Inglourious Basterds [sic]

Started by brockly, May 20, 2003, 06:05:39 AM

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picolas

Quote from: New Feeling on August 11, 2009, 01:37:36 AM
Just found out that the press screening that I am attending got bumped from thursday to tomorrow!!  I'll be watching this thing in 12 hours 

:shock: :shock: :shock: :yabbse-smiley:
review?

children with angels

In the U.S. are they taking the word Basterds off the public posters on the subway, etc.? Because they are in the U.K., for some reason. To begin with I assumed it was a marketing ploy, but now I'm wondering whether it's just to do with the naughty word factor (which would be ridiculous, considering it's not correctly spelled: sort of like bleeping out a bleep).
"Should I bring my own chains?"
"We always do..."

http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/
http://thelesserfeat.blogspot.com/

New Feeling

OK

First of all, I loved it.  Having read the script in advance, I knew going in that I was already very into what Tarantino was trying to do with this movie, and that if he didn't make any major mistakes this was going to be one of my favorites.  So take that for what it's worth.  And it turns out that Tarantino didn't make any major mistakes, and that this is indeed one of my favorite movies. 

Quentin's 6th movie (or so) is a crazy, messy, exhilarating 5 act play that climaxes with the emotional high point of his body of work, and should satisfy even the Kill Bill and Death Proof haters while continuing to evolve in the direction he's been going in with his post-millennial work.  It is definitely closest to Kill Bill in style and tone of all QT's previous works, in that hyperkenetic super-duper-cinema kind of way.  But the mix-master homaging seems to be come more naturally, and while he's still working in movie fantasyland, the real spectre of WW2 adds a certain weight to the proceedings that seemed to be missing from KB or most viewers.  I think this is the closest Quentin will ever come to making a "Fantasy" movie, and I think in a way this is his Lord of the Rings.  While the scenes of violence ring shockingly and hilariously true, the rest of the film exists on a purely poetic movie-movie level of theatricality that is for the most part incredibly executed, in particular by another incredible collection of performers.

Christopher Waltz's Hans Landa is simply one of the great movie villains and all the praise he's received is much deserved.  Brad Pitt is hilarious.  Melanie Laurent is very good, as is Diane Kruger.  A couple of the Basterds are barely seen and the others barely have any screen time  but when they get it they all leave a great impression.  The German basterd Stigitz is an instantly classic character, and against all odds Eli Roth's Donny Donowitz is even more classic.  I really think all the haters here will be surprised how much the warm up to this guy on screen, despite his relatively limited screentime.  There are half a dozen other great characters/performers who all have at least one great scene in this truly ensemble piece who I would love to give props to but I've got to go to bed so can't be bothered to look up their names or even type much more of this review. 

From first to last frame this is a flashy, funny, fantastical war story that's so satisfying it makes all other movies look pathetic by comparison.  I dig it.   



modage

Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Pas

hahaha exact same feeling here mod

MacGuffin

Quote from: children with angels on August 15, 2009, 05:09:30 AM
In the U.S. are they taking the word Basterds off the public posters on the subway, etc.? Because they are in the U.K., for some reason. To begin with I assumed it was a marketing ploy, but now I'm wondering whether it's just to do with the naughty word factor (which would be ridiculous, considering it's not correctly spelled: sort of like bleeping out a bleep).

Oh, those Brits and their proper English.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

pete

going to see it on wed. with QT in the crowd.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

MacGuffin

Quentin Tarantino's 'Basterds' is a glorious mash-up
To appreciate the director's World War II flick starring Brad Pitt, a knowledge of Sergio Leone, Ernst Lubitsch, Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst doesn't hurt.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Quentin Tarantino has long considered the original "Inglorious Bastards" to be his "own private little movie." So when he bought the rights to Enzo Castellari's little-seen 1978 Italian World War II flick -- later retitled "G.I. Bro" to capitalize on football-star-turned-actor Fred Williamson's presence -- the assumption was that Tarantino aimed to create another cinematic collage, similar to what he did with his two "Kill Bill" movies, martial-arts mash-ups that wore their references on their kimono sleeves.

