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DVD
FEATURES:
Description:
The new film from
director Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, begins in
German-occupied France, where Soshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent)
witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel
Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Soshanna narrowly escapes and flees to
Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of
a cinema. Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt)
organises a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of
retribution. Known to their enemies as "The Basterds," Raine's squad
joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark
(Diane Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of the Third
Reich. Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Soshanna is
poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own...
Review:
Although Quentin Tarantino has cherished Enzo G. Castellari's 1978
"macaroni" war flick The Inglorious Bastards for most of his
film-geek life, his own Inglourious Basterds is no remake. Instead,
as hinted by the Tarantino-esque misspelling, this is a lunatic
fantasia of WWII, a brazen re-imagining of both history and the
behind-enemy-lines war film subgenre. There's a Dirty
Not-Quite-Dozen of mostly Jewish commandos, led by a Tennessee good
ol' boy named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who reckons each warrior owes
him one hundred Nazi scalps--and he means that literally. Even as
Raine's band strikes terror into the Nazi occupiers of France, a
diabolically smart and self-assured German officer named Landa (Christoph
Waltz) is busy validating his own legend as "The Jew Hunter." Along
the way, he wipes out the rural family of a grave young girl
(Melanie Laurent) who will reappear years later in Paris, dreaming
of vengeance on an epic scale.
Now, this
isn't one more big-screen comic book. As the masterly opening
sequence reaffirms, Tarantino is a true filmmaker, with a deep
respect for the integrity of screen space and the tension that can
accumulate in contemplating two men seated at a table having a
polite conversation. IB reunites QT with cinematographer Robert
Richardson (who shot Kill Bill), and the colours and textures they
serve up can be riveting, from the eerie red-hot glow of a tabletop
in Adolf Hitler's den, to the creamy swirl of a Parisian pastry in
which Landa parks his cigarette. The action has been divided, Pulp
Fiction-like, into five chapters, each featuring at least one
spellbinding set-piece. It's testimony to the integrity we mentioned
that Tarantino can lock in the ferocious suspense of a scene for
minutes on end, then explode the situation almost faster than the
eye and ear can register, and then take the rest of the sequence to
a new, wholly unanticipated level within seconds.
Again, be warned: This is not your "Greatest Generation," Saving
Private Ryan WWII. The sadism of Raine and his boys can be as
unsavory as the Nazi variety; Tarantino's latest cinematic protégé,
Eli (director of Hostel) Roth, is aptly cast as a self-styled
"golem" fond of pulping Nazis with a baseball bat. But get past
that, and the sometimes disconcerting shifts to another location and
another set of characters, and the movie should gather you up like a
growing floodtide. Tarantino told the Cannes Film Festival audience
that he wanted to show "Adolf Hitler defeated by cinema." Cinema
wins. --Richard T. Jameson
Cast List:
Brad Pitt ... Lt.
Aldo Raine
Mélanie Laurent ... Shosanna Dreyfus
Christoph Waltz ... Col. Hans Landa
Eli Roth ... Sgt. Donny Donowitz
Michael Fassbender ... Lt. Archie Hicox
Diane Kruger ... Bridget von Hammersmark
Daniel Brühl ... Pvt Fredrick Zoller
Til Schweiger ... Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz
Gedeon Burkhard ... Cpl. Wilhelm Wicki
Jacky Ido ... Marcel
B.J. Novak ... Pfc. Smithson Utivich
Omar Doom ... Pfc. Omar Ulmer
August Diehl ... Major Dieter Hellstrom
Denis Menochet ... Perrier LaPadite
Sylvester Groth ... Joseph Goebbels
Martin Wuttke ... Adolf Hitler
Rod Taylor ... Winston Churchill
Anne-Sophie Franck ... Mathilda
Number of discs: 1
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