Inglourious Basterds (Rhoades)

“Inglourious Basterds” Is Hair-raising War Story
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Is Jennifer Aniston writing movie posters these days? I just saw one that proclaimed: “Brad Pitt Is a Basterd.”

That’s the promo for a funny war movie called “Inglourious Basterds,” currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

In it, Brad takes on a thick hillbilly accent to portray First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (a/k/a “Aldo the Apache”), the leader of a group of Jewish-American soldiers who escape from their scheduled executions and embark on a mission to help the Allies by killing Nazis, then desecrating their corpses in order to strike terror into the hearts of German soldiers.

“This is my spaghetti western,” claims director Quentin Tarantino. He spent more than a decade polishing the script. It wound up the length of three movies, but he forced himself to trim it back to 222 pages.

A former video store worker, Tarantino knows his genres. In addition to spaghetti westerns, he also pays homage here to a style of Italian war film known as “macaroni combat.” You’ll even sense a touch of French New Wave too.

He admits the premise began as a western, then evolved into a World War II version of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” set in Nazi-occupied France.

The title was stolen from a 1978 film by Enzo Castellari, but there are no plot similarities. There, a group of military prisoners are conscripted to rob a German train. Here, a bunch of renegade soldiers scalp the enemy like a bunch of Apaches on the warpath.

Stealing the title seems fair. That 1978 film was originally titled “Quel maledetto treno blindato” (translation: “That Damned Armored Train”), but was released as “Inglorious Bastards.” Tarantino at least spelled his differently.

He sees this film as his “epic masterpiece,” the best thing he’s ever written. But in truth it’s no match for “Reservoir Dogs” or “Pulp Fiction,” his true masterpieces.

Pitt does a good acting job, determined these days to prove he’s more than just a pretty boy with a pretty wife and a pissed-off ex-wife. Yep, he’s indeed an “Inglourious Basterd.”

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]