Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: camnite on August 22, 2009, 01:48:25 AM
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For those who havent seen it, very good movie, about 2 1/2 hours long. Plenty of obsenities and gore, but for most of the "mature" crowd you should like it
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I just saw it and it was a riot . Its got lots of dialog , gore , action and funny stuff you would expect .
Nutte :salute
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My local newspaper said the violence obscured what might have been a great movie. In reality, I often caught myself going "C'mon, where's the violence?" There wasn't as much violence as the paper said there was, but the parts that DID have violence were pure awesome. One of my favorite parts of the entire movie was when the German officer was being held captive by the Bastards and was waiting to have his head knocked out of the park. I freaking loved it.
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I just got back from it. Spoilers ahead, read at your own risk:
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Now, I've never enjoyed Tarantino's style. I sat through Kill Bill a couple weeks ago on Spike or whichever channel was running it, and found myself wondering WTF the hype was about?! And maybe that explains it, but although it had entertaining moments I just on the whole didn't enjoy it.
For one, it was just too slow. The previews made it look like it was going to be more of a traditional action war movie, something along the lines of The Dirty Dozen but Tarantino seems like he was going for something a little more stylistic, and IMO that detracted from the rest of the movie. There were two main plots: The Basterds themselves, and the Jewish girl Shosanna--If you're watching the trailers, blink and you'll miss her (she's the girl in one clip who LOOKS quite a bit like Diane Kruger, that is putting warpaint under her eyes). However it seems like her part actually turned out to be the MAIN plot of the film. Most of the movie centered around her plans for revenge, which ran parallel to the Basterds' own mission.
The split attention hurt, especially after it gets bogged down with the Shosanna/Zoller plot. There's VERY little of the Basterds' exploits, except for a few expository scenes or cut-aways to support dialog among other characters. In fact we go right from Raine's briefing to an audience by several German officers with Hitler talking about how the Basterds have been rampaging across the countryside. We get VERY little detail on who the Basterds are, which is really quite a waste because there were some very colorful characters that would have been interesting to get to know. As a result, I just didn't CARE about anyone in the movie.
I didn't mind the film's sort of twisted, dark comedy, but I think it would have been a much more entertaining and interesting film by eliminating the Shosanna plot altogether and focusing entirely on the Basterds. That's why everyone I know hated that almost the entire squad was killed at the end of Saving Private Ryan. We actually got to know these characters and watch them interact with each other, so by the end of the movie it actually had an impact watching them die. Here, the different characters were more or less just fodder for the handful of action scenes. Tarantino wasn't even consistent with the size of Raine's unit and how many men there actually WERE. In one scene there's about 5-6 men, including Raine and his Sgt. In another there appeared to be as many as 12. By the end there's only 6 of the Basterds--INCLUDING Raine and the Sergeant--whose fates I can account for.
Although the there was a much more logical narrative flow from beginning to end than in Kill Bill, which pretty mercilessly backtracked and jumped ahead at random in the timeline, I'm just not a fan of his editing. But I went and saw a Tarantino film, so knowing how he likes to make movies I shouldn't have been surprised.
Lastly, I have to say the pervasive Spaghetti Western music REALLY pulled me out of the movie. Awful, AWFUL music choice. I almost thought I was in the wrong theater when the movie started.
There were a few nice touches that suggests Tarantino did his homework on the period, and the costuming was first-rate, but on the whole it's not a movie I'm going to see again. I probably won't even rent it on DVD or watch it on HBO.
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You should rent the movie not watch it on TV Saxman. But I liked killbill. Just me. :confused:
And I'm still waiting the The Pacific to start on HBO. :aok
PS. I listen to sometracks off of the KillBill soundtrack flyin me cartoon plane. :x
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Cool deal !!!! Gonna check it out
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But why on earth do they have to shoot that one poor Nazi's balls off in that one scene from the Trailer??
Is that something appropriate for an American hero to do??
I thought that only the Mexican Drug Cartels or Hells Angels did that sort of thing.
Seems rather mean and cruel to me to castrate your enemy.
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But why on earth do they have to shoot that one poor Nazi's balls off in that one scene from the Trailer??
Is that something appropriate for an American hero to do??
I thought that only the Mexican Drug Cartels or Hells Angels did that sort of thing.
Seems rather mean and cruel to me to castrate your enemy.
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I hope you dont fight for my country, you will end up giving the enemy some flowers and back massages. j/k The movie looks good.
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going to see it with my dad this week :rock
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But why on earth do they have to shoot that one poor Nazi's balls off in that one scene from the Trailer??
Is that something appropriate for an American hero to do??
I thought that only the Mexican Drug Cartels or Hells Angels did that sort of thing.
Seems rather mean and cruel to me to castrate your enemy.
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Well If I had to take a guess, probably because it's supposed to be a movie and not real life.
