Inglourious Basterds Script And More

I finished reading Inglourious Basterds two weeks ago and it was about as good as everyone is saying, maybe a little worse. It was a unique experience for me especially since this is the first script (for a film) I’ve ever read. After reading Inglourious Basterds (purposefully misspelled by Quentin Tarantino) I decided reading screenplays is a good little past time since I don’t get to see half of what I intend to here in North Dakota. I just finished Milk earlier this week and hope to write something about that soon, too.

Inglorious Bastards, if you haven’t heard, is the World War II film Quentin Tarantino has promised for a few years now. It’s immediately visible in the writing that you’re reading something he wrote; it’s often quirky but extremely detailed and dialog heavy. Along with spoken English he mixes in French, German, and just a tad of Italian. I give props to him on that since I’ve never been a fan of misrepresenting a country’s natural language.

Inglourious Basterds is probably the most straight forward story he’s written since Jackie Brown and it shows the makings of what could be an excellent film. It starts out marvelously at a small farm where you meet the film’s leading antagonist, Col. Hans Landa, also known as “the Jew Hunter.” Without spoiling anything, it illustrates the beauty of having a multilingual anti-hero. From there we move on to meet up with Lt. Aldo’s group of ragtag Jewish-American soldiers whose sole purpose is to kill Nazi’s stationed in France. Lt. Aldo and his crew like to leave their own distinct calling card on any Nazi that’s fortunate (?) enough to be kept alive. This is done by carving a swastika into the Nazi’s forehead and sending them on their way. Hitler and his officers become infuriated with the group’s ability to avoid capture and the Reich’s talk of the Basterds like they are some type of aberration. Some, like Lt. Aldo and Sgt. Donnie Donowitz, are given nicknames like “Aldo the Apache” and “the Bear Jew” respectively. Donnie is even thought of as “an avenging Jew angel, conjured up by a vengeful rabbi…”

Flashbacks are frequent throughout the film’s five chapters, not exactly new territory for the director, but they’re used more willingly than ever before. At first I welcomed many of these additions since they were either entertaining or completely appropriate. One particular flashback featuring Donnie has him shopping for a baseball bat in his Boston neighborhood. He then parades around a Jewish neighborhood collecting the names of loved ones and recording them onto his bat. It’s ripe with a Tarantino-style atmosphere and it’s a perfect supplement for developing Donnie’s psyche. Later on the flashbacks become more of a distraction from the dialog (some are just cuts to the events characters are talking about.)

Robert Richardson will be the film’s cinematographer and I have confidence he’ll nail many of the film’s pans and frames. He’s been involved in a slew of good projects over the past few years but he’ll have to channel his efforts on films like the Aviator to get this one right. I’m excited to see what form the movie takes visually. I presume it will downplay the colors a good portion of the time by using loads of blue and gray but knowing Tarantino that could be all wrong. He loves to throw genre specifications out the window and the blue/gray color scheme would probably go along with it.

Inglourious Basterds is currently shooting in Germany so many of the casting choices have already been finalized. Most are perfectly fine (especially Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine as shown in the photo above) but others are complete shit. Eli Roth as Donnie was a terrible mistake and worst of all it’s a pretty critical role. I pictured the character much younger and I’m not sure Roth has the acting chops to pull it off (his credits are fairly limited.) Mike Myers and Cloris Leachman have admittedly small roles but they could be terribly distracting just by being involved.

The direction Tarantino intends to go with this one is still up in the air. I’m hoping it’s less Kill Bill and more Pulp Fiction and judging from what’s written, it could fall in either direction. No matter what he chooses to do, it should at least be entertaining. Hell, I even thought Death Proof had its moments. We should all be glad that he hasn’t given himself a part this time around, knock on wood. Now if only he’d stop handing roles over to his friends.