Posts Tagged ‘comedy’

On yet another not so sunny Sunday afternoon we met at Cafe Barbera for what promised to be an exciting SMEx. Our numbers were decimated by Illness and indifference towards Quentin Tarantino, meaning a turnout of nowhere near as many people as I expected.

I was a little apprehensive when going into this movie, I had known for a while it was going to be a difficult one for me. Being filmed with mostly German and French, I was going to have to use my limited knowledge of the Norwegian language to read subtitles to follow the plot. This was probably the thing which surprised me the most, the fact I could follow the plot!

The movie itself was not very surprising. I had been looking forward to seeing Inglourious Basterds for a while, with Tarantino apparently taking more than a decade to write the script I had high expectations. It turned out to be a very typical Tarantino movie, there was a very welcome dose of humor, gratuitous violence and some very stylish scenes and artistic shots.

The story follows the Basterds in their quest to rid France of the Nazi’s and all the way through to their attempt to end WWII. Inglourious Basterds shares a lot of the same satirical undertones with an old Kubrick classic and this film has some of the most original and funny characters i’ve seen in a war film since Full Metal Jacket. With Christoph Waltz‘s portrayal of the Jew hunter stealing the show for me personally, but with Brad Pitt and the other Basterds giving excellent performances too.

If I have to fault Tarantino, it feels like he has fallen into a rut and is maybe too stuck on the past. This film had the overuse of old style chaptering and sectioning like we saw in Kill Bill, along with the old fashioned techniques which could be found in Grindhouse (Death Proof)… and of course his trademark of dramatic music pieces out of place during the middle of a scene made a comeback. While I know he is always paying homage to filming techniques which he used to love as a child, it would be nice to have him shake up his style and produce something completely different. Maybe his talent is making arty films which get accepted by the mainstream but it would be nice to see him try something else, just to see if he could.

Don’t get me wrong though, its a very small blemish on what is otherwise a excellent movie. I’ve already watched it again with English subtitles to pick up on what I missed the first time round and I still thoroughly enjoyed it. With this probably being one of the last major releases of the Norwegian summer schedule, I have to look back and say that we’ve done really well, with a string of high quality movies with only a few piles of turd in between!