of strong women facing down evil men; and in Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent) and Third Reich screen star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) he’s created two of his fullest female portraits. But Basterds is long and, for the hypercharged auteur, surprisingly wan. It has to be declared a misfire.

At the press conference following the film, Tarantino was asked if this was a “Jewish revenge fantasy,” and he replied, “Well, that’s not the section of the video store I’d put it in.” But Eli Roth, director of the Hostel horror movies and one of Tarantino’s Basterds, said the notion of Jews getting even with Hitler was “kosher porn. It’s something I dreamed since I was a kid.”

Tarantino has dreamed mostly of movies, and his pictures are pastiches, updatings, twistings of the films he loved in a previous life as the world’s coolest, most knowledgeable video-store clerk. Kill Bill paid homage to Hong Kong swordplay films, and Death Proof to car-crazy exploitationers of the ’70s. This one, which might seem a mixture of wartime films from the U.S. and France (it does absorb some of the aura of François Truffaut’s 1980 The Last Metro), is really, as Tarantino has said, “a spaghetti Western but with World War II iconography.” That means Sergio Leone’s Fistful trilogy with Clint Eastwood and Leone’s all-time top Western homage Once Upon a Time in the West. Tarantino sprinkles the sound track of Basterds with eight pieces by longtime Leone composer Ennio Morricone and begins with a title card telling us that the story is set “Once upon a time … in Occupied France.”

There was an Italian film called Inglorious Bastardsle translates as made in 1978 by pulp journeyman Enzo G. Castellari, one of many vigorous imitators of the Leone Westerns. Bastards ripped off Robert Aldrich’s 1967 WW II hit The Dirty Dozen, reducing the all-star 12 to a more manageable and economic five. “Whatever the Dirty Dozen did,” the poster reads, “they do it dirtier!” It starred the American actors Fred Williamson and Bo Svenson, to whom Tarantino gives a cameo as a U.S. Army colonel. Beyond its title, Tarantino’s film has no other similarities to Castellari’s. Q.T. made the whole thing up himself.

In his warscape, an octet of eight rambunctious Jews — most of them American but a couple German — have been set loose with the mission to kill and disfigure the enemy army. “A hundred Nazi scalps each” is the order of the Basterds‘ leader, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, chewing heartily on an Ozark accent), who either doesn’t make the distinction between German soldiers and Nazis or doesn’t care. While the Basterds are giving the Krauts bloody haircuts, Raine takes his pleasure carving swastikas on the foreheads of his favorite prisoners.

Inglorious bastards movie review

Quentin Tarantino is having what Martin Amis readers might call a “Yellow Dog” moment – something which happens when, following a worrying, mid-to-late period of creative uncertainty, a once dazzlingly exciting artist suddenly and catastrophically belly-flops, to the dismay of his admirers.

His new film is a cod-second world war adventure about a Jewish-American revenge squad sent into occupied France to spread terror among Nazis. Brad Pitt plays their leader, Lt Aldo Raine, and Eli Roth, the director of Hostel, is his ferocious second-in-command Sgt Donny Donowitz; Diane Kruger plays a German movie star called Bridget Von Hammersmark who has secret quasi-Dietrich sympathies with the Allies, and Michael Fassbender plays Lt Archie Hicox, a cucumber-cool British commando who in civvy street was, of all things, a film critic. Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman who has had to change what in France is a resonant surname; she owns the Parisian cinema at which the Nazi top brass, including the Führer himself, will assemble for one of Goebbels’s propaganda movies. Here is where the Basterds hope to make their hit: but opposing them is the chilling SS Colonel Hans Landa, nicely played by Tarantino’s personal casting discovery Christoph Waltz, who won the best actor award at Cannes for this performance.

It is notionally inspired by a 1970s B-movie called Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato, otherwise The Damned Armoured Train, renamed Inglorious Bastards for its American release: a war picture in the Dirty Dozen style by Italian director Enzo Castellari. But Tarantino’s debt is much more obviously to Sergio Leone, weirdly mulched in with Mel Brooks. Having seen it once in Cannes earlier this year, and again for its UK release I was struck afresh by how exasperatingly awful and transcendentally disappointing it is: a colossal, complacent, long-winded dud, a gigantic two-and-a-half-hour anti-climax, like a Quentin Tarantino film in form and mannerism but with the crucial element of genius mysteriously amputated. Over-stretched scene follows over-stretched scene in plonkingly conventional narrative order and each is stuffed with dull dialogue which made it feel like Mogadon was somehow being pumped into the cinema’s air-conditioning. The cut is now marginally different from that which premiered in Cannes, slightly longer in fact, and there appears to be a new introduction to the unendurably, unbelievably tedious scene set in a beer cellar where the actors play a guessing-game with playing cards.

There’s no doubt that the 52-year-old Waltz – an Austrian-born actor who had been plying his trade on TV until Tarantino plucked him from the ranks – is a real find, and Mélanie Laurent also deserves this leg-up to stardom. But they can’t make any real difference, and Brad Pitt gives the most wooden and charmless performance of his life; he acts and speaks as if the lower half of his face is set in concrete. Now, it is misleading to complain about boredom, when we all know how Tarantino can alchemise this into something special. In Pulp Fiction two hitmen famously put the exciting business of murder on hold while they discussed dull things like what Europeans call a quarter-pounder.But there the ostensible banality was sexy, funny and above all intentional, and the director could in any case turn the action on a sixpence into something thrilling or horrifying whenever and wherever he felt like it. He exemplified Don DeLillo’s maxim about America being “the only country in the world with funny violence”. But here the boringness is just boring, and the violence doesn’t get gasps of shock, just winces of bafflement and distaste – and boredom. Tarantino just seems to have lost his cool, lost his mojo.When I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, my traumatised complaint was that it fails as conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp. Since then, its defenders have claimed that the point of the film is that it is “kosher porn”: an over-the-top revenge fantasy for Jews. Well, erm, maybe. But it might simply have the highly un-porny effect of reminding us what actually happened. And if “kosher porn” was the point, wouldn’t it have been better to make the Basterds’ leader actually Jewish? Instead of which, their CO is Brad Pitt, the good ol’ boy from Tennessee, a part of the world in which progressive sympathies with European Jewry are – how can I put it? – atypical. Even this, moreover, isn’t exactly the point. Wildly bad-taste ahistorical fantasies about Nazi Germany are great: but here they are nullified by middlebrow good-taste cinephile stuff referencing UFA, Emil Jannings etc, in which the details of course have to be exactly right.Tarantino’s genius always lay, for me, in his audacious and provocative adventures in style, making generic textures bubble and react. His great riffs were sublime, similar to what Godard saw in Nicholas Ray: pure cinema. What happens when these surfaces fail to fizz? You get what you have here: great heavy lumps of nothing. I have always deprecated the growing and rather supercilious critical consensus that the Master’s best film is Jackie Brown – a good film, yes, but uncharacteristic, and without the brash inspiration of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or the late-flowering delirium of Kill Bill. Yet maybe this is the sort of thing that Tarantino should now work on: solid adaptations to steady and re-settle his greatness. That could be a way to put his mojo-loss into remission and return to the glory days.