Fourthcoming: Inglourious Basterds

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R0lf
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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#476 Post by R0lf » Fri Aug 28, 2009 8:02 am

I saw a screening of To The Stars By Hard Ways at the cinema a few years ago. There is a really well designed and augmented house robot in the movie and whenever it came on screen people would start laughing. It got me to thinking, because the special effects weren't bad, that essentially we are conditioned by modern design in our reactions. The people were laughing because they couldn't appreciate a different design or perspective from what they would expect from science fiction.

Just personally I've been thinking how much I take for granted the intentionally amusing over the top violence that was used in Kill Bill and how this has flavoured my opinions of Tarantino and what I was expecting from Inglourious Basterds. It made me think that apart from Kill Bill Tarantino has mostly made movies featuring disturbing and realistic but heavily stylised violence. In the same respect I think I lot of people can't interpret a stylised movie as serious as well.

(Oh I'm not sure if I was terribly clear tying that all together!)

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#477 Post by Cheerupemokid » Fri Aug 28, 2009 1:12 pm

Mr Finch wrote:Reply much appreciated oldshepard. I guess I'd find it easier to agree with your point,
I also believe that reducing Nazis down to caricatures is something akin to what the Nazis did with the Jews, no?
if caricature was the only approach we took to the Nazis but there are countless examples to show that this isn't the case. If anything, satire is the exception. You're absolutely right though that not every Nazi/German soldier shared Hitler's ideology or was aware of the specifics of that, or was aware of what others did in Auschwitz-Birkenau etc. Stauffenberg and Schindler are only the best known examples of Germans who even actively fought or sabotaged the war effort.
Even in Basterds you have Pvt. Zoller who, while celebrated as a war hero, definitely shows some remorse in the many lives he has taken. He may not disagree with the Nazi cause (at least he never indicates this even remotely) but he does seem to reason that killing is killing, and a life is worth something even if it is that of “the enemy.”

Of course,
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Zoller turns into a frothing-at-the-mouth villain at the end, which bothers me as it didn’t feel natural at all. After setting up Zoller to be one of the few characters in the film who struck me as sympathetic, he’s made into a monster seemingly for the sake of moving the plot along. He has to be “given his due,” but the only way to accomplish that is by having him earn it moments before. That didn’t work for me.
There has been a lot of great conversation in this thread, thank you all for the great read.

My biggest problem with the movie, the thing that kept me from loving the film (I do like it though, would definitely call it “really good” to put it simply) was the lack of a concise style to the film. Things seemed to be all over the place, both in tone and in actual little nuances (the voice-over introductions of some characters; the random text for others). To me this made the movie feel really undefined, stylistically speaking.

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Cinetwist
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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#478 Post by Cinetwist » Fri Aug 28, 2009 2:31 pm

Did anyone else cringe at some of the self referential dialogue? This thread is a bit unruly for me to check.

I blushed at the 'this might be my masterpiece' line but maybe even worse was the crap about 'we respect directors in France' (yuk!) and putting the directors name on the marquee. There is no way in hell that Pabst's name would have been on a marquee. I'd complain about some of the film posters too, but then we're getting a little too into cinephile minutiae. Oh, and the nitrate exegeis was a bit embarrasing/unnecessary too. Silly to complain about realism, with a film that rewrites history though. Although my complaint is more to do with how shameless the lines are and not how realistic.

Still not sure what I think about the film. Easily my most indifferent reaction to a Tarantino film yet.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#479 Post by StevenJ0001 » Fri Aug 28, 2009 3:56 pm

Cinetwist wrote:Did anyone else cringe at some of the self referential dialogue? This thread is a bit unruly for me to check.
Short answer: yes!

I confess to not thoroughly reading this thread either, but FWIW here's my very brief capsule review: I thought it was an ugly trivialization of history. I'm not saying I found nothing of interest in it, but Tarantino's customary style and world-view (if he actually has a world view beyond visual quotations from movies he likes) was so offensive when employed for this subject matter that I found the film to be a generally miserable experience.

