Movie Shorts for Aug. 27

Inglourious basterds

There are a few things you can always count on from Quentin Tarantino. He always gorges himself on cinematic references. He always indulges in orgies of excessive, yet not distasteful, blood-soaked violence. And he always reimagines big-time actors in unexpected roles.

Then there are some things you can’t count on Tarantino to do. He doesn’t rely on conventions, and he doesn’t give a rip about keeping to the historical record, even as he directs a World War II comedy-action-drama. You just shouldn’t expect him to do these things.

“Inglourious Basterds” fits this mold, which is pretty universally Tarantino’s. It’s a historical fantasy of an American special ops unit in occupied France during the war. Its job is to hunt down Nazis, or, as their commander Lt. Aldo Raine pronounces it, “gnat-zees.”

Raine, played by Brad Pitt in what is easily one of the funniest and most likable roles of the year, is an anti-fascist hillbilly who has assembled elite Jewish-American soldiers to give the Germans no quarter. Along the way they meet up with a British film critic-warrior and a German double agent and carry out a plan to assassinate the Nazi high command.

By turns funny, serious, campy, grotesque and dramatic, this movie is an experimental mismatch of styles. Working with a loping, laid-back script, Tarantino finds plenty of adventurous screen compositions to work with his long, tense scenes. This is certainly one of his less frantic movies, but it’s quick enough to draw viewers in.

Still, I won’t lie. “Inglourious Basterds” has a lot of loose ends. Tarantino draws plenty of strands out of his wild imagination that don’t go anywhere.

But, as pretentious as it sounds, Tarantino is an auteur director through and through. These are his marks. If he makes mistakes, at least they’re his mistakes and not the boardroom filler of studio system executives. Tarantino voices his opinion, through Raine’s character, that this movie is his “masterpiece.” Well, not quite, but it’s still a good shot.



-Jonathan Pattishall



In The Loop

“In the Loop” is a semi-successful, occasionally funny attempt to harness (or simply rip off) the awkward, mockingly candid humor of “The Office” for the purpose of satirizing the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Unless you’re one of those indiscriminate receptacles that mistakes the cheap, repetitive gags of that show for comedic genius, then this movie will occasionally make you roar with laughter, but more often it will probably make you restless and bored.

Though the handheld camera work and faux-pas humor are straight out of “The Office” (as are some of the character types), the plot is somewhat a combination of last year’s “Burn After Reading” and 2006’s “Thank You For Smoking.”

When British Minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) slips up on a media question about the possibility of war with Iraq, the Labor government calls in its master spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) to make sure Foster knows how to stick to the party line.

Through a series of mishaps, Foster and his aides keep gaffing on the issue as they are seized upon by competing factions of the U.S. State Department, both of whom want to exploit his bumbling idiocy for their own political gain.

The funniest parts of the movie are invariably explicit rants of Tucker, who is a free-styling, psychopathic bard of insulting vulgarities.

But what really saves it from completely flopping on the comedy, a la “The Office,” is probably where it comes from. “In the Loop” is a British production that gleans many actors from a U.K. TV show called “The Thick of It,” which also deals in political satire.

Coming from a people who don’t feel the need to be polite when their ministers screw things up, the Brits have always been more capable than their Yankee brothers at skewering their government and, as this movie shows, ours as well. And though it partly gets lost in its borrowed style, I can’t imagine an American production bashing the war hawks of Washington and London any better.



-Jonathan Pattishall