Inglourious Basterds [sic]

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

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MacGuffin

Quote from: bigideas on August 25, 2009, 02:07:15 PM
Quote from: Stefen on August 25, 2009, 01:27:36 PM
I remember Lantz telling Aldo and Little Man that he planted the bombs right next to Hitler and Goebbel's so he had a part in their killing too.

didn't it cut to a shot showing him sliding the bombs he took from Aldo underneath their chairs?

Yes, when Landa passed a message to Goebbles in the opera box is when he slipped the TNT under the chairs.
"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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Stefen

Quote from: B.C. Long on August 25, 2009, 02:14:23 PM
I feel like his boner for shitty cinema gets in the way of him making something truly meaningful because some of his stuff just borderlines on the self-parody.

This was a main beef I had with the Kill Bill flicks and Deathproof. For some reason it just doesn't bother me with Inglorious Basterd's. I felt that KB and Deathproof were trying to be cool more than they were trying to be good films. I think the opposite is true with Inglorious Basterd's. It's trying to be a good movie. It's just so fucking cool.

I didn't mind Pitt very much. I've always found him to be a shitty actor but the guy is alright with me because of the projects he picks. Pitt could have easily pulled a Travolta or Cruise where he picks the most bankable movies possible where he can play a version of himself but Pitt during his career has always picked interesting roles. Regardless of his talent, he should be applauded for his willingness to attach himself to shit that most other movie stars wouldn't.
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.

B.C. Long

Just to clarify. When I'm speaking about Tarantino loving "shitty" cinema, I'm talking about grindhouse, exploitation filicks. Not old classic cinema.

Stefan, I also too felt like I.B. was trying to be a good movie. But I just think it's jarring and out of place stylistic choices really detered my enjoyment of the movie. Maybe Tarantino was never my cup of tea. But I thought Pulp Fiction had the perfect balance of all his influences without being blaringly obvious in your face.

socketlevel

Quote from: B.C. Long on August 25, 2009, 02:14:23 PM
I guess I'm the only one who was annoyed by Tarantino's stylistic choices.

There were some incredible parts to this film, no doubt. The opening scene for example. Just incredible and it really shows how god damn good of a writer Tarantino is. He writes scenes like a musician writes music. There's something so lyrical about them, they start slow, build up, and then reach a crescendo and it's absolutely beautiful. However, there are other scenes I just can't get over. The Bowie song, followed by the 80s montage. I mean really? That scene made me what to punch Tarantino in the face. I feel like his boner for shitty cinema gets in the way of him making something truly meaningful because some of his stuff just borderlines on the self-parody. I also felt that Brad Pitt was the worst part of the movie. Was his southern accent that bad on purpose? He just seemed like a caricature that somehow superimposed itself over another performance.



oh i was, the bowie-esque song was down right horrible. i agree with you 100%.  wtf tarantino does a flashdance sequence going into his climax chapter.  there is absolutely no defense for that part, it just simply wasn't remotely cool.

the caricature was on purpose i felt, it was suppose to be that over the top.
the one last hit that spent you...

Stefen

It's funny that you mention Pulp Fiction because I feel these two movies are the same type of film in that they allow you to suspend your disbelief because of the universe they're set in.

Pulp Fiction is set in some sort of alternate reality the same way Basterd's is. It's the reason I don't have a problem with some of the unrealistic stuff that goes on in both films. Each flick makes it evident from the start that what you're watching isn't some based on a true story type of bullshit.
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.

squints

Quote from: socketlevel on August 25, 2009, 02:52:48 PM
oh i was, the bowie-esque song was down right horrible.

so now i'm glad? that i got up and pissed?

who cares i'll still see it again.
"The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts" – Friedrich Nietzsche

B.C. Long

Quote from: Stefen on August 25, 2009, 02:59:21 PM
It's funny that you mention Pulp Fiction because I feel these two movies are the same type of film in that they allow you to suspend your disbelief because of the universe they're set in.

I get what you are saying and again I sorta agree. But the difference with Pulp Fiction and I.B. is all the stylistic choices for Pulp FIT the tone. While in this it does not. When you freeze-frame on a soldier and in bright yellow letters POUND his name onto the screen and that's the ONLY time you ever do something like that in a film, it just feels like shit. There's no consistency and I hate that. It's like he's pissing on his own art.