I do find Tarantino's long dialogue scenes fairly compelling, though, and that is always impressive. They are undermined somewhat by the now-tiresome explosion of violence that caps many of them.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#480 Post by Cheerupemokid » Fri Aug 28, 2009 4:15 pm

StevenJ0001 wrote:I do find Tarantino's long dialogue scenes fairly compelling, though, and that is always impressive. They are undermined somewhat by the now-tiresome explosion of violence that caps many of them.
THIS. Very much this. I loved a lot of the long scenes and thought the dialogue was fantastic, but having them end that way just seemed wrong for the movie. It was like here's a great scene, and here's the "Tarantino" twist to end it. I find this to be Tarantino's most frustrating movie to date, as it shows signs of true, matured brilliance, but tosses them aside for the sake of fitting some sort of self-imposed "Tarantino-style" Tarantino seems to be going for.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#481 Post by mario gauci » Fri Aug 28, 2009 5:01 pm

08/26/09: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) ***

"The new film by Quentin Tarantino" contains a handful of excellent performances – especially from relative newcomers Christoph Waltz (a Best Actor winner at the Cannes Film Festival, no less) as Landa aka The Jew Hunter and Melanie Laurent (who plays Shosanna) that makes one look forward to their reappearance on the screen. Typically for the director, there are a couple of masterfully staged and lengthy confrontation sequences (read talkfests): the very opening with the French farmer vs. the Jew Hunter; the one in which Shosanna is invited to have lunch with Josef Goebbels; and the entire "German Night in Paris" sequence – including both the sudden eruption into violence and the Basterds' negotiation with the sole enemy survivor of the massacre (which, taking place mostly off-screen, is the only time I really liked Brad Pitt’s character – more on this later on). Surprisingly enough for a Tarantino movie, there is a comparative understatement in the depiction of violence and the end result is, thankfully, much less of a macho gung-ho experience than I was anticipating. Having so much of the dialogue spoken in the proper language (be it English, French or German) was a bold touch – given that Tarantino's trademark had previously been his reams of “oh-so-cool” dialogue. Besides, the idea of having the Third Reich destroyed by highly flammable nitrate film prints of (ostensibly) their own Nazi Propaganda movies is, admittedly, a brilliant one. Despite its obvious anachronism, I found the use of David Bowie’s “Puttin’ Out The Fire” – originally written for the soundtrack of Paul Schrader's 1982 remake of CAT PEOPLE – playing over the sequence of Shosanna making herself up before shooting her own little holocaust of a movie – to be quite inspired. Lastly, I also liked the camera angle chosen for the film’s final shot in which Pitt utters the unprophetic, “I think this might just be my masterpiece”.

Alas for Tarantino, despite the eight-year-long gestation, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is far from his masterpiece. In fact, for all its admirable qualities, I found it to be a deeply flawed film: firstly, the performances of Brad Pitt (as Lt. Aldo Raine – clearly a tribute to actor Aldo Ray, a veteran of several solid war movies for the likes of Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann) and Eli Roth as the most prominent of the Basterds are, quite frankly, terrible; Pitt's Southern drawl is extremely annoying and Roth's over-the-top characterization as “The Bear Jew" is downright obnoxious. Despite the grandiose title, the Basterds here are a pretty anonymous bunch – a far cry from the first casting rumors of John Travolta, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger! Hell, even penny-pinching supremo Roger Corman came up with a much more decent cast for his own WWII commando movie, THE SECRET INVASION (1964)!

Furthermore, the cameos of Rod Taylor (as, for cryin’ out loud, Winston Churchill!) and Mike Myers (as General Ed Fenech! – obviously a tribute to, of all people, Edwige Fenech!) are simply ludicrous and the scene itself in which they both appear – which shows the Allies engaging a former film critic/ historian to go undercover during the upcoming Nazi premiere – a pointless one; indeed, I strongly doubt that film historians even existed at the time (much less published)! Tarantino's penchant for name-dropping reaches a new low here, too: Charles Chaplin (lest we forget, he had ridiculed Hitler in THE GREAT DICTATOR [1940]), Rene` Clair (he sought refuge in Hollywood before the Nazis occupied France) and G.W. Pabst (he fled from Germany once the Nazis came to power) were all, so to speak, in the Third Reich's black books at the time...therefore, it seems highly unlikely to have Nazis talking about them, using them in their childish word games and allowing posters of their movies to be hung up on the marquee of a movie theater! Besides, how would a very young German soldier know who Max Linder even was (given that the French comedian had committed suicide twenty years before)? Moreover, why would a poster for a three-year old movie – Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’ ASSASSIN HABITE AU 21 (1941) – still be hanging in a theater lobby in 1944?!

