Okay. The big complaints addressed, up front: Yes, it's very long, and yes, it's very talky (more than a "normal" Tarantino film, even). There's also far less overt action than you think there'll be going in, since the Basterds themselves are a plot device and background series of events rather than a constant foreground storyline--that latter honor is shared fairly equally between blonde, blue-eyed Jewess-in-hiding Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) and slimy-charming S.S. "Jew-hunter" Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), two sides of an uneven cat-and-mouse game played out "Once upon a time...in Nazi-occupied France". Finally, most of the film has subtitles, since many characters speak a language other than English, and people's ability to speak languages other than English fluently and/or convincingly provides a couple of plot points/running jokes--and yeah, people often let slip a fair amount of information on old movies along the way (strangely, since this IS QT we're talking about, here). But I happen to be fine with subtitles and like old movies, so fuck it.
Landa and Shoshanna first meet after Landa manages to (almost literally) sniff her family out at the neighboring dairy farm where they've been hiding; he uses the fact that he and the Gentile farmer who's sheltered her thus far can both speak English to disguise his plans, then brings in a death-squad to shoot up the floorboards, killing her mother, father, uncle and little brother. As Shoshanna rockets off across the fields, covered in their blood, Landa has a chance to shoot her in the back, and doesn't. "Au revoir, Shoshanna!" He sings out happily, instead. He's obviously a man who likes A) the chase and B) a challenge.
Meanwhile, over in Italy, scar-throated mountain man Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his man-crushy Boston baseball fan right hand Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) are putting together a crack guerrilla team for the purpose of one THANG and one THANG only--"Killin' NAHT-zees." Said team is naturally composed of the people most likely to want to kill Nazis, ie Jews with relatives in the old country--or rather not, anymore--like Donny (who, by his body-language, seems to have picked out the whole roster himself). Soon, they're beating Nazis to death with baseball bats (okay, that's just Donny), working diligently towards collecting 100 Nazi scalps each, and carving swastikas into the foreheads of the few Nazis they let live to tell their stories and swell the Basterds' legend.
Fast-forward to 1944. Shoshanna now owns and operates a small movie-house in Paris, where she and her projectionist boyfriend Marcel (black and French, another combination the occupying regime thinks shouldn't be allowed to exist) try to live beneath the radar, collaborating as little as possible. Unfortunately, Shoshanna attracts the attention of Frederick Zoller (Michael Bruhl), a nice young man who loves film and speaks very good French, yet also happens to have recently become the Nazi equivalent of Aldo Ray: He killed almost 300 enemy combattants from a sniper's perch, then played himself in a Goebbels film about the incident, titled Nation's Pride.
Obviously, Shoshanna wants nothing to do with Frederick, but he insists on trying to impress her by persuading Herr Doktor Goebbels to move Nation's Pride's official premiere from the Ritz...to Shoshanna's little theatre, where the entire Nazi High Command will be in attendance--including Hitler. And that's where all our characters begin to converge.
My overall verdict is that while I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds whole-heartedly while I was in it (NB: Wow, I just wrote that as "whore-heartedly"; apt), it cannot possibly be approached from the point of view of it being "just another" World War II movie/action film/exploitation picture/movie about people who love movies, love to talk, and mainly hate each other. Yes, it has huge helpings of all of these, and they mesh better than you might imagine--but what the film is, when all's said and done, is a swoonily elaborate piece of propaganda/wish-fulfillment, as over-the-top and virulent in its own way as Nation's Pride is in its. This is Tarantino playing moral chicken the Leni Riefenstahl-but-not-really way, roping in Roth to shoot Goebbels' vision of Zoller's deification, then balancing it by letting Donny bust heads and riddle Nazis with machine-gun bullets like he's having a Face Of Jewish Rage orgasm. As Roth himself has pointed out, you can't really feel bad about killing Nazis, and he has his own reasons to want to act out that scenario--but if you think he's not enjoying it you're fooling youself, just like if you think YOU wouldn't enjoy it too, you're fooling yourself extra-hard. Sadism in a good cause, during the last Good War.
As Zoller points out to Shoshanna, though, every German soldier is somebody's son, just like every pretty secretly Jewish girl is somebody's daughter. If Nazis ain't got no humanity for pretending Jews aren't human, yet Nazis are human too, where does this leave us? (You better discuss on your own, if you want to, 'cause the movie sure isn't gonna do it for you.)
Tarantino does this sort of feel bad about feelin' (a little too) good switcheroo pretty consistently throughout Inglourious Basterds, so much so that I suppose it could get wearing for those in the audience who aren't being constantly distracted--as I was--by the set-pieces and throw-away fillips he piles in on top. Cut I.B. altogether over some vague moral qualms, and you'll miss a heck of a lot: Til Schweiger's Hugo Stiglitz, a German army guy who joins the Basterds after suddenly deciding to kill every S.S. officer he sees, staring daggers at one who's sat down right next to him even while he still has a bar-game card with "Marco Polo" written on it stuck to his forehead; Michael Fassbender as Archie Hickox, a pre-War film critic turned O.S.S. officer, who tries to explain the Oxford intonation to his otherwise perfect German by claiming he comes from a mountain village so obscure he and his family were background extras in The White Hell of Pitz Palu; Diane Kruger's revelatorily smart, sexy and self-interested Bridget von Hammersmark; Brad Pitt's utterly atrocious, hillbilly-accented version of Italian; the crazy--yet somehow workable--soundtrack choices. ("Theme from Cat People", anyone?)
Uncomfortable? Hopefully. Fun? Indisputably.
Those basterds!
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