About 5 minute into Bastards I suddenly remembered why I love Quentin Tarantino so much. The way he shoots a scene, the dialog he uses, the way his shots are framed. He takes a simple conversation built around a tense situation, but lets the simplest actions and words drive the suspense. Words are to his films as Action is to Crank. It is indeed glorious.
Brad Pitt plays the commanding officer of a group, of whose only mission is to kill Nazis. Not just kill them, but instill the fear of god in them. He demands from each man in his unit 100 Nazi scalps. And it's likely he gets them. Maybe my lone complaint with the film is that this part of the movie doesn't get quite enough time, especially at just over 2 and a half hours it doesn't quite feel like we've gotten all the bang we could of gotten out Pitt and his merry men. But that really is a minor complaint.
The other arc of the film revolves around a young Jewish girl who escapes the grasps of the movies villain, a man known as The Jew Hunter, early in the film, and settles into a nice life for herself. That is until the film, like most of Tarantinos works, comes full circle in the closing act.
Christopher Waltz as The Jew Hunter is just remarkable and will surely be nominated for an Oscar. He does very little, if any, actual killing. But every scene in which he appears, he owns with his mannerisms and words and delivers an unbelievable tension too. Most of the time he's playing for laughs but always with a heinous underbelly that we know is lurking. He's simply awesome.
Roger Eberts review mentioned that almost every character in the movie comes so close to bordering on a cartoony caricature but never quite crosses that line and he's right. The film pushes everything to the edge but never steps over it. The music, the narration, the tones of the film are all dead on.
Hanging out with a bunch of Bastards has never been more fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment