Blaxploitation

'Blaxploitation is a film genre that emerged in the United States circa 1971 when many exploitation films were made specifically (and perhaps exclusively) for an audience of urban black people; the word itself is a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation". Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music. These films starred primarily black actors. Variety magazine credited Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, released in 1971, with the invention of the blaxploitation genre. Others argue that the Hollywood-financed film Shaft, also released in 1971, is closer to being blaxploitation, and thus is more likely to have begun the genre'

Inglourious Basterds Soundtrack

Track listing
1."The Green Leaves of Summer" - Nick Perito (Originally in The Alamo)
2."The Verdict (La Condanna)" - Ennio Morricone (mislabled "Dopo la condanna")
3."White Lightning (Main Title)" - Charles Bernstein (Originally in White Lightning)
4."Slaughter" - Billy Preston (Originally in Slaughter)
5."The Surrender (La resa)" - Ennio Morricone
6."One Silver Dollar (Un Dollaro Bucato)" - Gianni Ferrio
7."Davon geht die Welt nicht unter" - Zarah Leander
8."The Man with the Big Sombrero" - Samantha Shelton & Michael Andrew
9."Ich wollt, ich wär ein Huhn" - Lilian Harvey & Willy Fritsch
10."Main Theme from Dark of the Sun" - Jacques Loussier
11."Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" - David Bowie (Originally in Cat People)
12."Tiger Tank" - Lalo Schifrin (Originally in Kelly's Heroes)
13."Un Amico" - Ennio Morricone
14."Rabbia e Tarantella" - Ennio Morricone

Inglourious Basterds The Guardian Review - Peter Bradshaw

Quentin Tarantino's cod-second world war adventure is a transcendentally disappointing dud, in which Brad Pitt delivers his most charmless performance to date.
1 out of 5 stars

'Unendurably, unbelievably tedious … the card-playing scene from Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.'

Quentin Tarantino is having what Martin Amis readers might call a "Yellow Dog" moment - something which happens when, following a worrying, mid-to-late period of creative uncertainty, a once dazzlingly exciting artist suddenly and catastrophically belly-flops, to the dismay of his admirers.

His new film is a cod-second world war adventure about a Jewish-American revenge squad sent into occupied France to spread terror among Nazis. Brad Pitt plays their leader, Lt Aldo Raine, and Eli Roth, the director of Hostel, is his ferocious second-in-command Sgt Donny Donowitz; Diane Kruger plays a German movie star called Bridget Von Hammersmark who has secret quasi-Dietrich sympathies with the Allies, and Michael Fassbender plays Lt Archie Hicox, a cucumber-cool British commando who in civvy street was, of all things, a film critic. Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna Dreyfus, a beautiful young Jewish woman who has had to change what in France is a resonant surname; she owns the Parisian cinema at which the Nazi top brass, including the Führer himself, will assemble for one of Goebbels's propaganda movies. Here is where the Basterds hope to make their hit: but opposing them is the chilling SS Colonel Hans Landa, nicely played by Tarantino's personal casting discovery Christoph Waltz, who won the best actor award at Cannes for this performance.

It is notionally inspired by a 1970s B-movie called Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato, otherwise The Damned Armoured Train, renamed Inglorious Bastards for its American release: a war picture in the Dirty Dozen style by Italian director Enzo Castellari. But Tarantino's debt is much more obviously to Sergio Leone, weirdly mulched in with Mel Brooks. Having seen it once in Cannes earlier this year, and again for its UK release I was struck afresh by how exasperatingly awful and transcendentally disappointing it is: a colossal, complacent, long-winded dud, a gigantic two-and-a-half-hour anti-climax, like a Quentin Tarantino film in form and mannerism but with the crucial element of genius mysteriously amputated. Over-stretched scene follows over-stretched scene in plonkingly conventional narrative order and each is stuffed with dull dialogue which made it feel like Mogadon was somehow being pumped into the cinema's air-conditioning. The cut is now marginally different from that which premiered in Cannes, slightly longer in fact, and there appears to be a new introduction to the unendurably, unbelievably tedious scene set in a beer cellar where the actors play a guessing-game with playing cards.

There's no doubt that the 52-year-old Waltz - an Austrian-born actor who had been plying his trade on TV until Tarantino plucked him from the ranks - is a real find, and Mélanie Laurent also deserves this leg-up to stardom. But they can't make any real difference, and Brad Pitt gives the most wooden and charmless performance of his life; he acts and speaks as if the lower half of his face is set in concrete. Now, it is misleading to complain about boredom, when we all know how Tarantino can alchemise this into something special. In Pulp Fiction two hitmen famously put the exciting business of murder on hold while they discussed dull things like what Europeans call a quarter-pounder.