But Tarantino's curiously spelled World War II revenge fantasia, "Inglourious Basterds," which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and arrives in theaters Friday, is full of surprises. Instead of following men on a mission, à la "The Dirty Dozen," "Basterds" offers a singular vision, one that testifies to Tarantino's evangelical belief in the power of film.

The film focuses equally on three main characters -- a Nazi officer known as the Jew Hunter (Christoph Waltz), a beautiful Parisian cinema owner (Mélanie Laurent) who receives an unexpected opportunity to avenge her family's death, and the good-ol'-boy leader (Brad Pitt) of a Nazi-scalping band of Jewish American soldiers known as "The Basterds."

The trio come together in an explosive climax that might be considered over-the-top -- at least to those who haven't voraciously watched the war-era genre movies that inspired Tarantino while writing "Basterds."

"The idea that cinema can bring down the Third Reich is a really juicy metaphor that you can do a lot with," Tarantino says. "On the other hand, it's not a metaphor at all. It's the reality of the movie."

"Basterds," then, isn't Tarantino remaking a genre. It's Tarantino remaking World War II in five original chapters. To understand the cinematic context and filmic references behind those episodes, we offer our own chapter-by-chapter guide to "Inglourious Basterds." (Warning: Specific scenes and plot points will be discussed, but no spoilers. We promise.)

CHAPTER 1 Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France ...

"Basterds" begins with a protracted confrontation between Nazi Col. Hans Landa (Waltz) and a French dairy farmer he suspects of hiding a missing Jewish family. The lengthy stand-off is pure Sergio Leone -- the quiet menace of the long shots of sparse landscapes, the tense, back-and-forth exchanges between predator and prey, not to mention the extensive use of Leone composer Ennio Morricone's music.

"I just had in my mind the way 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' used the Civil War, that it'd be really cool to do a spaghetti western using World War II iconography," Tarantino says. "The spaghetti western landscape in movies is a no-man's land. Life is cheap. Death can be right around the corner. No room for tears. And when death happens, there's some sort of sardonic quip about it."

"It's a brutal landscape," Tarantino adds, "and also a pretty good description of what life was like in Nazi-occupied France at that time."

Tarantino shoots down the rumor that he had contacted Morricone to provide an original score.

"If I'm going to have Morricone score a movie for me, I'm going to do it like Leone," he says, referring to how Leone had Morricone write the music before he began filming. "That would be great, but it would have been impossible in this case. We were already leaving the gate."

CHAPTER 2 The Basterds and the bastard

Tarantino's Hitler (Martin Wuttke), introduced in juxtaposition with meeting the Basterds crew, recalls the wartime movie practice of using Hitler's grotesque image as an object worthy of ridicule and scorn. It's not quite Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator." It's more like the fool seen bumbling around in the 1945 Bugs Bunny cartoon "Herr Meets Hare" or the kidnapped Führer in the 1942 no-budget propaganda movie "Hitler: Dead or Alive."

"Three gangsters go to Germany after an industrialist puts out a million-dollar contract on Hitler," Tarantino says, explaining the "Dead or Alive" plot. "They get him, but the S.S. surrounds them. So they take off Hitler's uniform, shave off his mustache and cut off that big lock of greasy hair that hangs in his face. When the Nazis burst in, he doesn't look like Hitler any more." The Nazis proceed to beat him mercilessly. "It's unbelievable! They're giving him the old Nazi backhand and he's just ranting and raving."

Tarantino says he isn't always using Hitler for laughs, though he loves movies like Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be," which opens with what appears to be the alarming sight of Hitler standing in the middle of Warsaw in August 1939, days before the war began.

