Top 100 films of the 2000s: #8

8. Inglourious Basterds, 2009, USA
Dir: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz

I remember coming into this movie with mixed expectations because the reviews for the film were quite mixed coming out of Cannes and its rottentomatoes score was less than stellar for a Tarantino film. I was wondering if QT had lost his edge. I found most critics gave the film low scores because they found it to be too long and not very thrilling.

Well, allow me to call bullshit on that thought. That is, major, gigantic, huge cowdung. Now I don't mean for the gloves to completely come off as I feel that even less than a year later, along with 8 Oscar nominations, people gave the film a much-deserving second shot and found a lot more to love. Fortunately for me, I got just what I needed from a first viewing when it came out in theaters and I was rocked in my fucking seat from beginning to end.

First of all, how can anybody not love the opening scenes of this movie which are clear as day inside my head even though I haven't seen the film in months. Christoph Waltz plays Hanz Landa, the self-proclaimed Jew hunter who has visited a farm in France in order to track down a couple of Jews that are hiding beneath the floorboards. What follows is some brilliant, mature piece of filmmaking that shows Tarantino going leaps beyond his filmmaking craft and literally throwing us in the midst of this scene with a calm, affable, charming, yet terrifying man. Hanz appears to know all along that there are Jews hiding at the man's house, but instead of quickly pointing his fingers, he plays with the guy's head. He slowly, but surely inserts his masculine superiority over the French farmer and his tactics ultimately prove to be successful.

Once Inglourious Basterds gets kick-started by this brilliant scene, we basically follow two main stories. One is the story of Shoshanna who was the sole Jewish escapee from that farm who has since opened up a movie theater in France and has started a second life. The other story is, of course, about the Basterds lead by Brad Pitt's character Aldo Raine. Shoshanna's story is so wonderfully written and interesting that people often compare the Basterds' story quite unfavorably to Shoshanna, but I would very much disagree with that idea, especially upon seeing the film a second time.

You see, overall, Inglourious Basterds is a very precise and mature study on the perception of violence. These Nazi hunters don't just kill the Nazis, they scalp them, mutilate them, terrorize them. We, as the audience, cheer for the Nazi hunters because the Nazis are simply getting what was coming to them. But then Quentin Tarantino puts the camera on us. Later in the film, there are a bunch of Nazis gathered in Shoshanna's movie theater witnessing a pro-Nazi war film where tons of Allied forces are getting shot and killed. The audience laughs at this violence, much like we are laughing at the violence against the Nazis. This is very interesting territory Quentin Tarantino has gone into as it poses a very difficult and unexpected question: is our satisfaction of all these Nazis getting scalped and mutilated just as bad as the Nazis' satisfaction to seeing Allied forces (and essentially, us) being shot and killed? Of course, that question can go either way, but the fact of the matter is that Quentin Tarantino very cleverly uses these Basterds as a way to kind of point the finger at ourselves.

Of course, that's not the only reason why these Basterds exist. They provide some great entertainment for the film in very typical Tarantino fashion. Brad Pitt's performance may not be as jaw-droppingly brilliant as Christoph Waltz's, but he certainly makes for an entertaining and amusing character, especially during the movie theater sequence.

The only real problem with this film is Eli Roth's presence as the Bear Jew. Eli Roth simply cannot act and he's given a pretty prominent, albeit little, scene. Luckily, it never really takes away from the rest of the movie and it feels more like Tarantino proving that he can have this lame director in this role and his movie will still be awesome. Much like how Tarantino appears as Jimmy Dimmick in Pulp Fiction and sucks, but Pulp Fiction is still A-grade material.

Oh, Tarantino, you cocky son of a gun. You sure know how to make one hell of a movie, again and again.