Tarantino's long-awaited war flick may not much resemble the movie a lot of fans wanted (it's certainly not the rip-roaring Great Escape-style picture QT often seemed to imply it would be). Instead, it's an outrageous, typically QT-stylized, wildly talky, revenge picture that boils down to two Jewish plots to wipe out the upper-tier of the Nazi party (including Hitler himself). Those who like to take Tarantino to task usually cite such faults as: (1) all style, no substance; (2) doesn't really care about his characters; (3) overly self-indulgent. They won't have trouble making any of those cases here, but why bother? QT does what QT does, and many of us can still dig it. Even if the film is less perfect than much of the rest of the QT canon (and I'm not quite willing to rank it yet, myself), there's still a crazy amount to enjoy here, such as:
--Brad Pitt chewing the scenery as the "Apache" Aldo Raine, the "di-rect descendant of mountain man Jim Bridger," a Tennessee moonshiner with an unexplained scar on his neck that seems to be from a hangman's noose
--Eli Roth, as the "Bear Jew," taking batting practice on a Nazi soldier's head
--everything Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa says (especially the long opening conversation). Surely this will get an Oscar nod?
--the Revenge of the Giant Face!
--Samuel Jackson's voiceover explaining the extreme combustiblity of film stock
--the wildly corny? pretentious? final line by Pitt
See it at once!
. . .And then see it again!
ReplyDelete(When I learned about the extreme combustibility of nitrate film stock in film class, it was certainly not as cool as Jackson's narration and accompanying montage -- is it just me, or was one half of that split-screen from Hitchcock's SABOTAGE?)
Not sure. There was a lot to take in while Jackson was talking!
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