Inglourious Basterds

[Cde.]

I think it comes down to what sort of tone the rest of the film sends and the attitude Tarantino shows toward these characters later on. Is Tarantino trying to add a sense of moral ambiguity, or does he celebrate actions like those committed by the Basterds? Without having seen the film I'm thinking it's the latter, based on his recent comments about violence in cinema.

[Gregor Samsa]

Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.

So I take it we're not gonna see Quentin adapting Shoah any time soon.

[RodneyOz]

The tone IS celebratory, although the strength and grisliness of the

Spoiler

scalping scenes

in particular make almost everyone in the audience flinch (but not in a "Well, NOW the Basterds have gone too far" kind of way). There is a little moral questioning (well, poking, perhaps) when

Spoiler

he intercuts from scenes of the Basterds killing guards in 'cool' ways leading up to the climax to Hitler in the cinema audience thrilling to the carnage in the 'National Pride' film-within-a-film in the exact same way that the 'real' cinema audience would be reacting to the violence they're watching

but Tarantino doesn't really do much with it.

The morality of the movie is: killing Nazis is good. Torturing them first - even better. And if

Spoiler

one of the Nazis seems to be a decent human being despite being a member of the German army and thus having to kill members of the opposing army, then he'll just HAVE to either say something horrible about a female character OR hit a female character, so we can forget our sympathies towards him and applaud him getting shot by that female character. Which actually happens TWICE in the film to different pairs of characters.

One similarity with Shoah though - no footage of the camps or the Holocaust. It's there as a 'known' but not depicted.

[cdnchris]

So I take it we're not gonna see Quentin adapting Shoah any time soon.

If he did it would certainly be an interesting interpretation if nothing else.

[swo17]

Nine hours of Tarantino filming his own flabby talking head--no thanks.

[Narshty]

I'm not going to adapt anything ever again. I like the idea that it's all by me, that it starts with me and a blank piece of paper, and it ends with me and a movie. It didn't exist before me and it's all created by me, and it's all completely a product of my imagination.

This is disappointing news, because Jackie Brown has by far the richest storyline any of his films has ever featured. Tarantino's biggest weakness is in the stories he writes - he's just doesn't have a capacity for the ground-level stories themselves, despite being very skilled at the mechanics of storytelling. Kill Bill, Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds all have terribly anaemic narratives - a series of incidents that are complete in and of themselves. While anecdotal set pieces he can come up with, he doesn't seem to be able to build them to resonate off one another and expand into a broader picture; there's no accumulative power to his recent storylines. Kill Bill is a series of virtually unrelated situations. Death Proof's construction is pretty terrible, giving us no-one to root for (for one, why isn't Michael Parks tracking Kurt Russell in the second half?). Inglourious Basterds has an extremely scrappy plotline, with lots of separate incident, ultimately deciding upon the one and only mission we see in the film in the final hour.

On Pulp Fiction, the only segment with a real story is the Butch/Marsellus Wallace debacle, and that was Roger Avary's invention. The other segments are basically situations (cleaning up a crime scene; taking a boss's girlfriend out), but are transformed with a lot of flourish and energy and detail. Reservoir Dogs also has one central situation that spirals off from it in all directions to explore how the characters got to this point, and it works very well.

However much pleasure there is to be got from the loving craft of his movies (and I think it's considerable), it's still disappointing to see such . There's no emotional build from a careful construction of things finally clicking together and accumulating in ways that catch you off guard and add to the excitement - instead, it's from one enjoyable set-piece to the next, like a series of equally levelled stepping stones, then it's all over.

He also seems much less interested in using past genres to perfume his films and is now obsessed with acting out their rituals, but that's another argument.

[Mr Sausage]

Reservoir Dogs also has one central situation that spirals off from it in all directions to explore how the characters got to this point, and it works very well.