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TE,
The actual scene in the movie plays out a LOT differently from the trailer.
In fact, pay no attention to the trailer at all. The trailer makes this movie look like The Dirty Dozen. IT IS NOT. The Basterds themselves are barely more than a footnote, and almost the entire movie revolves around the Jewish girl Shosanna, played by Mélanie Laurent.
It's like Tarantino couldn't decide what type of movie he wanted to make, so he crammed them both into one 2.5 hour film.
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It's like Tarantino couldn't decide what type of movie he wanted to make, so he crammed them both into one 2.5 hour film.
Are you saying that it is another Tarantino flop?
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I don't really know how it compares to other Tarantino films precisely because I don't care for Tarantino's film-making to begin with so I haven't seen many of them. I just know that it was incredibly dull, felt like two entirely different movies crammed together with no time to fully develop either one, and VERY deceptively marketed (all the advertising focuses on Pitt and the Basterds, who I'd be generous saying they were in a quarter of the film).
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Just saw it last night. A typical Tarantino film. It was OK to see for humor purpose but cannot strand Tarantino. Now i can see the young idiots of this country believing how WWII ended, base off the move.
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Just watched the film. :aok
It had the humor that made the violent scenes disturbably hilarious. The outlandishness of the scenes made the film a true dark comedy.
I liked the small cameos of well known actors throughout the film. Plus the baseball bat wielding "Basterd" was Eli Roth that was behind the Hostel movies a few years ago. Several actors in supporting roles also are the creative forces of these demented films collaborating together.
Unfortunately, there will be many young people who have no interest in history will walk out of the theaters and truly believe that's how the war ended as depicted in the film.
How many people saw a strong resemblance between Eli Roth and "Heroes" Sylar and "Star Trek" reboot Spock actor Zachary Quinto?
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I was thinking about how this could have been done better.
The biggest problem, as I noted, was the feeling that Tarantino was trying to cram two movies into one with the "Revenge Drama" taking precedence despite the marketing focus on the more traditional "Action War Flick" of the Basterds. The Shosanna story DEFINITELY had a much different feel to it. The dark humor of the Basterds part of the story was gone, and it was definitely played much more seriously. Unfortunately, I don't think Tarantino has the chops for that type of story, so get rid of it. There's potential there, but leave it to someone who can REALLY do drama justice. As Shosanna's story is the central part of the ultimate, overall plot of the alternate history ending with the movie theater, that goes out the window, too.
Now once again, the marketing was making it look like a 21st Century take on The Dirty Dozen, so let's go with something more like that by focusing entirely on the Basterds themselves. Ok, so we have "Apache" Raine and his squad of Jewish-American GIs terrorizing German officers in Nazi-occupied Europe. Other than "killing Nat-zees" what would be the plot of the film? What would be the most poignant use of such characters? The Basterds ambush a top-ranking officer's convoy, and they discover evidence of a Death Camp within their area of operations. Honor-bound to protect their people, they decide to liberate the camp. The Basterds must figure out how to carry out the raid and escape with the prisoners back to Allied lines with their limited resources, ultimately putting their plan into action with a Dirty Dozen-style infiltration.
Simple, streamlined, to the point, action-packed. There's time to really learn about the characters, and an objective that will make the audience actually CARE if they succeed or fail. This could all still be done without sacrificing the black humor of the Basterds storyline from the movie as it was actually made.
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I really liked it.
I thought is was more of an art piece than the entertainment cinema we usually see produced now a days. I read in some critique that there's actually a lot of movie tributes worked in, but I don't know enough to detect more than a few myself. I'll be interested to see a list somewhere when other movie freaks actually pick it to pieces.
One problem I have with Tarantino and with the Kill Bills specifically is with overly stylized violence and it coming off really cheesy. Every time I mention something about a katana people always want to say something about Kill Bill or Hatori Honzo, and it disgusts me. That being said I think he did a really good job in this one of mixing extremely graphic violence with humor, and at the same time making it very realistic (other than the lint puffs that come out when the squibs go off). He also has an interesting contrast between ultra-violence somewhat rooted in reality to the stylized violence we often see on the screen in a subconscious comparison of the Nazi propaganda film and the Nazi's leering at it with the events that are unfolding around. The 'real' action is ugly and disgusting, and lots of people die. It in no way seems to glorify the violence, and actually begins to show the horror of necessary evil.
The dialogue, probably Tarantino's greatest strength, is wonderfully interesting, and really builds suspense at times. I also thing the two plot lines, which has been a major complaint on this thread, worked well together and came together nicely. The plot always seems to surprise, and left me riveted up to the end. And with a somewhat unconventional plot line that didn't have what we might expect as a standard climax, I was almost disbelieving that the film was at it's end. Thinking about it though, I guess it summed up rather well.
I might even go see it again with a friend...