Rehab pool parties on Sundays at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas notwithstanding, Reggie and I occasionally like to relax together at the movies. So with camp winding down this week and starters like us preparing for our last big outing this preseason against Oakland on Saturday, Nos. 88 and 25 found the perfect opportunity tonight to slip away from 5800 Airline Dr. for a few hours and catch Quentin Tarantino's latest beat-down instructional.
Yes, RSVPs at titty bars and Halo on Fridays will have to wait. For it's not the regular season. Until then, it's Inglorious Bastuhds.
Here's what I came away with: I.B. is a good talky. Talk, talk, talk. And then blow a little shit up. Watch The Bear Jew bash a Nazi. But just once. And too quickly.
And that's the problem with this movie. It's too broad. It's too far-reaching. It's without the buddy development that Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson and Jim Brown portrayed in the movie it's supposed to pay homage to. Instead of watching Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine and The Bear Jew and Hugo Stiletz -- played by that funny drug dealer in SLC Punk! who tried to shoot that floating car on the Great Salt Lake into submersion -- pulverize and tenderize Nazis for a couple of hours in the north and south of France, while maybe fighting amongst themselves ala-Dirty Dozen style, we're directed instead to a cinametheque operated by a Jewess and her black boyfriend. We're directed to a blathering Hitler who doesn't castrate but takes way too long to tell a private not to mention again The Bear Jew.
Tarantino wants it both ways. He gives you pure direction and stiff writing in the opening sequence, then sensation with the introduction of the Bastuhds. And just when you get comfortable with sensation -- you could of gave us more from other Bastuhds characters, Tarantino, at the very least Hugo -- he gives us long scenes of his signature dialogue, albeit with some psychological interplay between a couple of characters who are nearly underscored by the previous schlock.
Let's just say Christoph Waltz, who plays the "Jew Hunter", is by far the funnest to watch here. Col. Hans Landa. Dude is slippery cool. And I loved the way he moved from German to French to English to Italian. Skills like that and a playa not need a NFL contract.
And then there's that trilingual German broad who wears a high-heeled leg cast at the end. I don't speak German, but put her together with the Jewess, and to them I'd say all I know in French: menage a trois.
There's also a good bar scene that's played out during the latter half of the movie. But for the faux pas that apparently gives away a German-speaking British intelligence officer to a German officer, I hold up my forefinger, middle finger and ring finger -- together -- and say read between the lines. Good scene tension but the conclusion took way too long.
So that's my Bastuhds movie review. I don't normally do movie reviews, but I was moved enough by the incongruous stylistic direction of Tarantino's latest to share my piece on the flick. And blogging about it helps keep my mind off of easily had RSVP-gash. Which I've sworn off until I catch a TD in Black and Gold.
And then I'll inevitably begin a run.