No doubt part of the reason it works so well is that the "the ground-level" story, as you call it, was adapted pretty much beat for beat from another movie (the last act of Ringo Lam's City on Fire, which Tarantino accurately saw as having enough narrative potential to hang a separate movie on). Tarantino makes it his own with, as you put it so well, "a lot of flourish and energy and detail," but he's only able to do that because he's working with a solid narrative kernal supplied by someone else from which he can expand and elaborate and toy with. It seems increasingly like Tarantino hasn't either the skill or the patience to invent solid narrative centres, as even his best movies are demonstrateably not an "idea that it's all by [him]."

[colinr0380]

Sadly I had the same reaction to that article about not wanting to adapt other works again. It also seems to misunderstand that a great director can take another's work and in adapting it add their own touches and turn it into an individual statement (perhaps one of the reasons why the City on Fire homaging/stealing was given a pass in the first film as it could seem that Tarantino succeeded in adapting existing material while adding his unique voice). Look at Cronenberg: he's written films from scratch, taken on pre-existing assignments at a late stage such as The Fly, and adapted novels from authors with extremely powerful individual voices of their own - yet the films all share similar recognisable Cronenberg-style traits.

I agree with Narshty as it seems that the later films have the energy but no reason for being and no structure, so you then can't digress from a narrative that never existed in the first place, or feel any tension or excitement for the characters in any sustained way (Death Proof has to be the ultimate example of this for me). I just don't understand why it wouldn't work out for Tarantino to leave the story up to someone with more ability, or at least more interest in writing an engaging narrative. It would give the chance for another truly touching film after Jackie Brown, and also let Tarantino concentrate fully on adding the film quote embellishments that he does best without having to worry about 'creating' characters.

[kaujot]

Apparently he wants to adapt Len Deighton.

[Fiery Angel]

Lisa Schwarzbaum kind of fawns over it.

[Robert de la Cheyniest]

Glenn Kenny likes it a lot as well. Which makes me curious...

[Finch]

For once you can't accuse the trailers of misselling the film: it is a mess and then some. The first 15 minutes or so that comprise the first chapter are excellent: the extended conversation between Landa and the French farmer is a great introduction to Waltz' character; he is supremely gifted (fluent in four languages) and fiercely intelligent; he lulls people into a false sense of security, breaking down their barriers with his charm and subtly drawing out the information he wants. Tarantino's handling of the first chapter is pitch-perfect: the dialogue and pacing flow naturally; Robert Richardson's cinematography is exquisite without calling attention to itself and the entire scene is just a little masterpiece of sustained tension. If the entire film had been about Landa's pursuit of Shosanna and the Jewish population as such, I daresay it would have been a lot more coherent and captivating than what Tarantino ended up shooting. Which leads to me to the many issues with this film. It can't make up its mind about what it wants to be and it never manages to combine the two storylines of Shosanna and the bastards in any meaningful and coherent way. Landa is about the only thing that links the two plots together and I feel that QT should have settled on one scenario only to explore with this character, and developed that one scenario fully. Like J K Rowling, Tarantino needed a story editor to keep his imagination in check but I guess that folks around Tarantino are, akin to the situation with George Lucas, too awed of the man or blinded by the legacy of his early work that they can't give him constructive feedback.

The film's subsequent chapters still have fleeting moments of brilliance (mainly when Waltz is involved): it even has an inspired, laugh-out-loud (for me anyway) scene involving Landa, three of the bastards and Brigid von Hammermarck that seems like a harmless, light-hearted conversation but plays out as an interrogation with the subtlest of means, making great use of the multi-lingual aspect of the film. What makes the scene even funnier is that it doesn't just establish the character's superiority but also the actor's: Christoph Waltz gives a masterclass here that made me feel acutely embarrassed for Kruger, Pitt and Roth. It doesn't help that QT has only one memorable character in Landa but his casting choices really hurt the film: this is easily one of Pitt's worst performances and Roth's insufferable smugness makes the "Bear Jew" sequence (excerpts of which are in the trailers) all the more aggravating because QT gives Roth's character an entrance that will only have fed Roth's ego further. I can only dream what someone like Deadwood's W. Earl Brown (Dan Dority) might have done with that scene and a properly developed character. As characters, the bastards are barely one-dimensional and most of them have very little screentime. So why call it Inglourious Basterds? It only fuels the argument that QT should have stuck to the Shosanna storyline alone or treated both stories in separate films.

