Inglorious Basterds

I always look forward to a Tarantino, although you’re never sure which Tarantino is going to show up. As it happens, we get a pretty good one tonight.

The film is set during World War Two in Nazi occupied France and is played out sort of like a western. The opening ‘chapter’, as the film calls them, sets a pattern that the rest of the film will follow.

SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christian Waltz), the 'Jew Hunter', is at the farmhouse of Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), a local farmer, who is suspected of sheltering a neighbouring Jewish family. The tension builds during the scene as Landa interrogates the farmer with built in German efficiency. Landa is the ‘good cop-bad cop’ all in one, polite friendly official one minute, chilling evil bastard the next.



This is one of those big Tarantino dialogue scenes and during it you're never quite sure what’s going to happen next. The masterstroke here is that we all know what happened in the war and how that turned out but we’re now in a Tarantino parallel universe where he's prepared to take liberties with history. This is a film all about revenge, where he wants to put the boot on the other foot, rewrite history, and give the Jews a chance to get their own back. So anything can happen.

On this occasion, what probably would have happened happened, and the farmer sacrifices the family for his own survival. Only one member of the family, the teenage Shosanna, survives and manages to get away.

Then we finally get to meet the eponymous Basterds. They are a kind of Jewish Dirty Dozen with Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) at their helm. They have arrived in France with revenge on their minds and are intent on brutally killing and scalping as many Nazi's as they can get their hands on. They take immense pleasure in this project, especially baseball bat wielding Eli Roth with his own trademark style of retribution, as they give the Nazi’s a taste of their own inhumanity.



The only downside to the Basterds is that we don’t see enough of them and their crazed brand of vengeance because the film quickly moves back to Shosanna (Melanie Laurents), who is also plotting revenge. She seems to have fallen on her feet and has ‘inherited’ a cinema from an ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’, improbable though this may seem. I'm as suspicious as Landa on that one. When German war hero Fredrick Zoller gives her the eye she shuns him but when he persists in his attention she finds herself in the situation where her cinema is selected for the première of a film paying tribute to Zoller's heroics, also starring him. Equally improbable is that all the Third Reich's highest ranking officers, even Hitler, will be attending. For this reason, the première also catches the eye of the Basterds, who see it as an opportunity to bring about an early end to the war. Cue Mike Meyers, who pops up as the Allies send a film critic turned spy (Michael Fassbender) over to help and David Bowie’s ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ is used to dramatic effect as the two fractions prepare their different plans for destroying the cinema with all inside, and as one of many nods to other films.



'Inglourious Basterds' is a collection of long scenes, loosely connected to each other, which kind of come together but the film's two similar plots never actually meet in the middle. Which I assume is very deliberate, I think he's been learning or unlearning from the Coen Brothers, depending on your point of view.

It’s been said that some of the scenes drag on, I didn't think that at all. They all stay interesting despite their length. Occasionally deeply serious, at other times humorous and you wonder whether you're allowed to laugh or not. Overall it all has a nice pace to it and the two and half hours simply fly by.

A word about Christoph Waltz, who probably stole the show in a film that contained many impressive performances. Throughout the film Tarantino made use of English, German, French and even a bit of Italian and Waltz acted in all three, as well as playing the part of Landa brilliantly. Brad Pitt’s performance is also top draw (again), all the way from his minimalist Italian to his interesting line in forehead carving. I really think I’m becoming a Pitt fan? Another one to single out is Melanie Laurents who easily upstages Tarantino's hailed new muse Diane Kruger.



Certainly one of the best films I've seen this year and I haven't even mentioned the ending.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

I read a synopsis of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ last week and it turns out it’s one of those stories that I so love... backwards... and then forwards... and then backwards again... The complexity of it means that I’d probably be lost before the end of the opening titles but I loved the general idea of it.

In the end though I needn’t have worried because the studio has done a bit of dumbing down of the story, which meant I didn’t get lost at all but the movie clearly suffered at the hands of this tampering.

At the start we see Henry, the time travelling librarian, at the age of six in a car with his mother. The car gets shunted and this triggers Henry into a time jump, his first. Seconds later, he is back in the present but standing at the road side as the car driven by his mother crashes into a lorry.

