Inglourious Basterds truly Tarantino’s masterpiece

If any of you are wondering why it took me so long to get this review of Inglourious Basterds on Trashwire, the answer is that I’ve spend the last four days trying to think of how to sum up my feelings about the film without superfluous use of words like “amazing” or “awesome”. The performances from the cast, including Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, and an almost obscenely stellar turn from Christoph Waltz, add so much to the film, but the real star might be Director Quentin Tarantino.

There are few filmmakers who can blend genres, utilize both over-the-top performances and understated delivery, incorporate modern music into a period piece, and even make the opening and closing credits a part of the film experience. Tarantino can effortlessly do all these things.

Basterds seamlessly mixes drama, action, comedy and even classic filmmaking in the tale of a group of Jewish-American soldiers who are masters of brutality, spreading fear throughout the Third Reich in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Pitt stars as Lt. Aldo Raine, aka “Aldo the Apache”, who leads “The Basterds”, including Eli Roth, Til Schweiger, B.J. Novak, Samm Levine and others on their mission, ordering each man to collect 100 Nazi scalps along the way. At the same time, Col. Hans Landa (Waltz), a ruthless villain, tracks “The Basterds” while hunting Jewish people throughout the country. As all this is happening, we also see the story of Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent), a young Jewish woman who was the sole survivor of an earlier Nazi raid and now runs a movie theater under an assumed identity.

It wouldn’t be Tarantino without heightened violence and Basterds certainly doesn’t disappoint on that front. He manages to turn brutality into an art form in a scene where a Nazi is bludgeoned with a baseball bat while others are scalped, turns a tense encounter in a basement bar into an explosive gunfight, and includes a death scene at the end that can only be describes as beautiful despite it’s hyper-violent subject matter.

In similar trademark Tarantino form, the dialogue is unique and memorable. Pitt, in particular, executes each line with such skill that you wonder just how he doesn’t already have an Oscar and Waltz’s chilling speeches as “The Jew Hunter” make Col. Hans Landa as memorable a villain as Keyser Söze.

One of my favorite things about Tarantino is that his films are so loaded with reference points and tributes to old films that it becomes just as fascinating to see which ones you can pick out. This time around was like a journey through my Film Studies classes as he made clear shout-outs to classic films from German and French cinema history. Parts of the film play like a love letter to French cinema and that’s something hardcore film geeks are sure to enjoy.

There’s a reason that “Inglourious Basterds” was such a high-trending topic on Twitter during its opening weekend: it’s good, really good. There are almost too many layers and plotlines to describe in a review, but just know that this fill will definitely not disappoint you.