Ostentatious Self-Indulgence

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Inglourious Basterds - Movie PosterINGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is intentionally misspelled, because writer-director Quentin Tarantino wanted that title for his latest movie, but also wanted to differentiate it from the 1978 Italian movie of the same name, which just shows how easily he could have given it a unique title.

I’ll tell you what that unique title could have been later on.

The film is divided into five chapters, which are identified at the beginning of each section, and Chapter 1 takes place in 1941 in Nazi-occupied France.

Col. Hans Landa, a German SS officer played brilliantly by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, shows up with his men at a small dairy farm to question the owner in private.

Waltz has already won the Best Actor award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and he is sure to be nominated for and to win many more similar awards for this role.

Col. Landa is charged with finding and killing Jews in France, and he suspects that the farm owner he is questioning can provide him with information about the last Jewish family unaccounted for in the neighborhood.

Chapter 2 then shows the title characters, who are a squad of Jewish- American soldiers who have been dropped behind enemy lines in France and are led by Lt. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt in a surprisingly comic role.

Lt. Raine tells his men, “We’re here to do one thing and one thing only: Killing Nazis.”

Well, that’s not entirely true, because they also scalp the German soldiers that they kill in order to send a message to whoever finds the soldiers’ bodies.

Chapter 3 then jumps to 1944 in Paris, and we meet Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman who owns a movie theater, and here is where Tarantino really starts to show off his cinematic knowledge, so much so that the audience can get the impression that this is a lecture on the history of cinema instead of a movie itself.

Col. Landa shows up again, and then later Lt. Raine and the Inglourious Basterds show up, too, but by now this is no longer a war movie, but an elaborate hoax on the audience because of Tarantino’s rewriting of well-known history.

And remember how I said that Tarantino could have given it a unique title?

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS could easily have been called OSTENTATIOUS SELF-INDULGENCE.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”