Stefen

I get what you're saying. If he's going to do it for one, he should do it for everyone. Stiglitz was the only one he did this for but in the script, he did did it for pretty much everyone. The Bear Jew's origin took a good 3 or 4 pages.

What was Aldo sniffing? Was that just snuff/tobacco?
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.

brockly

the first chapter was great, but there after the movie is spotted with "cool" moments. the worst of which was stiglitz's flashback in the bar to being whipped by nazis with electric guitar music playing on the soundtrack. i have a problem with all the modern music choices actually, particularly the bowie song. it doesn't blend in any way other than to make the movie cooler.

Quote from: Stefen on August 25, 2009, 08:09:16 PM
What was Aldo sniffing? Was that just snuff/tobacco?

i assumed it was snuff.

Stefen

Yeah, that was a pretty awkward cut.

Diane Kruger really fucking kills it during that scene.
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.

AntiDumbFrogQuestion

when you guys complain about "jarring" moments in the movie, you read like a bunch of babies.

My friends & I found those moments to be some of the most memorable.  They gave a contemporary link to a passion or subtext that may well have been felt even back in the 40's.

I'll agree, most of that stuff annoyed me with Kill Bill, but that's because Kill Bill had no emotional craft to it's first half, leaving you REALLY not caring about anybody in it.  The second half is SO emotional, that you get upset with lack of action.

Well, emotionally, I think QT hit the nail on the head with this one.

I think the point of those "jarring" moments was to loosen the audience up.  Most WWII movies are so concerned with honoring the reality in terms of factual details that nowadays we lost the emotional truths.  The First Chapter was fan-damn-tastic, but hey...the 2nd chapter was about AMERICANS.  In reality, most don't give a crap about keeping it stuffy & realistic.  Perfect foil to the Antagonists of this movie.

brockly

Quote from: AntiDumbFrogQuestion on August 25, 2009, 11:14:14 PM
They gave a contemporary link to a passion or subtext that may well have been felt even back in the 40's.

fair call. but i don't see a cheesy freeze-frame on a soldier with cool yellow font displaying his name as a contemporary link to the character's subtext. i see it as tarantino's jizz sprayed all over the screen. and as B.C. pointed out, it wasn't consistent.

as for the music, there were many awkward choices that didn't blend with the period. i'm not saying the film should honour reality in terms of factual details but tarantino should recognise the boundaries a period setting bestows on a film. to me, they were out of place stylistic choices and they were "jarring". spaghetti western music worked great because it doesn't correlate to any era of pop culture.

pete

"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

MacGuffin

'Inglourious Basterds' defies summer wisdom
Major stars and adult dramas had been a toxic mix. Then along came Quentin Tarantino's film.

By Ben Fritz; Los Angeles Times

During a season when studios have become all but convinced that audiences are losing interest in big-name movie stars and R-rated adult fare, perhaps it was appropriate that the end of summer would offer a surprise hit that embodied both those qualities.

"Inglourious Basterds," featuring Brad Pitt among an ensemble cast, earned $38 million at the box office this weekend in the U.S. and Canada, according to domestic distributor Weinstein Co., far exceeding expectations by drawing a fairly diverse audience without alienating director Quentin Tarantino's core fan base of men in their 20s and early 30s.

The same occurred overseas, where Universal Pictures opened the film in 22 territories, including Germany, France, Britain and Australia, to a strong $27.5 million.

It's not the only movie this summer to open significantly stronger than pre-release polling had indicated. That list includes Warner Bros.' June release "The Hangover" and last weekend's "District 9" from Sony Pictures. But "Inglourious Basterds" certainly had the most at stake -- around $70 million in production spending split between Weinstein Co., which hasn't had a major release since December's "The Reader," and Universal, which has had a string of box-office underperformers this summer, including "Land of the Lost" and "Funny People."

