HERE COME THE BASTERDS

For Quentin Tarantino fans, the wait for a new film can feel interminable. The wait between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill Volume 1 was seven years. The six months between that film and its' second installment felt like an eternity filled with unanswered questions. Nearly three years passed before Death Proof materialized as part of the Grindhouse double feature in 2007.

Two and a half years later, the long-in-the-making Inglorious Basterds has at last roared into your nearest multiplex, promising all the dark humour, bizarre plot twists and unexpected violence you would expect from this generation's most audacious auteur.

You get that with this movie and a whole lot more.

The story being marketed to you in the trailers involves Brad Pitt leading a ragtag Jewish squadron of Nazi headhunters (literally) who are on a mission to stop the Third Reich scalp by bloody scalp. You get that but it's only one-third of the actual story. There is a subplot involving the terrific Christoph Waltz as a charming yet diabolical Nazi officer Col. Landa (nicknamed the Jew Hunter) who has killed the family of Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a refugee who has reinvented herself in France as a cinema operator. There is another subplot involving her romantic pursuit by a Nazi war hero-turned-movie star (Daniel Bruhl). There is yet a third subplot involving a German actress (Diane Kruger) who is also working as a double agent for the British in their plot to hire the Basterds to assassinate Hitler.

Confused? NO?!! Excellent! You now have my permission to check out this movie.

Tarantino, i feel, has put himself on a whole new plane as a director here. The stories eventually piece together very nicely and although there are plenty of macabre comedic moments throughout (mostly due to Pitt's character), they take their sweet time appearing here. Nothing as in-your-face as Kill Bill Vol. 1, for instance. The dialogue also has a new maturity to it. Maybe it has to do with the period of the piece that there are no typical QT observational diatribes about, say, 70s action movies or comic books. The script is still fabulous but the conversations here just have a decidedly different feel to them than i would have expected.

The music is, however, flying in the face of the period piece. There are even more spaghetti western selections from the legendary Ennio Morricone and Lalo Schifrin than Kill Bill and Death Proof combined, as well as the brilliant use of David Bowie's "Cat People", from the 1982 Paul Schrader film. Even in a Nazi war film, Tarantino throws the rules out the window and still finds the right song for the scene.

The film is heavily subtitled for a mainstream American studio movie, which will inevitably piss off a lot of people who were thinking they paid for Brad Pitt in GI Joe-Rise Of The Cobra instead. I gotta hand it to QT here. It would have been so much easier to just cast well-known American actors working hard on their French and German accents. But he knows his real fans can handle subtitles and foreign actors. The rest of you can just stay home and watch America's Got Talent.

You know who you are.

Overall, i can't recommend this enough for Tarantino fans. It will hopefully keep us sated until the next movie comes out in, by my averages, 2014.