Inglourious Basterds

“Can you Americans speak any other language besides English?”As always with Tarantino, it is the performances of the actors and the brilliant casting that elevates what could have been just a glorious mess into something more. Christoph Waltz as Standartenführer Hans Landa is a thing of beauty to watch. He gets to show off his linguistic skills and plays sweet and charming one moment and a completely cold-hearted killer the next. I do feel a little bad for finding Waltz hot considering the character he’s playing, but whatever I guess. Brad Pitt is so cartoonishly American that he makes me grin, Mélanie Laurent is quaintly French and at the same time shows a core of iron, playing scenes like the lunch Shosanna has with Zoller and Goebbels with a restraint that accentuates the tension until you can pretty much feel her vibrate from sheer stress. The supporting cast is cleverly chosen and used so well that even random-Nazi-soldier-Nr. 3-in-the-background contributes something to the overall. The movie walks that same fine line between the serious and the silly that most of Tarantino’s production does and he manages to stay within the parameters well enough that it never becomes pastiche, but stays in the realm of homage and that is not an easy feat. This is alternate history and it serves up the kind of twist that you hope for with something like that. It is also, sometimes perhaps despite itself, a clever comment on the fact that reality and truth are pretty much inseparable from fiction, fantasy and down right lying, even when we are dealing with our immediate history.