The opening weekend numbers provided an unexpected ending to a months-long marketing campaign. Since the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May to a mixed response, speculation has run rampant in Hollywood as to whether the movie would resemble Tarantino's 1994 breakout hit "Pulp Fiction," which earned $108 million domestically, or his 1997 follow-up "Jackie Brown," which grossed under $40 million.

Its premiere at the French festival initially exposed the fault line between loyal fans and vocal detractors. "Outside the cinema, reaction was moderate verging on the chilly," noted Xan Brooks, film critic for the Guardian UK.

Nonetheless, Tarantino and Pitt were in Cannes for a media blitz, serving to kick off Universal's worldwide marketing campaign that resulted in the highest grosses for a Tarantino film in nearly every major market where it played with the notable exception of Britain. "Once we had done the Cannes launch, the awareness level around the world dramatically spiked," said David Kosse, president of international distribution for Universal.

Domestically, meanwhile, Weinstein Co. has been crafting a carefully calibrated marketing campaign that attempted to let audiences know about Tarantino and Pitt's presence without relying too much on their names at a time when the ability of A-list stars to bring audiences into theaters seems to be diminishing, overshadowed by high-concept events like "Transformers."

Trailers, posters and TV spots focused more on the movie's most marketable concept -- an elite team of soldiers on a mission to kill Nazis -- and its over-the-top action.

"The concept was 'revenge fantasy,' just like 'Transformers' was a big battles with robots fantasy and 'G.I. Joe' was a ninja fantasy," said Chris Thalk, who runs the blog Movie Marketing Madness. "It came across as an action movie that just happened to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Quentin Tarantino."

That approach succeeded in activating the core audience for an R-rated action movie, which crosses over very nicely with Tarantino fans: 58% of moviegoers were male, according to exit polling, and 65% were between 18 and 34.

Weinstein Co. Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein said he was most proud, however, of the 42% of the audience that was female, a surprisingly large minority that he attributed to a last-minute push on TV shows, magazines and websites that appeal to women.

Universal did exit polling only in Britain, where the movie's male/female split was similar. Kosse attributed the attraction of women in part to a marketing campaign that focused a bit less on the movie's violence and more on its humor.

European audiences also got a much bigger publicity presence from costars Christoph Waltz, who's Austrian, and German native Diane Kruger. The two even did their own voice-overs for versions dubbed into German and French.

In a particularly surprising twist, however, there was much higher than usual demand to see the movie in English. Twenty-eight theaters in Germany, four times the typical number, showed the so-called "original version" that's the same shown in the United States, indicating that audiences perhaps wanted to hear Tarantino's celebrated dialogue in its original language or experience the movie, which features characters speaking German and French, from the perspective of its American protagonists.

"Those original versions were massive," Kosse said. "We were at the limit of breaking records with them."

Stateside, it's no surprise, of course, that Tarantino's traditional demographic group liked the movie best. Men in the U.S. gave the movie an A-minus, according to market research firm CinemaScore, while those under 25 gave it an A and between 25 and 34 an A-minus. But women graded it B-plus and the small minority over 50, under 16% according to exit polls, rated it a B.

Critics, meanwhile, were polarized, either bowled over or totally underwhelmed, by "Basterds' " ultra-violence, revisionist history and long scenes with baroque dialogue.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert praised "Basterds" as "a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he's the real thing, a director of quixotic delights."

The Village Voice's J. Hoberman called the film "a consummate Hollywood entertainment -- rich in fantasy and blithely amoral."

But other critics found the movie's historical fantasia hard to accept. " 'Inglourious Basterds' is not boring," cautioned the New Yorker's David Denby, "but it's ridiculous and appallingly insensitive." The Times' Kenneth Turan called the 2-hour, 32-minute action-drama "unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial."

But in the age of Twitter and Facebook, it seems that audience buzz is what matters most and Weinstein Co. is intent on using it, along with the positive reviews it can highlight, to turn "Inglourious Basterds" into a long-running hit by transforming public perception of it from a bloody-revenge tale to a highbrow drama on the way to the list of 10 Academy Award best picture nominees.

"We've got to do that changeover," Weinstein said. "An adult audience is the one that will really sustain us."
"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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tpfkabi

what about that quick cut to the man and woman having sex - was this Shoshanna just imagining what they would be like?
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