"The part of 'Basterds' that always struck me as very 'To Be or Not to Be' is the lunch scene with [Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph] Goebbels," Tarantino says. "Just the Old World sophistication of it. There's a Lubitsch touch there. At least, I went for it, anyway. It feels like a Nazi version of a scene from 'L.A. Story.' "

CHAPTER 3 Leni and Max meet-cute

Joining Goebbels at that lunch is Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent). First seen in the film's opening chapter, Shosanna now owns a cinema in Paris. One night, as she's changing the titles on the marquee, she meets Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a war hero turned movie star, beating Audie Murphy to the punch.

Safe to say, theirs is the first-ever movie meet-cute where the topic at hand is a debate over the filmmaking merits of Leni Riefenstahl and Max Linder.

The French-born Linder was a star of European silent film, nearly Chaplin's equal as a comedian. Riefenstahl began as the superwoman of German mountain climbing movies, but is best known for directing history's most famous propaganda film, "Triumph of the Will."

"Basterds" shows more than a passing interest in moviemaking in the Third Reich, with Goebbels, its leader, seen aspiring to be like Hollywood producing icon David O. Selznick.

"Riefenstahl and Goebbels despised each other," Tarantino says. "He was in charge of every single person in the German film industry with the sole exception of her."

"We shot on the same stages that Goebbels used during the war," Tarantino adds. "It felt weird, but cool, too, with the way we were rewriting history."

CHAPTER 4 Film commando receives blue ribbon in Pabst

Tarantino has often said that if he wasn't making movies, he'd be writing about them. In "Basterds," he goes so far as to write one into the mission. Described in the script as a "young George Sanders type," Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is a British commando (not to mention a self-professed expert on the subtext of German director G.W. Pabst), very loosely modeled on writer Graham Greene.

"It's a little bit of a gimmick, but it makes sense," Tarantino says. "As an expert on German cinema, this guy could sell himself at a Nazi film event."

CHAPTER 5 Saboteurs and 'Sabotage'

The movie's three main protagonists come together at the premiere of "Nation's Pride," the propaganda movie starring Zoller. Shosanna sees the event, held at her theater, as a chance to exact revenge and comes up with a plan straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 thriller, "Sabotage."

"I learned from that movie that 35- millimeter nitrate film can be a powerful weapon," Tarantino says. "I've always wanted to use that idea."

One of the key lines of "Basterds," spoken by Pitt, is: "I think this just might be my masterpiece."

Is the actor voicing thoughts of his director?

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone asks about that," Tarantino says, laughing. "Well, what can I say? No one has ever accused me of lacking confidence."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Eli Roth barely survives acting in Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds'
The 'Hostel' writer-director costars in his friend's WWII action picture.
By Chris Lee; Los Angeles Times

The scene takes place toward the end of Quentin Tarantino's rollicking World War II action-drama "Inglourious Basterds." As fire engulfs a Parisian movie theater packed with German military commanders, pandemonium ensues, diverting attention from the real action: a heart-pounding confrontation between a crack team of Nazi-terrorizing Jewish covert operatives (the so-called "Basterds") and the Third Reich's top brass.

It's vintage Tarantino, hyper-real ultra-violence that arrives as a kind of catharsis after more than two hours of intricate plot twists and baroque dialogue as the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Raine ( Brad Pitt), do their best to destabilize German forces in Nazi-occupied France through their unique brand of terrorism: collecting the scalps of Hitler's troops.

But for cast member Eli Roth -- who portrays a merciless, baseball-bat-wielding Nazi killer dubbed "the Bear Jew" by fear-stricken German soldiers in the film, which opens Friday -- the scene is memorable for a different reason.

"We almost got incinerated," Roth exclaimed during a recent outing to Hollywood's Amoeba Music, where he was riffling through racks of DVDs. "The fire comes up. They thought it was going to burn at 400 degrees centigrade and it burned at 1,200. That's like 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit! You see the swastika fall. It was not supposed to. It was fastened with steel cables; the steel liquefied."