However, the most embarrassing gaffe might well come as an insult to the director’s own ‘mentor’ on this movie: Enzo G. Castellari, the director of the original 1978 Italian film that supposedly inspired Tarantino's! In fact, while Eli Roth poses as “Antonio Margheriti” (for the uninitiated, the name of another prolific Italian genre director), Brad Pitt erroneously calls himself Enzo Gorlomi (instead of Girolami which is Castellari's real-name) – even though Castellari himself is present as an extra in the very same sequence!! Maybe Castellari did not dare correct Tarantino or perhaps he was fine with Tarantino's artistic license in redubbing him Gorlomi? He sure seemed happy enough to bask in Tarantino's supposed adulation for his work when I saw him at that aforementioned retrospective during the 2004 Venice Film Festival!

As usual, Tarantino keeps shoving the music of his favorite movies down our ears despite their incongruity (being mostly Westerns in a WWII context); unfortunately, most of the time this distracts the viewer more than anything else e.g. I thought the music used for the shoot-out in the projection booth was effective but, while the tune sounded familiar to me, I could not quite place it! Is a viewer supposed to have these kinds of thoughts in his head during such a pivotal scene? Bafflingly enough, the actor playing Hitler looks and acts nothing like his historical counterpart (but, in a bizarre sort of way, this makes Tarantino's rewriting of history – apparently, it was The Bear Jew who killed Hitler! – more palatable)! But, then again, why conventionally shoot The Fuehrer and not maul him to death with a baseball bat (as per The Bear’s notorious modus operandi)? The scene were Hans Landa lunges murderously at the German actress-double agent (decently played by Diane Krueger) creates the right frisson, true, but is thoroughly uncharacteristic of the level-headed and even sympathetic personality he had displayed so far; this sudden change strikes a distinctly false note when coming so soon before Landa’s own defection to the enemy! Additionally, the Fredrick Zoller biopic having the all-important premiere is shot in a much more kinetic style than was current at the time!

Despite my own personal feelings towards the man himself, Tarantino’s latest opus is, undeniably, a marked improvement over his previous film, DEATH-PROOF (2007); not a great movie overall, mind you, but it does have a couple of peerlessly superb set-pieces and fine performances. Still, when one comes right down to it, I wonder how having a movie entitled INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (was Tarantino's quaint misspelling of the name an effort on his part to further distance himself from Castellari's modest original?) in which the sequences featuring the titular bunch are not only the weakest therein but occasionally quite excruciating to watch, can be considered much of a success…
Last edited by mario gauci on Sun Aug 30, 2009 10:55 am, edited 4 times in total.

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Cinetwist
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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#482 Post by Cinetwist » Sat Aug 29, 2009 3:46 am

Ah yes, the English (auteurist) monograph writing film critic. He was the other embarrasing bit of film history I forgot to mention.

Good review Mario. I agree with pretty much all of it, apart from I don't think it's an improvement over Death Proof at all.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#483 Post by Nothing » Sat Aug 29, 2009 5:07 am

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mario gauci wrote:The scene were Hans Landa lunges murderously at the German actress-double agent (decently played by Diane Krueger) creates the right frisson, true, but is thoroughly uncharacteristic of the level-headed and even sympathetic personality he had displayed so far; this sudden change strikes a distinctly false note when coming so soon before Landa’s own defection to the enemy!
Quite the opposite - he is getting his rocks off for the last time.

Btw, regarding the mis-spelling: In the opening credits, for the title, Tarantino uses a scan from the front page of the first draft screenplay that was leaked online, no? Meaning "I can't spell, but I can still make $100m+ at the box-office" - something to that effect.
Last edited by Mr Sausage on Sat Aug 29, 2009 11:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Added spoiler tags

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#484 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 29, 2009 11:10 am

I WANT TO THANK YOU FOR NOT USING SPOILER TAGS, YOU FUCKING GENIUS

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#485 Post by mario gauci » Sat Aug 29, 2009 5:19 pm

domino harvey wrote:I WANT TO THANK YOU FOR NOT USING SPOILER TAGS, YOU FUCKING GENIUS
If you thought for a minute that a review that long could not potentially contain spoilers, then you're a better person than I. If on the other hand, you kept on reading regardless of your desire to not have the film's plot spoiled for you, I'll take that as a compliment to my 'compelling' writing style...

