Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds has Quentin Tarantino getting back to his glory days as a Hollywood wunderkind. Here he takes us to 1944 and occupied France where there are two stories on a collision course. One has Mélanie Laurent (ingénue Shosanna Dreyfus) a Jewish woman who after narrowly escaping extermination inherits a Parisian cinema where the opportunity to strike a crushing blow to the Third Reich drops in her lap. The other scenario involves a team of pre-D-Day special ops running renegade sorties behind enemy lines. Their leader is a blood thirsty and somewhat ghoulish Lt. Aldo Raine played by Brad Pitt revisiting his Benjamin Buttons southern drawl. Germany’s Col. Hans Landa is the glue that holds these two parts together. He’s the Nazi Jew Hunter with a prim disarming smile that brings to mind the placid grin of a viper before it strikes. He’s played with Gestapo gusto by Christopher Waltz, an Austrian actor currently unknown but won’t be for long since this role already won him best actor at Cannes and may again at next years Oscars. His methodical, tension filled interrogation of his prey before he strikes is a testament to Tarantino’s writing which snaps from hysterically funny to brutally gruesome in the blink of an eye. It also does violence to the facts, but then again it’s the way we’d like to have history turn out - just the way Hollywood would tell it.