When Quentin Tarantino was just a video store clerk filled with filmmaking dreams, he and his pals shared a shorthand for the against-all-odds mission movie they would someday make: “This will be our ‘Inglorious Bastards!’ ” Tarantino and his friends would say.
Other aspiring filmmakers might have cited “The Dirty Dozen” or “The Magnificent Seven” for reference, but Tarantino — who always has been drawn to and has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure B movies — preferred director Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Italian World War II film “Inglorious Bastards,” a sometimes campy drama about renegade soldiers shooting and blowing up Nazis in World War II France.
Tarantino’s new film — starring Brad Pitt, a mix of American and European character actors and some fish-out-of-water casting picks such as comedian Mike Myers and torture-porn director Eli Roth — borrows hardly anything from its Italian predecessor, and even the title of Tarantino’s Cannes Film Festival competition movie is a bit different: “Inglourious Basterds.”
But there is still a difficult mission in the film that opens Aug. 21; it is still World War II, and there are still guns and bombs.
Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine heads a group of eight Jewish soldiers (two of whom are German-born) spreading terror among the enemy in Nazi-occupied France. Their tactics, given the filmmaker’s soft spot for sadism, aren’t exactly subtle. Read more. Thanks Gabriella.
