The New Classics: Inglourious Basterds

Michael Cusumano here to take a break from batting around Once Upon a Time In... Hollywood to look back a decade.

Scene - Chapter 2: Inglourious Basterds 
The Inglourious Basterds marketing team knew what aspects of the film to emphasize ten years ago. 

“A basterd's work is never done” boasted the tag line next to the image of a triumphant Brad Pitt brandishing a machine gun atop a pile of dead Nazis. “An inglourious, uproarious thrill-ride of vengeance!” promised another line. The centerpiece of the trailer was Pitt’s Aldo the Apache jutting his chin into a tight close to declare “I want my scalps!”. The promise was clear. The director of Kill Bill is trading samurai swords for hand grenades.

Rewatching it now, ten years later, I can still feel the chasm between the film that was sold and the film that was delivered. Basterds is a sprawling, oddly-shaped, thesis paper of a movie. And while there is no shortage of violence, it takes a back seat to dialogue, mostly arriving in quick bursts to punctuate long scenes of conversation. At times, Basterds could be mistaken for an adaptation of a stage play, and a foreign language one to boot. 

“Uproarious” though. The tag was telling the truth about that...

Click to read more ...

Link Club

• Variety RIP Piero Tosi one of the great costume designers. His film credits include Death in Venice, La Traviata, La Cage Aux Folles and The Night Porter so he's the one responsible for Charlotte Rampling at her most sexually provocative
• BuzzFeed good piece on Brad Pitt's talent and why he shines in weirder sideline roles as opposed to leads... though we object to any notion that he isn't a leading man in Once Upon a Time... but this battle is already lost since critics keep calling him supporting even before the Oscar campaign does. (sigh)

more after the jump including The Hunt, a fun conversation on Hobbs & Shaw, Tarantino and Almodóvar...

Click to read more ...

Podcast: Once Upon a Time ... in Listener Questions

with Murtada Elfadl & Nathaniel R

 

Index (59 minutes)
00:01 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: stars, tension, pacing, violence
27:00 Skin starring Jamie Bell: Murtada hates it
Listener Questions...
30:00 Feelings about Renee Zellweger playing Judy
35:00 Our favourite Brad Pitt roles
37:00 Alternative history movies
39:00 Best cats in movies?
41:45 Who is the next Nicole Kidman? 
49:00 Smackdown scheduling
50:20 Sharon Tate's legacy 
51:30 What happened with Mask (1985) at the Oscars? 
55:00 Is 2019 a weak film year? 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Articles referenced in this recording
• Jason's review of Once Upon a Time...
• Murtada on the Judy trailer
• Nathaniel on Mask 

Once Upon a Time in Listener Questions

Lunchtime Poll: Which scene in a movie made you imagine a whole other movie?

by Nathaniel R

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood was difficult to write about. That's what happens with dense movies. Naturally, then, my review left out something major. It was only after publishing it that I realized I hadn't even mentioned the extended scene that is the movie's most impressive on a filmmaking level. I'm talking about the significant detour when Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) visits Spahn's Movie Ranch. He used to shoot a TV show there a decade earlier but it's now Manson Family territory, thanks to the retired and now blind George Spahn (Bruce Dern)...

Click to read more ...

Review: Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad...

We want you... to see this movie so we can talk about it.

[Spoiler-free review] Here’s the best way to know that you’re inside an auteur’s movie. It’s impossible to imagine it having been made by anyone else. Quentin Tarantino’s 10th feature film (creatively referred to as his 9th, presumably to give him a retirement out after his various “I’ll quit after 10 films!” proclamations) is a fable about Hollywood. The movie begins in 1968 and ends in the summer of 1969 when the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s new wife, and her house guests were all brutally murdered by the Manson family. Any number of filmmakers could have made a movie about that infamous year in California, but only Tarantino could have made Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. 

Historical events, real ones at least, have never been as sacred to Tarantino as the history of the movies. Whenever he’s dipped into “history” -- Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds-- it’s been as emotionally loaded prefab worlds from which to spin his own idiosyncratic yarns.  In this regard Once Upon a Time is no exception. To this viewer, though, his latest movie feels closer in spirit to Pulp Fiction...

Click to read more ...