Other than Waltz, only Melanie Laurent and Daniel Bruehl (in a typecast part) walk away with their dignity intact. It's too confused and rarely gets the tone right simply because it tries to hit too many at the same time: moments of tension are ruined when QT follows it up with attempts at Nazi caricature which in itself would be fine if it was intelligent satire a la Lubitsch but here we get a fleeting shot of Goebbels fucking his French translator/mistress from behind and howling like a coyote. Says it all really.

[R0lf]

^ I think these problems might not have been such an issue if Tarantino had made a longer movie or used a different format such as the television series he once suggested for the project. Its heightened by the fact that most of the scenes are also incredibly long so the movie feels like it has only four or five scenes before it ends.

[Vic Pardo]

Question about the script of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS:

If Col. Landa has to speak French, German and Italian in the film, who wrote those passages in the screenplay? It's a safe bet Tarantino didn't write in those languages. I'm assuming he wrote the dialogue in English and gave it to someone else to translate into the appropriate languages. Who did the translation? OR did he get someone else to come up with original dialogue in those languages for those scenes? In which case, then who wrote this dialogue?

I think it's a key question. Does anyone here have any idea?

Thanks.

[Finch]

Tom Tywker translated the dialogue for the German characters from English into German for QT (and he gets a Thank You credit for it); I'd imagine QT found someone else to do likewise for the French and Italian lines.

[Anhedionisiac]

If Col. Landa has to speak French, German and Italian in the film, who wrote those passages in the screenplay? It's a safe bet Tarantino didn't write in those languages.

The script is simply written in english with notes explaining that such-and-such dialogue will be spoken in such-and-such language.

[Finch]

Question about the script of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS:

If Col. Landa has to speak French, German and Italian in the film, who wrote those passages in the screenplay?

Actually, he also speaks English which makes it all the more remarkable how effortlessly Waltz changes between several languages often in the same scene.

[Vic Pardo]

If Col. Landa has to speak French, German and Italian in the film, who wrote those passages in the screenplay? It's a safe bet Tarantino didn't write in those languages.

The script is simply written in english with notes explaining that such-and-such dialogue will be spoken in such-and-such language.

That doesn't even begin to answer the question now, does it?

Mr. Finch answered a third of the question (thank you, Mr. Finch), so we've still got two-thirds of the way to go.

[domino harvey]

It answered the question completely. You're asking about the shooting script, which would, like any shooting script, be filled with things the director didn't explicitly write

[Vic Pardo]

It answered the question completely. You're asking about the shooting script, which would, like any shooting script, be filled with things the director didn't explicitly write

Evidently, when the actor in IB who will be playing a part in French, German or Italian holds the script in his hand, the dialogue on the page in front of him will be in the necessary language for the scene. Since Quentin obviously didn't write that dialogue, somebody else did. Mr. Finch informs us that Tom Tykwer (writer-director of RUN, LOLA, RUN) supplied the German dialogue. Which makes sense, since you want a screenwriter who is fluent in that language, rather than just a translator, and would know how to turn Tarantino's purple prose into something that a German actor would be comfortable saying. I'm just curious who worked on the French and Italian parts.

It's an important issue, since you're doing more than translating. You have to be a screenwriter capable of shaping the dialogue into something that sounds right to a native speaker of that language. What if an Italian working solely as a translator did the translations of Leone & Co.'s original dialogue in the spaghetti westerns? Would we have gotten the memorable dialogue that American actor-writer Mickey Knox supplied to THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY ("When ya have to shoot, shoot, don't talk") and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST ("Looks like we're shy one horse." "No, you brought two too many")?

