Torrented Inglourious Basterds the other day and watched it last night. The link goes to a good cam copy with hard-coded subs. Until very recently, the only copy available had Russian (in cyrillic) subs, while the audio was in the original’s French, German, Italian and English languages (depending on the script, different speakers speak different languages, their own and other languages used for plot points) and the movie was virtually impossible to follow unless you knew those languages.
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I’d assume it’s subtitled in English in the American release, but that’s not available in torrents yet (I’m sure it will be soon). Thankfully for those of us who can’t wait, an enterprising torrenter with the handle Devise uploaded a version with the English superimposed over the Cyrillic. Since it’s hardcoded instead of merely an .srt file, you can make a playable DVD with the subs permanently “on”, which you’d want anyway.
A friend, who is vehemently anti-pirating, asked me why anyone would do that; “do they do it just to be jerks?” I prefer to think it’s a public service. I have no qualms about torrenting: I haven’t purchased a CD, software prog, computer game nor movie in several years and don’t plan on it in the near future. Fuck the corporations. Most of the docweasel crew feel the same. I could go into our reasons in depth but that’s a different post.
I don’t enjoy going to the theater anymore, I’d rather work on the comp with a movie on my 2nd comp and enjoy the movie that way. I’ve never yet watched a DVD or .avi and thought “boy, I wish I’d seen that in a theater!”
The movie was entertaining, but the hype that preceded it kind of made me expect more. I thought “is that it? This one caper and that’s the entire movie?” which, by the way, was sloppily plotted, with many holes and illogical turns and twists and a rather lame ending, if I may say.
And what is the deal with Tarantino hitting you over the head with an obvious (or best left subtle) point? They talk about nitrate film and burning down the theater, then he goes on for five minutes instructing the audience how flammable nitrate film is. We get it!
Or when the girl from the beginning of the movie appears later in the film, he flashes back to her earlier scene, just to make sure we get it: we do, Quentin! Enough!
He did this a dozen times. Very annoying.
Also, the scalping and blood and gore is very over-hyped. It’s almost as if there is enough there to make a good trailer, and that’s about it. The story doesn’t much depend on it, and the exploits are few in this vein. The main thrust of the movie is kind of a very simple version of Where Eagles Dare or some-such caper, only not as clever or involved.
In fact, about half-way through it occurred to us that the entire plot and time-frame were just devices for Tarantino to hang his pop-references and snappy dialog upon. It didn’t have to be WWII Germany, they didn’t have to be scalp-taking NAT-zee hunters, they didn’t have to be speaking every major European language. It was just Jackie Brown or Pulp Fiction, but in period costumes and Olde World locales and foreign dialects.
So don’t expect the genre-tropes to even matter. You could have inserted half the scenes into Kill Bill or Pulp if they had been in English and America and contemporary dress. It’s a movie, and Tarantino never lets you forget it, employing every fillip and affectation and device in his quiver to drum it into your head that all this is just spectacle and show. It is entertaining, but sometimes it does wear a bit.
Also, don’t expect to be surprised at anything that happens in the entire plot, not even the “twist” near the end. Not if you’ve ever seen any decent 40’s-70’s movies before, that is.
But, it was a good 2 hours’ diversion and I’d watch it again, especially for free!
The main thing about IB is that it’s funnier than 99.9% of the SHITE Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler or Will Farrell are smoking a joint then ad-libbing on a 100 million dollar budget. It’s better than 99.9% of the CGI diseased and explosion pocked “action” films (at 140 decibels) imposed on the public today. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen lately that didn’t offend me with stupidity. Also, he uses great and largely unknown actors (outside of Pitt, of course) and that’s pretty sweet also. I’m so fucking sick of the current crop of talentless, annoying hacks. Even people like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whom I used to enjoy before he became a leading man, annoy me. This movie never did that, and I think a large part of it was because of the lack of recognizable stars (Mike Myers was nearly unrecognizable, doing his British gent general).
Also, I’ve had the unfortunate luck to watch a number of movies set in contemporary 00’s and everyone is texting and browsing and cell-phones are necessary to the plot and it’s all so banal and tiresome you want to puke your fucking guts out. I haven’t yet seen Twittering, but when I do, I’m spraying the crowd with submachine gun fire while they writhe in agony as they burn to death.
Down with the evil corporations! Long Live Bittorrent! (we recommend uTorrent as a client prog).
Other opinions:
Hot Air: Inglourious Basterds
Sparky, Spunky, Bongo: Explanation]]>