Last time I watched Jackie Brown was last year.
Still love that one, not his best, but one of my favorites from him.
Jackie is just awesome. People were expecting another Pulp and he gave them a completely tonally different one. Trolling to the max
anyway, onto Inglourious. I find this movie simply incredible. Tarantino takes WW2 as a starting point to create a fantasy world in which every historical detail is thrown out of the window in favour of a pure, crystalline cinematic experience that celebrates cinema as a whole and at the same time exploits the medium in a 360 way. His trolling is masterful: the Basterds are the perfect bait for the (American) masses, hey you got these bad ass Yankees butchering Nazis with a baseball bat, must be awesome! Yet, he films a 20 minutes prologue in a French farm, with a French farmer and a Nazi officer talking around a table. I can only imagine the look on the bloodthirsty audience's faces. "Enough of this *insert slur against the French*!". Then he finally introduces the Basterds in a three minutes scene. We'll see more of them soon enough. Cue an enraged Hitler himself, wearing a rather tasty chain cloak reminiscent of a comic book supervillain. His intent is now clear, don't look for any historical truth here, he wants the audience to have fun. Every chapter is both an homage to German cinema, American war movies, cinema itself, with a rather massive array of characters, some barely sketched in with quick flashbacks, quick cuts, scarce dialogue, but all of them functional to the big picture. He quickly relegates his bait, the Basterds, and their bloody methods to the benches, enter Shoshanna, Landa, Hicox, Zoller, Goebbels, Von Hammersmark. Each one of them played and written with great expertise, they are given a surprising amount of screentime, and the viewer can't be happier because Basterds becomes another movie again. A tragic love story, a spy thriller, a period drama, all filmed with such attention to detail, directorial mastery and total subversion of people's expectations to leave astounded, let alone the fact most of the movie is in German, with subtitles, which has to be highly praised because, after all, you're watching a fantasy movie, but every little detail, such as the strudel Landa is eating with Shoshanna, or Goebbels shaking her hand with that weird finger movement, don't clash with Tarantino's more outrageous meta signatures, like the superimposed titles, the HUGO STIGLITZ that suddenly appears before said character, or the little arrows that pop up indicating who's who. Its a behemoth of a movie, so modern yet so enshrined to the past, it baffles the mind. Then you have the individual performances. Its been said enough about Waltz's monstrous skills and presence, but I would like to praise the Germans too. Goebbels is perfect, and so is Hellstrom (don't know the names, sorry), and so is young Wilhelm, and Daniel Bruhl' s Zoller. Tremendous actors, all of them, nuanced, brilliantly creepy, absolutely believable and true. I find the weakest performance is given by Melanie Laurent, she's a bit goofy overall, especially compared to these monsters. The Basterds, as I said, felt more like a side dish, you only see the Bear Jew smashing one skull, but it's clear it was not Tarantino's intent to make a movie about these guys, he wanted to make a neckbreak paced WW2 cartoonish pastiche as detailed and refined as possible, and with he help of an insanely talented cast, he succeeded indeed. Masterpiece, 10/10
