Inglourious Basterds: A Movie Review |
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Posted on January 13 2010 under Arts & Entertainment
 By Aaron Dumont
Inglorious Basterds - **** Heroes and villains switch, victories go tainted and angels and demons run about in Quentin Tarantino's bold, loud, recklessly audacious masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds. This is a beautiful movie. It is epic and thorny in scope and rich with allusions, multiple interpretations, theatrics and mise-en-scene. One may confuse Inglourious Basterds as simply an ignorant splendor of hipster movie karaoke and bloodbaths, but the movie addresses so much more. Through the Fountain of Youth stream of ideas, showdowns and clever deliveries, Quentin Tarantino transfers ruminations of history, war, morals and, of course, movies, with the rushes, depths, mysteries and conflicts that surround them all. From the first encounter between a French farmer hiding Jews beneath his attic and the much feared Jew Hunter--a scene primal and thespian in emotion and suspense, as it is pastoral and dreamlike in composition and landscape--Tarantino announces himself as big, bold and revolutionary, and spends the rest of the movie effortlessly proving himself right up until the explosive end. The movie may remind a viewer of, perhaps, a masterful literary work (the movie is even divided in chapters). If Quentin Tarantino was a writer, this would be his masterpiece. Through all the youthful flurry of love and passion that Inglourious Basterds so proudly displays, its genius is spread with even balance, gently passing on to the next. There are showdowns. There are battles of wills, mind and guns. There are wild schemes, delirious plots and cackling, careful strategies that fuel the colorful, varying characters in the dizzying, delusional, rampaging world of Inglourious Basterds. Yes, but Quentin Tarantino adds not merely a cinephilic subtext and beautiful, impressionistic pageantry to his alternate history. The movie meditates on questions, morals and what-ifs, and surrounds itself around film's relationship with culture, society and history. The toppling of the Third Reich is achieved through the cinema, and the movie-within-a-movie in Inglourious Basterds--Nation's Pride--is itself fueled by greed, war and violence. The movie is alive and kicking with philosophy, poetry and curiosity, punctuated by paroxysms of bloodshed. It works on so many different readings: as entertainment, as a wondrous, feverish, impassioned cine-essay (think Histoire(s) du Tarantino or Quentin le Fou?), as a crazy but oddly profound look at intolerance, racism and nationalism flipped and spun and turned upside down. It's commentary, it's movie-making love, it's simply satisfying. I can't say any more, I'm speechless. I'd tell you more, but I would feel bad for spoiling all the wonder and genius that went into this ferocious, bold, massive, bloated and brilliant work of art. It's enough to turn the most jaded of old movie critics back into a young cinephile again. |
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