Word: frenchness
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...ended not in a bunker below the Reich Chancellory in Berlin, with no outsiders watching, but in a public area made for mass entertainment: a Paris movie theater. And that the Jews, Hitler's special victims, might have had a crucial hand in his defeat - indeed, that a French Jewess could have ignited her own holocaust of the Führer and his top aides with the words: "My name is Shoshanna Dreyfus. And this is the face of Jewish vengeance...
...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...
...Hammersmark, and thus get close enough to Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to kill them and end the war. (Two of the Reich's most beloved actresses, Zarah Leander and Olga Chekova, were later thought to be secret agents for the U.S.S.R.) Hicox and the actress rendezvous in a French bar, the setting for the movie's most artful confrontation, a tense game of wits between sham Nazis and real ones. (See pictures of Kristallnacht...
...Basterds is, after all, a war movie without a single scene on the front lines. No long tracking shots of soldiers crouching in foxholes or marching across an open field, aiming death at their enemies. Almost all the set pieces are conversations, or interrogations, usually involving Landa: with the French farmer (Denis Menochet), Shoshanna, Von Hammersmark and Raine. Some of these chats could use either punching up or scrupulous editing. In fact, on the basis of sheer entertainment value, this movie can't match the two hours Tarantino spent onstage in Cannes last year talking movies with French critic Michel...
...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 Landa tells the French farmer, "I ask your permission to speak English for the rest of the conversation." (He and the film have a reason for this...