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...Anyway, he's the first director we know of to spin this sweet fantasy out into a 2½-hr., four-language epic. Receiving its world premiere on May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival, Inglourious Basterds - first word as in "glower," second as in "turds" - is an alternative history of World War II from the writer-director of Pulp Fiction, the Palme d'Or winner 15 years ago. As with all of his recent work - the two Kill Bill movies and Death Proof - Basterds draws portraits of strong women facing down evil men; and in Shoshanna (Mélanie...
...press conference following the film, Tarantino was asked if this was a "Jewish revenge fantasy," and he replied, "Well, that's not the section of the video store I'd put it in." But Eli Roth, director of the Hostel horror movies and one of Tarantino's Basterds, said the notion of Jews getting even with Hitler was "kosher porn. It's something I dreamed since...
...There was an Italian film called Inglorious Bastards (the English name for a movie whose original title translates as "That Damned Armored Train") made in 1978 by pulp journeyman Enzo G. Castellari, one of many vigorous imitators of the Leone Westerns. Bastards ripped off Robert Aldrich's 1967 WW II hit The Dirty Dozen, reducing the all-star 12 to a more manageable and economic five. "Whatever the Dirty Dozen did," the poster reads, "they do it dirtier!" It starred the American actors Fred Williamson and Bo Svenson, to whom Tarantino gives a cameo as a U.S. Army colonel. Beyond...
...parallel story lines that converge late in the film, German Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a kind of supersleuth "Jew hunter" with a chatty, almost courtly demeanor, discovers and kills most of a Jewish family hiding in the cellar of a French farm. One girl, Shoshanna, escapes to Paris, where she runs a movie theater. She meets a young soldier, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl of Good Bye Lenin!) who has become a battlefield hero and starred in his own military biopic, which is to receive its world premiere at Shoshanna's theater with top Nazis in attendance...
...such a large cast, Pitt all but disappears into his mountaineer accent and laconic sadism; the other Basterds are mere war-film window dressing. This conflict is fought mainly between nasty Nazis and resourceful women. In her slinky dresses and fancy footwear (sometimes just one shoe), Kruger is steely glamour incarnate. And Waltz has the purring efficiency of a sleek German vehicle, not a tank but a Mercedes-Benz; he could take Cannes' Best Actor prize on Sunday night. The movie is pretty scrupulously played in the languages its characters would speak - except for one odd moment early on, when...