He paused midstory, however, discovering used copies of "Hostel" and "Hostel: Part II," the films that were produced by his friend and biggest booster Tarantino and cemented Roth's reputation as one of horror moviedom's most extreme, successful (and reviled) auteurs. Roth's primary function is to make films, you see, not act in them (his output as a writer-director-producer even spawned its own sub-category in the genre: "torture porn"). His role in "Inglourious Basterds," however, is more than simply a glorified cameo. It represents a kind of creative apotheosis in his relationship with his mentor, Tarantino -- a culminant experience that drew upon Roth's skill set as a filmmaker, his hometown and his religion.

Marveling at his movies' price tags -- "12 bucks, what a deal!" -- Roth continued his on-set story, explaining that the actor who shared the scene with him, Omar Doom, "had to go to the hospital. I was on the ground, my feet were up, I had ice packs all over me. . . . The fire department said another 10 or 15 seconds, the structure would have collapsed."

In other words, torture porn's poster boy -- the filmmaker who committed to celluloid such images as a cheerleader jumping into the air and doing a split onto a gigantic hunting knife -- and the guy who ruthlessly bludgeons, bombs and machine guns every Nazi in his path in "Inglourious Basterds" finally got to taste the pain himself.

"I got torched," Roth said solemnly.

A controversial career

Although Roth will tell you he relishes being a provocateur and enjoys pushing people's buttons ("I upset people so much they had to create a new genre for me!"), spend an afternoon with him and it becomes abundantly clear that he's done some thinking about the slagging he's taken from detractors who say his movies are misogynistic and desensitize viewers to violence, ultimately dismissing Roth as a moronic frat boy.

"When people direct insults at me, I can take it," the Boston-born New York University grad (and son of a Harvard professor) said later, sipping a protein shake (with extra glutamine). "I'm an easy target. But I know where my stuff comes from.

"I have a strong art-history background," he continued. "I could discuss all these painters I grew up looking at, authors I read. How there's far more violence in those works. Why aren't you upset about that? Instead they write about me, 'Eli Roth, that fraternity boy.' People can't get past the blood."

Most injurious to Roth -- an amiable, fast-talking workout buff who was voted Men's Fitness magazine's "most fit director" in 2006, but who, for the record, has attended precisely one frat party in his life -- is the perception in indie movie circles that he somehow glad-handed his way into Hollywood's big leagues. "I've been making movies since I was 8, working on movies since I was 18, didn't make my first movie until I was 30 and didn't even have money until I was 33," he said. "Then people are like, 'He got it easy.' It's so much easier to think I cheated than to think I worked my ass off."

Roth's career began to take off in 2002. After toiling in lowly movie production jobs for a decade, he cobbled together $1.5 million to shoot his debut feature, "Cabin Fever," a canny horror flick about a group of kids stricken with a flesh-eating virus while vacationing in the woods.

The film was a hit on the festival circuit. When Roth screened it at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2003, he showed up to the premiere drenched in fake blood in costume as Ichi the Killer, hero of an obscure Japanese crime torture film of the same name. "Cabin Fever's" crudely compelling aesthetic, as well as the director's eagerness for self-promotion, were enough to impress Tarantino, who invited Roth to his house after seeing it. "I was like P.T. Barnum," Roth recalled. "And Quentin loved that about me. He saw a lot of me in him."

"Cabin Fever" went on to take in $30 million worldwide and an additional $70 million on DVD. Roth was inundated with scripts and considered directing a big-screen adaptation of "Baywatch" (to have been titled "Baywatch 3-Double-D"), among other projects, before he told Tarantino a movie idea he had kicking around about a youth hostel in a foreign country where American tourists are tortured and murdered as sport.

The idea galvanized Tarantino. He signed on as an executive producer on 2006's "Hostel," which was billed as "Quentin Tarantino Presents," helping to propel the $4-million, independently financed film's worldwide box office to more than $80 million.

That was the start of a beautiful friendship. As Tarantino was working on the script for "Inglourious Basterds," he would enact scenes for Roth. Admiring his small turn in front of the camera in "Cabin Fever" -- Roth had to fill in for another actor who dropped out -- Tarantino cast him in a cameo in "Death Proof," the segment he directed in the '70s exploitation homage "Grindhouse." (Roth also directed a now infamous trailer for a faux-horror movie that appears within the movie, "Thanksgiving.")

