Thursday, November 05, 2009

Once upon a time in Nazi occupied France...

It's been ages since I reviewed a movie. So here's one I watched recently, my first in a cinema in weeks!

Inglourious Basterds is a war film set in WWII during the Nazi occupation in France but with an alternate historical universe. It covers two plots to assassinate the Nazi political leadership (Hitler and gang), one by a French Jewish woman (whose family was killed when she was young) and another by a group of American soldiers known as the Basterds (led by Brad Pitt). The film is shown in chapters, each chapter bringing the viewers closer to the planned D-Day.

At the start, the film was serious, tense and sad even. I mean how could war be a joyous occasion, right? However, the film got hilarious toward the end which I thought was a perfect way to end things. I had a good laugh watching the characters and listening to their dialogues (yes, it was a more dialog less action type of movie but sit through it and you will be well-rewarded). I also loved how they made use of different languages in 1 film - French, German, English. Reading English subtitles was never this fun before :)

But the most outstanding of all was Christopher Waltz's character - Standartenführer Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter" (yup, even Brad Pitt was overshadowed!) He was nicknamed so due to his keen ability to think like a Jew and therefore never failed to locate them.

"I love my unofficial title, precisely because I have earned it." - Landa

Landa was the bad guy and you honestly wanted to hate him but you just couldn't help yourself to like and laugh with him. Waltz played Landa to perfection and the film would not be the same without him. Even Quentin Tarantino, the director of the film acknowledged so;

"I think that Landa is one of the best characters I've ever written and ever will write, and Christoph played it to a tee… It's true that if I couldn't have found someone as good as Christoph I might not have made Inglourious Basterds." [taken from Inglourious Basterds feature]

And for that delightful character, Waltz won the best actor award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Recommended to watch :)

My Ratings:

3 tots:

jun6 said...

yup...I think this is a good movie and I hav a high expectation to this movie so. Some-more Quentin Tarantino who is a 'crazy' but special director and the camera skill and style u'll never find out from other director
The movie poster oso outstanding and nice.

Catherine said...

Yup, you should go and watch it :)

Soo Huey said...

jun6, actually Tarantino's style is not that special and there are a lot of interesting films that get shown in 'arthouse cinemas' overseas.... but malaysians don't usually appreciate anything outside of what they are used to watching (ie. hollywood movies) and the censorship board cuts out too much of anything controversial, so we get pretty boring films here in malaysia.

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