A Few Words About Inglourious Basterds

So last weekend I went out to my local megaplex and watched Inglourious Basterds, the new Tarantino movie.

And I've got to tell you, the movie didn't surprise me one bit. Every plot twist, every nuance. Shit, even most of the dialogue.

I saw it all coming.

Am I a psychic, you ask?

Surprisingly, no. I just... you know. I'd read the script already.

Anyhow, this was a new experience for me. Most of the time I read a script after I've watched the movie. A script, after all, is best described as the blueprint for a movie, and reading one before you've watched the movie is sort of like looking at a set of blueprints before you've seen the building.

But that's what I did with Inglourious Basterds anyway, to see what it was like, to see how different it would be and if my opinion of it would change. I'd heard the final draft of the shooting script had leaked so I secured myself a copy.

Then I sat down a read it, knowing I'd be sacrificing some of the joy of watching the movie for the first time in the process.

So what was it like, you ask patiently, hoping I'll move on to another topic?

Well, the truth is I probably should have picked a different script, because the Inglourious Basterds script, with few exceptions, was exactly like the fucking movie.

With the exception of an extensive beer pong sequence.

That is, of course, without all the typos. The goddamn script was riddled with them. Tarantino is apparently some combination of dyslexic, lazy and a bad speller. For instance: Adolf Hitler is spelled "Adolph Hitler."

At the end of the day, though, my experience of reading it was, like I said, almost exactly like my experience of watching it (sans the music, of course, and the smell of farts). And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense why.

A Tarantino movie is inevitably talky (and whatever you think about it, Inglourious Basterds is a very talky movie), to the point that many scenes essentially boil down to a few talking heads. The drama is carried out by the situation and the inventiveness of the dialogue (which I can report was nearly line for line), and all of that is in the script.

Thinking back over it, I actually think the movie would have worked just as well as a radio play, since you realize after doing what I did just how few of the scenes were carried primarily by the visuals (like this scene from Pulp Fiction).

And that's fine. Glengarry Glen Ross is non-visual, too, and it's one of my favorite movies.

In the final evaluation, I think it's a useful exercise. But the next time I do this it'll have to be something not quite so talky (that means you, Zach and Miri Make a Porno!)

Oh, and my grade on the movie (since I can tell you were all eagerly awaiting that): 3 stars out of 5.

The movie was only so-so, I thought. The first sequence is amazing and the rest sort of fizzles. The Hans Landa character really stood out in the script and I'm glad he was well played (though I honestly thought he read better).

I'd say it goes in the Death Proof file, though Inglourious Basterds, for all it's gung ho weirdness, wasn't nearly as playful as that movie.