"That became my audition for 'Inglourious Basterds,' " Roth recalled.

Getting into character

To hear it from Tarantino, however, Roth was not his first choice for the part of Donny Donowitz, a rage- fueled, Boston-born Jewish-American who makes his displeasure toward Nazis known in the movie primarily by dint of a Louisville Slugger to the cranium. "I had actually somebody else in mind," Tarantino said. "So I was writing for a real Boston guy. And I got to know Eli right before I started writing the script again. Eli is from Boston, and he's kind of perfect casting. In 'Death Proof,' he did my dialogue as good as anybody else in the movie. And he loved the idea of trying his hand at acting and really being a character."

But before offering him the part, Tarantino urged Roth to start thinking about how to embody Donowitz as a "360-degree character." Roth agreed and decided to clear his schedule to remain in Germany with Tarantino for the duration of "Basterds' " six-month shoot, including Christmas and New Year's Eve when nearly everyone else went home for the holidays.

"I wanted to be there not just as an actor but as a crew member and as a friend," Roth said. "It was a great feeling to help him out and pay him back for all he's done for me."

As Roth tells it, he also became Tarantino's "Jewish fact-checker" on the project almost by default. Roth's input ultimately enabled the writer-director to more imbue "Basterds' " resolution with a higher degree of psychological realism. This began with Roth inviting his mentor to his family home for Passover Seder in 2007, Tarantino's first. "We got into these long, philosophical discussions about the Holocaust and slavery, oppression," Roth said. "He asked me, 'Would a Jew give absolution to a Nazi at the end of the war?' I said, 'Never.' It's purely a Christian construct. It's not that we don't forgive; we don't forget. Being Jewish is to remember. If I had the chance, I would kill every one of those [Nazis]."

He also persuaded Tarantino to let him direct yet another movie-within-a-movie, the Nazi propaganda film called "Nation's Pride" that follows the exploits of a German army sniper who is key to the plot of "Inglourious Basterds." Tarantino has historically avoided using a second-unit director and was initially reluctant. But he wanted to finish the movie in time to submit it for the Cannes Film Festival. So he loaned Roth the use of "Basterds" cast member Daniel Brühl, and Roth cajoled Tarantino into allotting him many more resources than the writer-director had planned to use himself: an eight-man crew, five stuntmen and 20 extras. Naturally, a seven-minute director's cut of "Nation's Pride" will be included on the DVD.

The results are typically over-the-top, Roth-style war gore: Brühl's character is heroically depicted mowing down hundreds of Allied troops from the safety of a bell tower and carving an ornate swastika onto the floorboards to buck up his courage. "I had so much fun making it," Roth exclaimed. "But my grandparents must be turning over in their graves."

He invited his parents to Berlin to take part in filming a scene in which 300 extras dressed in full Nazi regalia attend a screening of "Nation's Pride." Never mind that many of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust -- or that his mother and father had previously sworn never to set foot in Germany. Upon landing in Berlin, Roth's parents visited the Holocaust Museum and changed their stance on modern Germany. On set later in the day, they displayed a willingness to enter into the film's historical-revisionist fantasy, posing for photos with the actor who portrays Hitler in "Basterds."

With its shocker ending and high Nazi body count, "Inglourious Basterds" certainly helped Roth live out the stuff of so many Hebrew-school revenge fantasies. And with Tarantino's encouragement, Roth plans to earmark acting parts for himself in any future films he makes.

"Quentin really pushed me [as an actor]. He said, 'Now you can write parts for yourself because you went toe to toe with the best. You acted with Brad Pitt and for me and you held the screen. You could have another career if you want,' " Roth said with characteristic self-satisfaction, adding that "Inglourious Basterds" remains one of his personal and professional high points.

