The Low-Down on the "Inglourious Basterds" Premiere at Cannes

The new Quentin Tarantino Jew vs. Nazi slasher war comedy flick Inglourious Basterds finally saw the light of day today at Cannes.  Reviewers are reviewing it, Tarantino is talking about it, and baseball-bat-wielding Jew soldier actor Eli Roth is calling it “Kosher porn.”  The best of the yapping, ATJ. 

From the Boston Globe:

After a lot of desperate shoving (people really need their Tarantino), some of us were allowed in. The house was, indeed, packed. The lights dimmed, and people started cheering (the first time this year). More than two hours later, the lights return, and some of the audience hooted some more.I hooted on the inside, but the movie is something to be reckoned with as much as it to be purely enjoyed – and there is a lot to enjoy. But the movie is divided into five energetic chapters that fail to produce a superb book .

The movie manages to emancipate itself from the obligations of history by making up its own. But despite that revisionist final chapter, which is as funny as it is ghastly, out of its mind, and not not a bit of propaganda. Tarantino never cuts totally loose. Not many directors can keep intact a story with as many parenthetical digressions, footnotes, and curlicues as Tarantino does. But the element of surprise never overtook me.

My brain wants to cheer, but my heart won’t let me.

Summary: It’s great, but for some reason I can’t really explain, also not that great.

On to the BBC‘s review!

The plot culminates with an attempt to incinerate the Nazi high command – including Hitler, Goebbels and Goering – at a film premiere in Paris.

In the words of Tarantino, it’s “the power of cinema bringing down the Third Reich”.

Once again, the US director has blurred film genres. Essentially it’s western meets war movie, with David Bowie on the soundtrack.

This is not an American movie. Rather, it’s Tarantino’s homage to the European cinema he adores.

Indeed, there are so many scenes shot in French and German that an English-speaking audience will spend a lot of the film reading subtitles.

[Tarantino] is royalty at this festival – and as long as you can suspend disbelief and offence, he remains the king of trashy cinema.

Summary: It’s great, but Quentin Tarantino is only an American.

Quentin Tarantino himself sez:

If you’ve done a movie you’re proud of, that you might be defined by, then to me the dream is not necessarily to be there at Oscar time. That’s wonderful. But my dream is to always go to present the film at Cannes.

[On Brad Pitt:] “Once, I was talking to a big actor who said, ‘You’re afraid of stars. You want to be the guy.’ I never feel like I need a star, but a lot of the great Hollywood directors I respect all worked with stars and so there was this aspect in the back of my mind where it was time to do that.”

[On German actor Christoph Waltz, who plays the villain Hans Landa:] Tarantino grew so frustrated at casting that role, he was five days away from calling off the movie when Waltz auditioned.

“I told my producers I might have written a part that was un-playable,” Tarantino said. “I said, I don’t want to make this movie if I can’t find the perfect Landa, I’d rather just publish the script than make a movie where this character would be less than he was on the page. When Christoph came in and read the next day, he gave me my movie back.”

Summary: It’s great.

Source: Boston Globe, BBC, Variety.