His elder self appears alongside him to comfort him and to reassure him about all this time jump malarkey. Henry has a rare genetic anomaly that causes him to live his life on a shifting timeline, involuntarily jumping back and forth through time. He can’t control it and has no idea when he’s going to travel or where to, except that it often seems to be triggered by stress, and that he usually travels to places related to his life, just at a different time. This could of course all just be a great ruse and an excuse for nipping down the pub when his misses isn’t looking but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. A slight inconvenience is that he never gets to take anything with him and so arrives stark naked, meaning that his first task is always finding something to wear.

In the next scene, the grown up Henry (Eric Bana) is at work in the library when he is approached by Clare (Rachel McAdams). He’s never met her before but this babe declares undying love for him. No never happened to me either. He’s oddly reluctant about her offer of dinner. Just get in there mate, don’t worry about the detail, just nod in the right places and go along with it. To his credit, his reluctant seems to have evaporated by the time she talks herself into his apartment and takes her clothes off.

Clare claims to have known him all her life because he has been visiting during her childhood and teenage years from the future but because he isn’t in the future yet, he doesn’t know that. Now I’m not sure how it’s handled in the book but we’ve just been given 90% of the plot in the first ten minutes...

Then we get flashbacks to when Henry visited her in the past but what we don’t get to see enough of is the progression of their relationship. What caused Clare, as a young girl, to fall so madly in love with him? She just seemed to believe that they were destined to be together and it was so inevitable that she never bothered to doubt it. It’s like chunks of the story have been cut out and it doesn’t help you to relate to the characters.



It’s the same with other characters. Henry’s father drifts into the story at one stage and there’s an obviously been some history there and there’s a story to be told but it never happens and his father disappears again.

The other 10% of the plot is revealed not long later when we find out that Henry dies at a young age. So that leaves us with no suspense left at all, leaving us with basically just a rom-com.

They get married, of course, which Henry nearly misses by dematerializing just before his bride walks down the aisle. Conveniently, when he time jumps he usually seems to pop straight back, although having aged or un-aged. Several sticky situations, like the one at the wedding, were avoided which could have added to the plot but equally might have ensured we ended up with an unpalatable slapstick comedy instead.



There's only one moment where he leaves for a long period of time, which causes an argument but the rest of the time it’s just played as a bit of an inconvenience, like he was diabetic or had a lisp or something like that. You would have thought his time travelling would have caused a lot more grief for everyone but you just don’t get that impression.

In fact very few people seem to notice his disappearances and reappearances or his random ageing and un-ageing, those that do just accept it, but then the makeup department seemed to simply rely on you counting the grey hairs on his head to gauge his age. It didn’t work. This was no Benjamin Button on that front, it was almost impossible to distinguish whether he was a younger or older.

They try for a baby and Clare easily gets pregnant, time and time again, each time the baby time-travels out of the womb and Clare risks bleeding to death but I’ve made that sound more dramatic than it was. Henry decides he’s not going to put her through another pregnancy and has a vasectomy. Undeterred, Clare slopes off to meet a younger pre-vasectomy version of Henry who has time travelled forward to the present and shags him in a parking lot. She falls pregnant again and this one goes full turn. Bingo, time travelling Daughter is born.



It’s a film that seems in a rush to tell its story and consequently doesn’t, it trips over itself on occasion and unnecessarily so because at only an hour and forty minutes, they had time to spare to flesh out the full story, which I’m sure is in there somewhere.

Apparently in the book, two of the things that keep Henry in the present are running and sex, as both these activities relieve his stresses. As a big fan of both, I was sad to see these aspects overlooked. He also has to avoid alcohol but it was never really explained why. Another good stress reliever surely?

What we have in the end is another film about a couple who face adversity due to their circumstances but in the end, of course, love wins through, except this has a bit of time travel in it. Apparently the book isn't as mushy.

So a pleasant enough film but incredibly disappointing. It wasn’t a film that needed too much dissecting in the pub afterwards.