"I almost died shooting it. But it's one of the most satisfying, orgasmic things I've done in my life," he said. "It's kosher porn."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Why we're writing about Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
Source: SciFi Wire

Quentin Tarantino's latest film, the World War II action satire Inglourious Basterds, doesn't seem like something we should write about, but it is: As the film unwinds, it becomes apparent that it's all taking place in an alternate universe. Or, as star Eli Roth calls it, it's a "fairy tale." With Nazis.

We won't spoil which major events are different in Tarantino's world, but when you notice events diverging from reality, the director has a solid explanation.

"You can definitely say, 'Look, there is a point in the movie that history went one way, and we go another,'" Tarantino said in a group interview last week in Beverly Hills, Calif. "Now, where I'm coming from that is basically my characters changed the course of the war. Now, that didn't happen because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed, everything that happens is fairly plausible." (Spoilers ahead!)

Tarantino's "Basterds" are a group of Jewish soldiers who hunt Nazis. He also invented Nazi war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a sniper who killed 300 Allied troops with his rifle while holed up in a lighthouse. The Nazis made the propaganda film Nation's Pride in his honor, starring Zoller himself. Both Hitler and Goebbels themselves attend the film's premiere.

The writer/director came up with this plotline after scrapping his first draft. "I had a different story, and it was just too big," Tarantino said. "It was just too big. I had the opposite of writer's block. I couldn't stop writing. I couldn't shut my brain off, and I literally said, 'OK, I'm going to take out this story because that's the thing that derailed me way back when,' and I came up with a new story. The new story is the one about Frederick Zoller, about him being this German Audie Murphy character. He gets a movie about him, and the mission would be the blowing up of the actual premiere."

Were Hitler and Goebbels actually in attendance at the premiere of Nation's Pride, had the film or its subject actually existed, perhaps the Allies would have sent some "Inglourious Basterds" after the Nazi gala. Tarantino's filmmaker friend and the film's co-star, Eli Roth, shared his perspective on the alternate history.

"It's a work of fiction, and he's not constrained by the rules of history," Roth said in an exclusive interview later that day. "By making the movie not historically accurate but making the characters honest and accurate, by having them speak in their native tongue, the characters are much more human and much more relatable. In the story, it leaves you free to draw your own conclusions, to draw your own associations to it. Quentin's an artist. He says this is a fairy tale. 'Once upon a time,' and that's it. It's so much fun. It allows you to really just enjoy it and experience that and get that thrill of experiencing that. It's something that everybody's thought of."

Hindsight indeed gives victims of tragedy thoughts about how they could have thwarted such events. Filmmakers are no exception.

"It made me think about after September 11th, how I had fantasies of going back in time and being on those planes and killing those hijackers," Roth continued. "I think that Quentin has actually tapped into something very, very real, which is this human wish to go back in time and sacrifice yourself to stop evil and save thousands. That's a very, very real thing."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Stefen

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 17, 2009, 10:19:19 AM
"It made me think about after September 11th, how I had fantasies of going back in time and being on those planes and killing those hijackers," Roth continued. "I think that Quentin has actually tapped into something very, very real, which is this human wish to go back in time and sacrifice yourself to stop evil and save thousands. That's a very, very real thing."

Eli Roth wants to be a time traveling Rambo. They need to sop giving this guy press. He's proven himself to be one of the biggest idiots working in da biz. Everytime he opens his mouth and eyebrows major lulz follow.

STFU, Eli.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

Pas

Quote from: Stefen on August 17, 2009, 10:26:15 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on August 17, 2009, 10:19:19 AM
"It made me think about after September 11th, how I had fantasies of going back in time and being on those planes and killing those hijackers," Roth continued. "I think that Quentin has actually tapped into something very, very real, which is this human wish to go back in time and sacrifice yourself to stop evil and save thousands. That's a very, very real thing."

Eli Roth wants to be a time traveling Rambo. They need to sop giving this guy press. He's proven himself to be one of the biggest idiots working in da biz. Everytime he opens his mouth and eyebrows major lulz follow.

STFU, Eli.