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#486 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 29, 2009 6:43 pm

I was talking to the person who quoted your spoiler. I definitely didn't read your review, but I did manage to read the first line of brief quoted excerpt above, which was enough for me to realize I'd just read something I shouldn't have. This thread is littered with spoiler tags, you guys couldn't take two seconds to add your own?

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#487 Post by mario gauci » Sat Aug 29, 2009 6:50 pm

domino harvey wrote:I was talking to the person who quoted your spoiler. I definitely didn't read your review, but I did manage to read the first line of brief quoted excerpt above, which was enough for me to realize I'd just read something I shouldn't have. This thread is littered with spoiler tags, you guys couldn't take two seconds to add your own?
Ah, that's clearer now. In any case, I apologize for indirectly spoiling that particular twist for you, then.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#488 Post by Grand Illusion » Sat Aug 29, 2009 11:23 pm

starmanof51 wrote:
Grand Illusion wrote:
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What occurs is a war crime, but is it "wrong?"
Yes, wholeheartedly.
I disagree. And although I'm not about to argue morality since it's really just a question of opinion, I'd like to bring up how the film is operating in interesting and ambiguous areas of morality.
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Pitt carves a swastika into Waltz's forhead. We get a close-up designed to make us squirm, to show the grotesquerie of the act. Nonetheless, Waltz is a mass murder and perpetrator of genocide. The American higher-ups have already given him sanctuary. There will be no justice.

Now, keep in mind, Pitt's character says that he carves the swastika into the Nazis' foreheads particularly because he wants them to live with their crimes. They can take off their uniform, as Waltz would, but they cannot escape their crimes. Initially, it appears to be similar to the way the Nazis scarred their Jewish victims with tattoos on their arms. In fact, it's a clever inversion of that.

A central focus of what made the Holocaust unique was the bureaucracy of it. The Nazis tattooed the Jews to remove their individuality, to merely make them a number. Pitt's character does the opposite. He does not remove their individuality. He emphasizes it. He makes their uniqueness a central fact to their existence. The Nazis made it so that the Jews could not escape their future. Pitt makes it so the Nazi's cannot escape their past.
GringoTex wrote:The La Louisiane sequence has nothing to do with Hitchcock's bomb under the table. There's nothing we know that the characters don't in that scene. We are introduced to all the surprises along with them.
Disagree.
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The entire suspense of the sequence is based on the fact that we know who the resistance fighters are and that the Nazis do not. Or, at least in the case of the Major, we're unsure if he knows or not. Regardless, we do know.

We're introduced to the new developments with the protagonists, true. But the scene plays out, with us having knowledge that the antagonists do not. Most of the drama is not the initial surprise. The suspense is in the continued conversations and what they might reveal to the Nazis. Facts we are already aware of.
GringoTex wrote:How does this film criticize Nazi propaganda? It celebrates it's dumbassness, which is not a critique.
Rather than critiquing the propaganda, itself, I believe that Inglourious Basterds is critiquing the way we consume war films. First off, the propaganda in the film looks like a Hollywood action sequence (later, I read it was directed by Eli Roth). The Nazis laugh at the scene, which is not a recreation of the Holocaust or the idolatry found in Triumph of the Will. The scene is a war scene, a battle scene. Similar to what the West watches and cheers when we digest a WWII film. I was instantly reminded of the sniper in the tower from Saving Private Ryan.

IG is shot to both compare and contrast the elements of Nazi propaganda and our own, obviously intercutting between scenes that we are meant to cheer and the Nazis cheering on their film. I strongly believe Inglourious Basterds hinges on the moment where it departs from history. While the film works on a suspense/entertainment level, the thesis or major point of interest is when Tarantino delivers the "ultimate payoff." In that, I already stated how I believe Tarantino is critiquing how we digest war films. What we look for? Catharsis? Or is it schadenfreude? Why do we watch soldiers fight and die and torture and be tortured? What is left to learn?

