Inglourious.basterds.2009

It is, without question, Tarantino’s most mature work. It is also his most fun.

He asks the farmer hiding a family under his floorboards: "Are you hiding refugees underneath my nose?"

Inglourious Basterds is messy, indulgent, too long, and utterly glorious. It is a film that believes in the power of cinema so deeply that it lets a movie theater end a war. It understands that sometimes the only satisfying answer to evil is a baseball bat to the skull—and sometimes it's a French girl weeping while watching her Nazi enemies burn. inglourious.basterds.2009

You know the answer. The farmer knows the answer. But for three agonizing minutes, Tarantino makes you watch the chess match anyway. That is the magic of the 2009 film. It is not a war movie. It is a tension machine. On paper, Inglourious Basterds shouldn’t work. It is a spaghetti western disguised as WWII propaganda. It stars Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee hillbilly who scalps Nazis and speaks Italian with an accent so bad it becomes art. It features a French Jewish girl (Mélanie Laurent) who runs a cinema and plots revenge. It gives the most terrifying villain of the 21st century (Christoph Waltz as Landa) the most polite vocabulary in cinema history.

And it rewrites history. Literally.

There is a moment in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds that stops the film cold. It happens about twenty minutes in, in a smoky French farmhouse. A Nazi colonel named Hans Landa—known as "The Jew Hunter"—stops talking about rats and Jews and shifts to the subject of metaphor.

Final thought: Re-watch the tavern scene. Pay attention to the hand signals. And remember—three glasses of whiskey. Never four. It is, without question, Tarantino’s most mature work

Tarantino doesn’t care about the actual end of World War II. He cares about the cinematic end. So he takes a movie theater, 400 rolls of flammable nitrate film, and a room full of Nazi high command, and he burns it all down. The genius of Basterds is that it weaponizes our own history against us. We know the real Nazis weren’t killed in a Parisian cinema fire. But for two and a half hours, Tarantino makes you want it to be true. He turns vengeance into a genre.