I feel that psycho-linguisticaly, by saying so often and repeatedly that this is ''a very very very real real real very real'' thing, it shows that he's not sure if it's real so he inconsciently feels he has to put emphasis on how real it is or else no one will believe it. I don't know if I'm clear but you get the idea. It happens to a lot of people, same pattern as: ''[whatever exagaration/uncertainty]. I swear to god it's true!'' before anyone doubts or anything.

OrHowILearnedTo

Seeing this tomorrow with eli roth in attendance

Neil

Quote from: OrHowILearnedTo on August 17, 2009, 10:00:46 PM
Seeing this tomorrow with eli roth in attendance


did you get the pistol that stefen Fed Ex'd to you?
it's not the wrench, it's the plumber.

OrHowILearnedTo

So i liked it.

It's very good, and there are enough moments here where i thought this could be something special, and something that could be resonate emotionally (the first chapter for example), but alas this is not the film Quentin wanted to make, and whether or not this is a good/bad thing can be discussed later. The point is this movie is a fucking blast. Once you finally get over whatever you thought this was going to be (or wanted it to be) and just go along into Tarantino's world it's so much fun. The cast is nothing short of phenomenal, especially Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent, and yes even Eli Roth doesn't stink up the joint here. Brad Pitt is absolutely hilarious and Mike Myers is...Mike Myers, but funny this time. When the acting and the storytelling is this good its damn hard not to have fun at least. My advice would be to take off your critic hats for the first time around, then analyze and deconstruct  on later viewings. This is just too good of a time at the movies not to enjoy at least once. The ending is absolutely ridiculous though.

And actually Eli Roth isn't as big of a douchebag as he makes himself out to be in interviews. He was actually a pretty nice, cool, sincere guy. He answered everyone's dumb question with a good funny story, and he seems to know his shit. But i guess this was because i was sitting far away and didn't have to look at his stupid fucking grin all night.

MacGuffin

Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglorious Basterds' is about what could have happened
He admits he is no historian, so story comes well before fact.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Ten years ago, when Quentin Tarantino first sat down to write his own WWII extravaganza, "Inglourious Basterds," a film he referred to as his "men on a mission" saga, he needed to come up with two story staples: a cool group of renegades and a mission. For his rough-edged warriors, he quickly settled on Jewish soldiers -- not the most obvious choice, given the legacy of Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen -- and for his mission, nothing less than revising history in his update of such war film staples as "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Guns of Navarone," "Where Eagles Dare" and "The Great Escape." ¶ With Jews as his tough guys, there would be a certain poetic justice. ¶ "Most of these young soldiers would have been second-generation Americans," Tarantino says. "And they probably still had family in Poland or Czechoslovakia. It was kind of a metaphor of their European grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles being unable to fight against the Huns. But these were their American sons. Where they had to endure pain, we can inflict it."

On a recent summer day, Tarantino delivers his patter with relish and brio. The 46-year-old director looks disarmingly chipper despite having returned only hours before from barnstorming Europe and Australia promoting the film in which his band of Nazi killers -- the "Basterds" -- mete out justice with bloody Tarantino-style poetics. Dressed in a black and white bowling shirt, he sits on an outdoor swing at his Hollywood Hills home -- a stunning view of his hometown stretched before him. Yet, all that occupies his fertile imagination at the moment are his "Basterds," who maraud through Europe killing and scalping Nazis.

The squad is led by a dashing Southerner, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who Tarantino figures cut his teeth on baiting the Klan and who takes pride in his partial Apache heritage, and also includes such idiosyncratic soldiers as Sgt. Donnie Donowitz, a.k.a. "The Bear Jew," who bashes in Nazi heads with his baseball bat and is played by Tarantino buddy and torture-porn director Eli Roth. Ever the equal-opportunity avenger, Tarantino's secondary story line follows Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish woman who witnessed her family's murder by the Nazis only to reemerge as a movie-theater proprietress with a plan to wreak revenge on the entire German high command.

As it happens, Tarantino isn't Jewish. But why should that make any difference? "I don't think there has to be a reason to have empathy or to live in somebody else's shoes. Don't we all wear the same shoes at one end of the spectrum or the other?"