QT gives us laughter, violence, but also the ultimate carthartic moment in its grotesque, triumphant glory.
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A common question in time travel philosophy is, "If you could go back in time to kill Hitler, would you?" It's obviously a thought in the collective consciousness. Well, here it is. How do we digest that? If that doesn't "work" for us, if that doesn't make us feel warm and fuzzy, then what are we doing in the seats, congregating together, watching war films? And we could extrapolate that to any drama or tragedy that offers catharsis.

By focusing on Goebbels's propaganda, Tarantino also explores the dark side of his greatest love, cinema. It's no concidence that the film concludes in a theater. And only the destruction of film (reels and reels and reels of film) can deliver vengeance and/or justice. The questioning of film as a tool for good or evil is a big one coming from someone who loves the form as much as Tarantino.

It should be no surprise that Tarantino is more interested in how we interact with the images of war, rather than the war itself. And the critique of Goebbels and the propaganda film is an ongoing metatextual dialogue going on throughout the Inglourious Basterds.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#489 Post by StevenJ0001 » Sun Aug 30, 2009 1:48 am

Grand Illusion wrote:We get a close-up designed to make us squirm, to show the grotesquerie of the act.
I'm not so sure Tarantino uses violence and gore in that way. He loves violence on film and revels in his own use of it just the way he enjoys violence in the exploitation cinema he admires. I think he presumes most of his his fans enjoy it as much as he does, which is probably correct. What was so different about this particular graphic scene? It seemed to me as "joyous" (from Tarantino's perspective) as any of his other graphically violent/gory moments. Nothing gave me the impression he was trying to rub our faces in it to generate the more layered reaction you suggest.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#490 Post by Grand Illusion » Sun Aug 30, 2009 2:19 am

StevenJ0001 wrote:
Grand Illusion wrote:We get a close-up designed to make us squirm, to show the grotesquerie of the act.
I'm not so sure Tarantino uses violence and gore in that way. He loves violence on film and revels in his own use of it just the way he enjoys violence in the exploitation cinema he admires. I think he presumes most of his his fans enjoy it as much as he does, which is probably correct. What was so different about this particular graphic scene? It seemed to me as "joyous" (from Tarantino's perspective) as any of his other graphically violent/gory moments. Nothing gave me the impression he was trying to rub our faces in it to generate the more layered reaction you suggest.
I can't speak to his intent. However, I'm using two points of evidence, really, that there is some subversion to the representation of
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the final carved swastika in the head of Landa.
The first is that the theater I saw it with all had an "Eeewwwww..." reaction. While anecdotal, I present it to say that, regardless of intent, it's an extremely graphic shot. And the second point, is that this graphic shot is
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probably the closest and most sustained shot of gore that we see. It's not Hitler getting shot with a machine gun. It's surgical or medical how close we get. Couple that with the fact that it is the climax of the violence being among the final shots of the film.
Now, Tarantino does love his violence, and the phrase "grotesque" is not entirely pejorative. I don't think that act is entirely looked down upon, if at all really. Personally, I do feel that justice is being served in that moment - a grey, morally ambiguous "justice," but the best justice that can be had in that specific moment in time. This is also the framework of justice and morality in war that I believe the film operates under as a whole.

So basically, the last graphic representation of that act merely posits that, at the very least, Tarantino is still willing to show what that justice or vengeance entails. He does not cut away, which would make the act much more palatable to the general audience (at least the one I saw it with). In fact, it was precisely the politics of "not showing" that led to the Nazis themselves keeping the most heinous death camps outside of the Greater Germany area, lest their population get too worried about the program.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#491 Post by mario gauci » Sun Aug 30, 2009 4:04 am

It has been four days since I've watched the movie now and, for obvious reasons, I can't get it out of my head. And you know what - the more I think about it, the more I discover stuff that Tarantino might well have 'lifted' from my screenplay! Consequently, I've gone and updated "Chapter 2" of my review accordingly.

You be the judge.


P.S. "Ms. Harvey" can go right ahead and ignore the changes with my blessing :) .

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#492 Post by MichaelB » Sun Aug 30, 2009 4:52 am

mario gauci wrote:And you know what - the more I think about it, the more I discover stuff that Tarantino might well have 'lifted' from my screenplay! Consequently, I've gone and updated "Chapter 2" of my review accordingly.

You be the judge.
Well, as you've invited me to be the judge, the first thing I'd request is that you prove that you wrote this screenplay when you said you did.

