Although I love many Tarantino movies, I can’t say he is one of my favorite directors.  Reservoir Dogs is a favorite, but Kill Bill and other recent films left me cold.  Still, I was intrigued by the idea of QT giving his take on World War II.  Brad Pitt can be great or can mail a role in, and I wasn’t sure what to expect…was this going to be a bloody shoot-em-up action film or something where the dialogue drives the plot?  I’d sort of decided to skip Inglorious Bastedrs and wait for the DVD, until someone who I share a good deal of film taste with told me I *HAD* to see it.  Since was the same fellow who made sure I didn’t miss Whatever Works, I felt obliged to take his advice.  A bit of arm twisting was all I needed to convince Heather to give it a try.

Don’t let the trailers fool you.  The opening scene lets you know that this is not going to be a QT take on The Dirty Dozen.  Sure, you have Brad Pitt and his gang of Jewish GI’s, who have been dropped behind enemy lines in France and are terrorizing the Nazi’s.  But that is only a secondary part of the film.  As usually, Tarantino has multiple storylines, which he toes together later.  As the film opens, you have 20 minutes of dialogue between a Nazi Colonel (Christoph Waltz) and a farmer who he suspects of hiding Jews.  The tension is heavy, but also lies underneath the innocuous conversation.  You keep waiting for the bullets to fly, or the body to drop, but brilliantly each moment where a lesser film might do this comes and goes.  The man lights his pipe.  The Colonel drinks some milk.  It is, in a way, similar to the Hitchcock theory on the bomb in the drawer.  But in this case, there is no bomb that we can see…we just suspect one.

From here we meet Brad Pitt, who plays Lt. Aldo Rain.  A combination of a hillbilly, an Apache, and a few drops of a satire on Lee Marvin, Rain and his crew travel to France to kill (and literally scalp) Nazis.  They gain quite a reputation and attain legendary status among the common Nazi soldier.  Hitler is beyond himself at his army’s inability to track them down and kill them.  Admittedly, from this point forward, we’ve entered an alternate history of the war, but it doesn’t matter.  You’re having too much fun to care, and Tarantino is able to bring you into this world without a struggle.

Two more storylines are developed and brought together: a Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) who escaped from the Nazi Colonel (known as the “Jew Hunter”) and now runs a cinema, and a British Intelligence plot to assassinate a number of high-ranking Nazis.  Eventually everything comes to a combined volcanic eruption, as you’d expect in a QT film, but again he manages to do this with plot twists that play against the obvious and expected.  Thus the magic of his touch is his ability to lead you towards the cliché of World War II films, and then deftly reveal that the pea is not under the cup that you expected it to be. 

As always there are some showdowns, some shoot-outs, and a pile of delicious dialogue.  I worry that many moviegoers will skip Inglorious Basterds because of the trailers and the generally poor promotion the studio provided.  Fortunately for me, I didn’t miss it, and I hope you don’t either!