This said, he infused the Basterds with some old-school Native American fighting tactics, pointing out he is a quarter Cherokee. "I'm actually equating the Jews in this situation, in World War II, with the Indians," he says. "It's not nothing that they're doing Apache resistance. It's not about dying. It's about killing. They ambush their guys. They trick the enemy. It's not a straight-up fight. And then they go and they just completely desecrate the bodies to win a psychological war."

"Inglourious Basterds," with its twisted spelling signaling that it is not an actual remake of director Enzo Castellari's 1978 Italian World War II film "Inglorious Bastards" -- a Tarantino favorite -- is gory yet funny, a cathartic romp through a history significantly rewritten by one of Hollywood's most famous autodidacts, with an almost total recall of cinematic images and story lines.

Tarantino didn't study the actual war much. He didn't bone up on History Channel documentaries or read up on the plight of the Jews. The only research he did was to learn a little bit about barbering because Donowitz was supposed to be a barber -- although, Roth did take it upon himself to invite Tarantino to his first Passover.

Research isn't Tarantino's métier. He basically picks a genre and then let's his imagination roam. "I could have decided to do a western, but this time I decided to do a World War II movie. The sitting down -- the thing that makes me start contemplating it -- usually is that simple," he says. "The fun part isn't obviously to do it like the way it's been done before. It's to imagine what I'll do with it."

But sometimes he gets overwhelmed with abundance, with too many characters and plots climbing out of his head. "Inglourious Basterds" was meant to be his first original screenplay after his Oscar-winning "Pulp Fiction." It didn't quite work out that way. "I was understandably precious," Tarantino explains. "It just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I had the opposite of writer's block. I couldn't shut my brain off." He considered turning his growing epic into a multi-part miniseries but was talked out of that by a chance luncheon with director Luc Besson. Finally, in frustration, he just swept all the various piles of pages and notes for "Inglourious Basterds" into a box to make room for "Kill Bill," a different sort of deadly arts epic that grew so big it was turned into two movies.

In the intervening 10 years, he'd occasionally sort the papers in the "Basterds" box, until in 2008, he hauled out the project again and wrote the current incarnation in a mere six months.

It is part of the Tarantino lore that he started his career as a maniacal video-store clerk but before that, he was an acting student who wrote scenes to provide himself with material for classes. He was in his late teens and every week he'd take a three-hour bus ride from his home in Manhattan Beach to an acting class in Toluca Lake, where he told everyone he was 21 so he could go out drinking with his classmates afterward.

"Back then, it wasn't so easy to get scripts," real movie scripts for class, he says. "One of the prerequisites of being a writer, or at least a good writer, is you have to have a really good memory. That's part of your job, to remember things that people say. So, I would go see a movie and I'd just remember the scene. I'd go home right after I saw it or on the bus maybe going home and I'd write the scene down from memory and anything I didn't remember, I filled in the blanks. Then just little by little by little, I started filling in more and more and more blanks without even realizing it. My scenes were legendary; they were literally just pieces of paper and chicken scratch and misspelled words and I'd hand it to some baffled student I'd have in my acting class."

The jig was up, however, when one day he scribbled down scenes from the teleplay of "Marty" (later an Oscar-winning movie) by Paddy Chayefsky and handed it to a close friend who actually had the published screenplay; they compared the two to discover several added Tarantino monologues. "I go, 'Oh, sorry' and he goes, 'phffff, don't be sorry, it's better than Paddy Chayefsky.' Not that I'm saying that it was better than Paddy Chayefsky, but the thing is . . . that was the very first time anybody had complimented me on something I didn't take seriously. I really thought it was worth something. From that day on, I kind of started writing a little bit more seriously."

With "Inglourious Basterds," Tarantino takes liberty again not with a famed writer but with actual history. As he points out, "my characters don't know they're part of history. There is nothing they can't do as far as they're concerned, right?" They just get done what they need to get done. And in so doing, the course of world events is completely changed. So what, Tarantino says with a laugh, "It only has to be plausible."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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