Common sense says that before you sent it to someone with a long track record of "borrowing" from others (and who can afford expensive lawyers if it came to a lawsuit) that you would have taken steps to ensure that said proof exists, possibly by depositing a sealed copy in a bank vault or similar facility with documented evidence that it hasn't been accessed since then.

Naturally, I assume that you did this, otherwise you wouldn't be running the risk of libelling Tarantino on a public forum - but can you confirm?

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#493 Post by RodneyOz » Sun Aug 30, 2009 8:06 am

I'm not going to spend time going through 'Chapter 2' in detail, but this strikes me as odd right from the start:

For the record, our screenplay deals with a crack team of four “Exterminators” engaged by the Government to eliminate the lower strata of society (don't ask); in Tarantino's movie, a crack commando team (consisting of four major characters) is sanctioned by the Allies to hunt down Nazis for their scalps.

OK, so the crack team are equivalents. The Exterminators/Basterds are engaged/sanctioned by the Government/Allies to eliminate/hunt down the lower strata of society/Nazis. Got it. Cool.

Our script has a sequence in which all the Exterminators are invited to a conference and, once inside the building, they are locked in and blown up; in Tarantino's movie, the elite members of the Third Reich are invited to a movie premiere and, once inside the theater, are locked in and blown up

Uhh... what? All the Exterminators (who are the Basterds in the script that plagarising prick Tarantino wrote) get locked in a building/theatre and blown up? When did the Exterminators switch from being the Basterds to the Nazis? Did Tarantino put down your script mid-plagarism, pick it up a year later after a lot of hash-smoking and forget who was meant to be who in his plagarised version? This is one weird display of parallelism.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#494 Post by mario gauci » Sun Aug 30, 2009 8:57 am

RodneyOz wrote:Our script has a sequence in which all the Exterminators are invited to a conference and, once inside the building, they are locked in and blown up; in Tarantino's movie, the elite members of the Third Reich are invited to a movie premiere and, once inside the theater, are locked in and blown up

Uhh... what? All the Exterminators (who are the Basterds in the script that plagarising prick Tarantino wrote) get locked in a building/theatre and blown up? When did the Exterminators switch from being the Basterds to the Nazis? Did Tarantino put down your script mid-plagarism, pick it up a year later after a lot of hash-smoking and forget who was meant to be who in his plagarised version? This is one weird display of parallelism.
But, you see, he read the thing back in 2004 and made the movie in 2008 or 2009 so he kind of got the groups mixed up a little...

Joking aside, my point is that the manner in which the audience, congregation, spectators (or whatever you want to call them) get bumped off is similar - they don't just happen to be passing by and get hit by a grenade or something. They are gathered together for a purpose but a traitor (just like Col. Landa - ha, I forgot that extra bit! A new update for "Chapter 2" is in order here) leaves the scene and, subsequently, they are locked in and blown up! Who gets blown up or why is, frankly, immaterial to me.
Last edited by mario gauci on Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:19 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#495 Post by MichaelB » Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:01 am

mario gauci wrote:But, you see, he read the thing back in 2004
Allegedly. Where's the proof?

(Sorry, I'm still in judge mode, but that's just about the first thing one will want to know)

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#496 Post by mario gauci » Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:06 am

MichaelB wrote:
mario gauci wrote:And you know what - the more I think about it, the more I discover stuff that Tarantino might well have 'lifted' from my screenplay! Consequently, I've gone and updated "Chapter 2" of my review accordingly.

You be the judge.
Well, as you've invited me to be the judge, the first thing I'd request is that you prove that you wrote this screenplay when you said you did.

Common sense says that before you sent it to someone with a long track record of "borrowing" from others (and who can afford expensive lawyers if it came to a lawsuit) that you would have taken steps to ensure that said proof exists, possibly by depositing a sealed copy in a bank vault or similar facility with documented evidence that it hasn't been accessed since then.

Naturally, I assume that you did this, otherwise you wouldn't be running the risk of libelling Tarantino on a public forum - but can you confirm?
So Quentin Tarantino reads "The Criterion Forum", does he :)?

Seriously, though: are you respectfully calling my bluff or do you genuinely believe I do have a case here :shock:?

Let's say that can I prove 'scientifically' that I wrote the script between June 2000-July 2001 and concretely that I met Tarantino in Venice 2004. Perhaps we can take this to PM and discuss all the other peripheral details over there.

