Academy Awards Special - Inglourious Basterds

Auteur thy name is Tarantino. There is no film student who matriculated in the early 90's who didn't want to be Quentin Tarantino. Ironically, Tarantino didn't go film school. Or college. Or most of high school. Yet the director has churned out some the most original, maniacally brilliant films in the American canon. Tarantino has always utilized non-linear story lines and stylized violence to tell his tales, and yet one aspect present in nearly all of his films is rarely discussed. Tarantino has some of the most uniquely realized feminine characters ever to grace the screen. They are so evolved that they have achieved post-feminist status. In True Romance (which Tarantino wrote but did not direct), Alabama is a beautiful hooker who has had only a handful of clients. She meets Clarence and falls deeply in love, forsaking her career in prostitution. Despite Alabama's penchant for animal prints and push-up bras, Tarantino never paints her as cheap or wanton. He presents a full-blown heroine whose one mission in life is to love her husband. In Natural Born Killers, Mallory Knox is a serial murderer who, after years of sexual abuse at the hand of her own father, is moved to kill indiscriminately with her beloved husband, Mickey. An ass-kicking beauty seems trite in the age of Angelina, but in 1994 those broads were few and far between. Finally, in Kill Bill; Volume I and II, Tarantino gave us Beatrix Kiddo. Kiddo is a martial-arts expert and killer-for-hire who undergoes a profound change once she becomes pregnant. She leaves both her lover Bill and her life of crime to pursue a quasi-Ozzie and Harriet-type life. Bill and his gang of female killers finds Beatrix and guns her and her wedding party down in cold blood. Beatrix awakes from a coma years later to find her in-utero cargo at large and the lady is pissed. Somehow, somehow, Tarantino (and of course, Uma Thurman) gives us an incredibly relatable character who avenges the loss of her baby by brutally murdering all complicit. Thurman becomes that virtually illusive woman who can both stomp ass and be touchingly vulnerable.

Which brings us to Basterds. In this rather imaginative (in Hollywood, what?) script. Tarantino places us in Nazi-occupied France. Christoph Waltz is the sociopathic Colonel Landa whose job it is to rid the French countryside of their pesky Jew problem. Landa and his thugs murder the entire Dreyfus family, save for their beautiful daughter Shoshanna, who escapes to Paris. Shoshanna hides in plain sight for years as the proprietor of a theater with her black lover Marcel. By this time, America has become aware of the genocidal evils of the Germany's National Socialist Party and has deployed a small band of Jewish soldiers to fight them. The crew call themselves the "Basterds" and are led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, pulling off the year's most inexplicable feat by being the worst actor in the film and simultaneously the most watchable). The Basterds have one mission; kill and scalp as many Nazi's as they can. While the Basterds formulate a plan to get the biggest fish in the Nazi tank, Shoshanna is devising her own plan of remarkable similarity. Again, Tarantino makes his female lead the true heart of the story. Shoshanna is smart, tough and ravishing in the vein of Catherine Deneuve. She displays incredible fortitude in the face of unbearable fear. She is the character we long to return to, even as we salivate over the brutish Eli Roth's savage beating of a smarmy German officer. The talented Melanie Laurent is Shoshanna, and my one complaint about her acting is that she does not have the pathos needed to really make us cry for her. But Laurent is still young, and it is possible that she is just a bit too European in her approach for the emotional American movie-goer. The other actors in Basterds are top-notch, with Waltz being the standout. Michael Fassbender and Diane Kruger are both delicious, as is an unusually reserved Mike Myers as an English officer who desperately wants to partner with the Americans if it will only end the war. Inglorious Basterds is splashy, deeply colorful and touches lightly on camp, but it achieves the substantive feel with the rock and roll vibe that so defines all of Tarantino's films.

My Comment relates to the chick thing. There are very few stories that combine the duality of woman, particularly on film. In the last ten years, there has been a fascination with the angry, violent, cartoon-like images we see in action films. Angelina Jolie has always played these roles, because the studios realize the value in a feminine beauty who acts nothing like a woman. Jolie herself fed the frenzy by acting like a man in public. She was never the betrayed, always the betrayer, and she presented a black-leather clad package of testosterone wrapped in gorgeousness. More and more, I hear women say that they never want to get married or have children. It's as if they are warding off the inevitable label of desperate that so many men apply to women looking for a husband. These woman want to be seen as independent (read; not clingy), tough (not a silly girly girl), and interested in fun (able to pound non-faggoty drinks like tequila). But I offer up the theory that many of these women are actually using this act in order to impress men. In effect, they are acting like men so that men don't think they act like women, and then the men will want to date, marry and procreate with them. What is really so wrong with being independent and still wanting to fall in love with someone and have children? Why do we have to make a choice between the two? I submit that the post-modern feminist is the one who finds a way to be strong, self-reliant, able to play beer-pong with the boys and not be afraid to admit that her mate and baby make her sloppy with emotion. Come on ladies, if Angie can do it, why can't wait. Oh wait, because she's really hot and has nannies. Screw Angie, just do it.