But there the ostensible banality was sexy, funny and above all intentional, and the director could in any case turn the action on a sixpence into something thrilling or horrifying whenever and wherever he felt like it. He exemplified Don DeLillo's maxim about America being "the only country in the world with funny violence". But here the boringness is just boring, and the violence doesn't get gasps of shock, just winces of bafflement and distaste - and boredom. Tarantino just seems to have lost his cool, lost his mojo.

When I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, my traumatised complaint was that it fails as conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp. Since then, its defenders have claimed that the point of the film is that it is "kosher porn": an over-the-top revenge fantasy for Jews. Well, erm, maybe. But it might simply have the highly un-porny effect of reminding us what actually happened. And if "kosher porn" was the point, wouldn't it have been better to make the Basterds' leader actually Jewish? Instead of which, their CO is Brad Pitt, the good ol' boy from Tennessee, a part of the world in which progressive sympathies with European Jewry are - how can I put it? - atypical. Even this, moreover, isn't exactly the point. Wildly bad-taste ahistorical fantasies about Nazi Germany are great: but here they are nullified by middlebrow good-taste cinephile stuff referencing UFA, Emil Jannings etc, in which the details of course have to be exactly right.

Tarantino's genius always lay, for me, in his audacious and provocative adventures in style, making generic textures bubble and react. His great riffs were sublime, similar to what Godard saw in Nicholas Ray: pure cinema. What happens when these surfaces fail to fizz? You get what you have here: great heavy lumps of nothing. I have always deprecated the growing and rather supercilious critical consensus that the Master's best film is Jackie Brown - a good film, yes, but uncharacteristic, and without the brash inspiration of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction or the late-flowering delirium of Kill Bill. Yet maybe this is the sort of thing that Tarantino should now work on: solid adaptations to steady and re-settle his greatness. That could be a way to put his mojo-loss into remission and return to the glory days.

Inglourious Basterds Telegraph Review

Quentin Tarantino's thriller will please fans who regard him as a virtuoso choreographer of carnal mayhem. Rating: * *

As titles go, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is one of the very best. Partly lifted from an obscure 1978 flick by Enzo Castellari, its eye-grabbing, demented heroism puts it right up there in the pop cultural pantheon alongside the Sewer Zombies song 'They Died With Their Willie Nelson T-Shirts On’ and Lionel Terray’s 1963 mountaineering book 'Conquistadors of the Useless’.

Tarantino’s always been a genius at hooking moviegoers. The chopping off of a man’s ear, lead-performers outfits so cool they kickstart fashion trends, a canny use of tunes so cheesy they wouldn’t be heard on a Guilty Pleasures dancefloor and of once-famous actors whose careers were on life-machine-support status: the director brands his films with a rare attention to detail.

Inglourious Basterds abounds in pointillist detail. There are obscure movie allusions designed to tickle the fancy of the sternest cinephile. Close-ups of women’s shoes so gorgeous they’d melt Anna Wintour’s heart. Delightful bite-sized riffs – on apple strudel! – that rekindle memories of Tarantino’s reputation-defining dialogues about cheeseburgers in Pulp Fiction.


These details though add up to very little. Thinking of it as a historical fantasy unbound by usual dramatic conventions would be true, though also too kind. Mostly, it’s an action thriller, sliced into five chapters, none of which segues successfully into the next. Tension is evoked, but never mounts. Intrigue is created, but never sustained.

Tarantino, in some critics’ eyes, always was a pick 'n’ mix, smash-and-grab postmodernist; this time, whether out of haste (it’s said the film’s production was rushed through to suit Brad Pitt’s schedule), or because the material is too unwieldy (the project’s been in development for a decade), he has created an anthology rather than a movie.

Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, the leader of a band of WW2 Jewish-American soldiers all of whom have been sent on a Dirty Dozen-style mission to get behind enemy lines and collect a hundred Nazi scalps. Among his most trusted warriors are Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a taciturn defector from the German side, and Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth, director of the Hostel series) who enjoys clubbing his victims to death with a baseball bat.

Tarantino sets up their campaign, but doesn’t follow it. Instead, he shifts his attention to Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl from Goodbye Lenin!), a German soldier who withstood and gunned down nearly three hundred Italian soldiers in a siege that is now about to be immortalized by Goebbels in a propaganda film.

Zoller is increasingly drawn to the young proprietor of the cinema where the Paris premiere will take place, a young woman called (Melanie Laurent). He doesn’t know that her real name is Shosanna or that she is Jewish or that, as revealed in the first and best section of the film, she was the only survivor of a bloody massacre of her family organized by SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).

