Live Life Team
Quentin Tarantino’s sixth film may be his most daring one yet which is no mean feat for a director known for pushing the envelope with his often bizarre plot twists. He is a brilliant genre director who takes the pulp films he enjoyed as a youth and improves them.
“Inglorious Basterds” is Tarantino’s World War II genre film. It takes place in Nazi-occupied France and, like most of Tarantino’s earlier films, follows multiple story lines. The first follows a young Jewish woman who has been orphaned by the Gestapo. The second is a colonel who has been charged by the Nazis to eliminate any Jews left in France. The third is a group of American soldiers called the Basterds, who torture and kill any Nazis they can find.
Without revealing too much of the plot, I have to admit that I was completely mesmerized by the film’s unpredictability. Christoph Waltz’s role as Colonel Hans Landa came across as gripping and slightly chilling. Finding an actor to speak German, French, English, and Italian in one film might have been challenging enough for any casting director, but Waltz’s Landa may be one of the most effective film villains in years. He is polite, elegant, sly, and seems to enjoy making the people he’s questioning uncomfortable. It’s like watching a cat playing with a mouse just before he devours it, which sums up my experience watching the film. Tarantino is the cat playing with his viewer. And I loved every minute of it.
