Inglourious Basterds Reviews
“Inglourious Basterds ” has been finally premiered on Wednesday May 20, 2009 at Cannes Film Festival.
Quentin Tarantino who has already won a Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, and his new movie is in contention for the top prize at Cannes, has said: “I’m expecting this to be one of the high moments of my career. There is nothing like it in cinema… Directors in my situation don’t normally go this direction, especially when they’re doing something really big.”
“It’s like a Quentin Tarantino movie on steroids and speed. It’s a movie that takes place in World War Two, but this is not a World War Two movie,” Eli Roth said of the film.
We are not in Cannes, unfortunately, so we haven’t seen Quentin Tarantino’s “Ingluorious Basterds” but you can read the reviews from other sites – both the positive and the negative ones. You can read the two contrasting opinions just from Totalfilm, Screendaily is very mixed too, but Variety gives positive review. However, we must wait “Inglourious Basterds ” August US release.
“Given what the world expects from Quentin Tarantino – the man, the myth, the pastiche-driven movie machine – his latest feature, “Inglourious Basterds,” stands out for its seemingly low ambition. Talked about for years by the filmmaker as his epic “guys-on-a-mission” movie, the final product, unveiled this morning in Cannes, certainly meets those standards.
The story of Nazi-hunting Jewish soldiers delivers on the colorful brand of unserious entertainment implied by the plot, but no matter how much extreme contextualization and heavily stylized techniques Tarantino introduced to the production, “Inglorious Basterds” feels like a bubblegum sidedish to the heavy dinner plate of his career.” IndieWire
“An intermittently-inspired World War II epic which illustrates both Quentin Tarantino’s brilliance and his tendency towards indulgence, Inglourious Basterds is composed of a series of long-running vignettes strung together by a slender story thread. The problem is that no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, and, with some of the scenes running up to half an hour each, the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing.
Above-the-title star Brad Pitt plays the captain of a troupe of Jewish American renegades dubbed the Inglorious Bastards, but Pitt is far from the centre of attention and both French actress Melanie Laurent and German actor Christoph Waltz both have more screen time and juicier roles…” ScreenDaily
“…It’s an audacious, and, when it comes to timing, indulgent work – some sequences (the prologue, a lengthy interlude in a cellar) run to more than 20 minutes; this comes after what must have been drastic cutting, as Maggie Cheung does not appear at all in the finished product shown in Cannes today, Mike Myers only has one scene and even Michael Fassbender comes and goes with alarming alacrity…” ScreenDaily Blog – Fionnuala Halligan
Samuel L. Jackson and Maggie Cheung Signs On for Inglourious Basterds!
The highly anticipated Quentin Tarantino project “Inglorious Basterds” has added two more to its cast – Academy Award-nominated actor Samuel L. Jackson and one time Cannes Best Actress Maggie Cheung.
“Inglourious Basterds” begins in German-occupied France, where Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) witnesses the execution of her family at the hand of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Shosanna narrowly escapes and flees to Paris, where she forges a new identity as the owner and operator of a cinema.
Elsewhere in Europe, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) organizes a group of Jewish soldiers to engage in targeted acts of retribution. Known to their enemy as “The Basterds,” Raine’s squad joins German actress and undercover agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) on a mission to take down the leaders of The Third Reich. Fates converge under a cinema marquee, where Shosanna is poised to carry out a revenge plan of her own.
The Playlist says that Jackson, who called Tarantino himself to ask for a role in the movie, will be the narrator and will appear only a few times throughout. Meanwhile, Maggie Cheung (Hero, Clean) has been cast as Madame Mimieux, the French matron of the Cinematheque that takes in the protagonist Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) when she becomes homeless and is being sought by the Nazis.
The film is currently shooting in Europe and also stars Eli Roth, Mike Myers and Michael Fassbender.
“Inglourious Basterds” will be released in 2009, and will possibly debut at the Cannes Film Festival.