Disney's been using interesting writers to rewrite the dialogue for Miyazaki's English dubs. Renowned comic book/graphic novel writer Neil Gaiman ("Sandman") worked off someone else's translations to write the English dialogue for PRINCESS MONONOKE. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison (E.T.) did the same for PONYO.

We can always tell a sub or dub job that did NOT use a skilled screenwriter to rework the translations into something that makes sense in English. Check out Toho's original English dubs of so many Godzilla movies. When they were released in the U.S. in the '60s, a dubbing house in New York redid the English tracks from scratch.

[accatone]

Have not seen the film yet but http://www.newsweek.com/id/212016 - quite interesting how ambivalent reactions to this film are - in Germany as well. However i somehow do not have the slightest interest to watch this...

[kaujot]

Ebert's pre-review article. Word of caution, there are some spoilers.

[numediaman2]

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian trashes it.

[Finch]

I've been thinking quite a bit about the film since I saw it and my opinion of it has actually improved a little. While I still think that it's hurt by some of the casting choices and that at least Shosanna's story would have warranted a film of its own, I imagine that Basters may have some value in the context of where it stands within the WWII genre. Some critics have been outraged by its lack of respect for history but I feel that it works in the film's favour. I don't mean a lack of respect for the holocaust (which, to my recollection, the film doesn't mention at all) but a lack of deference to the Nazis. What the film does, and brings it in line with the likes of To Be Or Not To Be and The Producers (though it is clearly inferior to both), is that it attempts to deny the Nazis the kind of cultural legacy and myth-making that they tried for in their own films and which they would have hoped for beyond The Third Reich. In relation to that, it also represents, as far as I am aware (though feel free to correct me), a first in film in that it shows

Spoiler

Hitler being not just killed but shot to bloody pieces and burned.

.

In that respect, I found it refreshingly different to Downfall where the reticence to show Hitler's death was, to me, a major flaw in the film. By not showing his death and "tastefully" panning away when Goebbels shoots himself, Downfall defers to, and contributes to the myth of the very thing that it presumably meant to humanise. The sequence in Basterds is clearly wish fulfilment but I also felt that it was long overdue that somebody had the nerve to break a taboo and not be deferential. It is vulgar and crass, to be sure, but ultimately, Basterds strikes me as a much moral film than the likes of Downfall (and frankly, I find the shower scene in Schindler's List far more offensive than anything in Tarantino's film). And for everything it gets wrong (and there's plenty of it), there are stretches or moments in Basterds I find memorable for all the right reasons: how the camera stays on Melanie Laurent's face registering all her conflicting emotions when she realises she shares a table with the man who killed her family, how Tarantino, who worships at the altar of cinema, makes the ultimate sacrifice in this film so that the world can be saved - a moving gesture in a film that whenever it works feels more humane and real than some of his earlier films that have been near universally praised (the only film of his I unreservedly love is Jackie Brown; everything else I have varying degrees of admiration for or feel indifferent about).

In fact, the biggest flaw of the film for me is that Tarantino is operating on the level of Zucker-style parodies when he ridicules the Nazis. Not that there is anything wrong with Zucker-style parody but if only it was on the level of Airplane rather than Scary Movie. Lubitsch or even Mel Brooks it isn't.

For positive reviews, here's Ed Gonzalez at Slant: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_ ... sp?ID=4455" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I also thought Glenn Kenny did a good write-up (even if I'm nowhere near as enthusiastic about it as he is): http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some ... alism.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some ... terds.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Mr Sausage]

By not showing his death and "tastefully" panning away when Goering shoots himself, Downfall defers to, and contributes to the myth of the very thing that it presumably meant to humanise.

?

Not to derail the thread, but since Downfall was supposed to be nominally from Trudl Jung's point of view, the portrayel of Hitler's death from outside the room with simply the shots heard and then the bodies carried out--ie. as she witnessed it--didn't bother me in the slightest.