Inglourious Basterds

Movie: Inglourious Basterds

I saw it on: August 27

Cast: Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, B.J. Novak, Melanie Laurent, Samm Levine

Genre: Action, War Adventure

Synopsis: Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is an Army Lieutenant from the hills of Tennessee.  Early in World War II he and his company of seven Jewish soldiers are sent into occupied France.  Their mission: kill as many Nazis as they can.  They spend the next several years there absolutely terrorizing the Nazi’s.  They have a simple plan – find all the Nazis they can, brutally kill them and then remove their scalps so that everyone knows who killed them.  They usually let one Nazi from each group they catch (and kill) live – to spread the word of what happens when they catch Nazis.  The German soldiers are understandably terrified of Aldo and his crew of “Basterds”.

 Toward the end of the war, the Nazis decide to have a huge opening for a propaganda film in Paris.  So many high ranking Nazis are going to attend, that the Allies decide to take advantage of this concentration of Nazi brass and hatch a plot to kill them all.  Aldo and his Basterds are enlisted to help pull off the plot.  SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) is a “Jew hunter” assigned to ensure the security of this movie premier.  He has a sixth sense for sniffing out subterfuge – and Jews.

My two cents: A great movie, if a bit long.  The scenes of the Basterds executing Nazis are over the top in violence.  Fortunately, they don’t spend a lot of time showing them.  The scalping scenes are also pretty hard to watch.  The movie does not try to be factual, it is Quentin Tarentino’s own fictional version of how World War 2 ends.

Brad Pitt was great as Aldo Raine.  The funniest scene in the whole movie was Aldo Raine, with his hillbilly accent, trying to sound fluent in Italian.  Mike Myers (yes, Austin Powers) makes a brief appearance as a stuffy British general.  His makeup was so good that the only way I recognized him was by a couple of Austin Powers-type mannerisms.  They way the Basterds are so casual in carrying out the violently brutal executions reminded me of Samuel Jackson’s and John Travolta’s characters from “Pulp Fiction”.  Then I remembered – duh, Quentin Tarentino.

After Aldo Raine, by far the best character was the Nazi “Jew hunter” Col. Hans Landa played by the German actor Christoph Waltz.  Early in the movie he is just trying to track down any Jews left in France.  It is later that he is in charge of security for the movie premier.  Watching him question someone was like watching a cat play with a mouse.  His powers of deduction are extraordinary.

Definitely a movie watch worth seeing – but be prepared to do some squirming when Aldo and his squad do their thing.