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MichaelB
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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#497 Post by MichaelB » Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:18 am

mario gauci wrote:Seriously, though: are you respectfully calling my bluff or do you believe I do have a case here :shock:?
I'm asking for cast-iron proof that the script existed in the form that you said it did prior to the 2004 Venice Film Festival (proof that would convince a judge - I suspect the word 'scientifically' implies otherwise), and that you have hard evidence that Tarantino read it.

Merely handing it to him at a festival tells us nothing - people get given all kinds of crap at festivals, most of which ends up in the bin as soon as they're out of sight of the person who handed it over.

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#498 Post by mario gauci » Sun Aug 30, 2009 9:44 am

MichaelB wrote:
mario gauci wrote:Seriously, though: are you respectfully calling my bluff or do you believe I do have a case here :shock:?
I'm asking for cast-iron proof that the script existed in the form that you said it did prior to the 2004 Venice Film Festival (proof that would convince a judge - I suspect the word 'scientifically' implies otherwise), and that you have hard evidence that Tarantino read it.

Merely handing it to him at a festival tells us nothing - people get given all kinds of crap at festivals, most of which ends up in the bin as soon as they're out of sight of the person who handed it over.
You know, I wouldn't have paid it any mind if there were 1 or 2 'similarities' but 10 (so far)? Wouldn't you think they were a little too many to disregard as mere coincidence?

Frankly, my animosity stems not from the fact that someone would (let's use the word) 'inspire' himself from the work of somebody else (this has been done all the time for a long number of years now) or that he wouldn't acknowledge the fact (Led Zeppelin, anyone?); I'm angry because, while he had the good fortune to thrust his first script into the lap of a Hollywood celebrity and get it optioned, he evidently isn't prepared to do likewise with other people when the opportunity arises!

Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty sure that Tarantino's offices are inundated with Tarantino-esque scripts penned by his much younger fans...so much so that he may have to hire people expressly to get rid of these manuscripts! But, then again, I don't suppose he was drowning in scripts during that Venice fortnight and, perhaps, he ought to have given a little more consideration to two eager film buffs with limited resources and opportunities. If nothing else, he should have mailed the script right back to us since he didn't have any use for it...after all, our hotels were all of 30 minutes' walking distance from one another!

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#499 Post by MichaelB » Sun Aug 30, 2009 10:00 am

I once hosted an onstage discussion involving Terry Gilliam in 1993. In the foyer afterwards he was mobbed by people thrusting scripts at him, asking him for the personal phone numbers of major studio executives, etc. - and I vividly remember his reply "Guys, I haven't been able to get behind a camera myself in three years - what makes you think I can help you?"

If Gilliam got that kind of attention in London during a pretty low ebb in his career, I can only imagine how much it must be multiplied in Tarantino's case. I also strongly suspect 99.9% of the people who mob him are also "eager film buffs with limited resources and opportunities". So what makes you so special that you think he ought to have read your script? Or indeed gone to the expense of sending it back to you, given that he didn't solicit it in the first place?

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Re: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

#500 Post by Brianruns10 » Sun Aug 30, 2009 10:30 am

1. It's not like your idea for the Exterminators is all that original. "Dirty Dozen" anyone? People do it all the time. Call it homage. Call it theft. Some of the greatest films are take offs of other material. Taxi Driver was based on The Searchers. Magnificent Seven was Seven Samurai. Kurosawa based many of his films off loosely reworked Shakespeare plays. The point is you've gotta have more than a few similarities in the plot.

2. Was your script registered with the WGA? Did you even bother to send yourself a copy via registered mail so you'd have proof of date? You've got to protect yourself, because if it comes down to a lawsuit with a studio, YOU LOSE. End of story. They have enough money and high powered lawyers to keep you in legal limbo for years, decades. You wind up spending more in the legal fight than you would've if you'd won the case. Why, there are still some lawsuits (last I heard) over the LOTR films, because some people promised a cut of the gross haven't been paid because the studio claims they're still recouping their investing, on "advertising." It's a damn lie, but they're able to pull it off because they can afford the best lawyers, and the other guys can't. Not for very long at least. So consider it a lesson learned. Don't freaking show your stuff to people before it's protected, least of all people like QT who have the power to make it happen.

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