On top of this, Diane Kruger plays German film star and double agent Bridget von Hammersmark, who is in cahoots with British movie scholar and spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender, mercifully bulked up after his excellent performance as an emaciated Bobby Sands in Hunger).

In writing the screenplay, Tarantino faced a real problem. It’s his first film set outside the United States and starring such an international cast. If they speak English it will seem anachronistic; if they don’t, it will frighten American audiences and run the risk of becoming a multi-lingual Euro-pudding.

His solutions can be amusing. At one point, in the middle of a deadly serious stand off between Hans Landa and the farmer protecting Shosanna’s family (a superb Denis Menochet), the colonel asks permission to stop speaking in French and “to switch to English for the rest of our conversation”.

On other occasions though, using sizeable chunks of German and French, and having to switch codes so often, means that he struggles to get into his groove when it comes to injecting his dialogue with the degree of rhythm and snap for which he is famous.

The subtitles, combined with the long takes - this is a film almost as verbose as his last one, 2007’s Death Proof – places a huge pressure on him to make the dramatic scenes, when they arrive, truly special. They aren’t.

If the writing fails to hit the high spots of old, the hit-and-miss casting doesn’t help. Mike Myers has an entirely superfluous role as a British officer. A mono-browed Roth, who directed one of the fake adverts for the 'Grindhouse’ double bill that Tarantino created with Robert Rodriguez, is spectacularly bad as one of the 'basterds’.

Pitt speaks in a cartoonish Southern drawl, carries himself like a cross between Popeye the Sailorman and Clark Gable, and struggles to find more than one dimension in his role.

The non-Atlantic actors perform best. Kruger has never looked as lovely or been so dangerously poised. Jacky Ido, as an African projectionist, is the epitome of old-school heroism. Waltz is fantastic – in command of many languages, cruel enough to convince as a baddie, but also impish enough to remind us that this film is not a historical treatise. “I love rumours!” he pipes at one stage. “Facts can be so misleading!”

Those Tarantino fans who regard him as a virtuoso choreographer of blood-letting and carnal mayhem will be pleased to learn that the film depicts women being strangled, throats being slit, heads scalped, fists being thrust into mouths, and swastikas carved onto foreheads. Yet these scenes fail to chock or titillate. They’re forced, ponderously laboured efforts to make us groan and retch. The film too, for most of its 154 minutes, lacks tempo or drive.

Tarantino, like Woody Allen at his least appealing, is so set on showing off his love for European auteur cinema – GW Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl and Henri-Georges Clouzot are ostentatiously referenced – that he’s forced to employ Samuel L. Jackson as a voiceover and include arrows and captions pointing to Boorman and Goering at key points in the film. The ending, when it finally stumbles into view, isn’t so much contrived as almost meaningless in relation to what has preceded it.

Inglourious Basterds has all the ingredients of classic Tarantino – a camera circling around tables full of yakking conspirators, lashings of epic Morricone on the soundtrack, a female revenger figure in Shosanna – but it is far, far less than the sum of its parts.

Whether discoursing on the physical properties of nitrate or drawing links between Goebbels and Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, it’s a film that’s only interested in film, a masterclass in gorgeously-constructed self-pastiche. Tarantino desperately needs an editor willing to trim his indulgences.

Right now, he’s imprisoned by his passions, as entombed as The Bride in Kill Bill.

Inglourious Basterds Rotten Tomatoes Review

Rotten Tomatoes
88% Average Rating: 7.7/10
Reviews Counted: 257
Fresh: 227 Rotten: 30
A classic Tarantino genre-blending thrill ride, Inglourious Basterds is violent, unrestrained, and thoroughly entertaining.

Audience
87% liked it
Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 283874

Quentin Tarantino - Biography

Born - 27th March 1963, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
Years Active - 1988 to Present

Tarantino plans to retire from film-making at 60, to focus on film literature and writing novels. He says "If it actually gets to a place where you can't show 35mm film in theatres anymore and everything is digital projection, I won't even make it to 60."

Reservoir Dogs was given the Critic's Award at the 4th Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in 1993.
Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. The film was nominated for seven oscars, winning one for Best Supporting Actor.
Won the Icon of the Decade award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards in 2005.
In 2007, Tarantino was presented with a lifetime achievement award by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
In 2010, Inglourious Basterds was nominated for 8 oscars, winning one for Best Supporting Actor, played by Christoph Waltz.

Quentin Tarantino - Filmography

Reservoir Dogs - 1992
Pulp Fiction - 1994
Jackie Brown - 1997
Kill Bill Vol.1 - 2003
Kill Bill Vol.2 - 2004
Sin City [Special Guest Director] - 2005
Death Proof - 2007
Inglourious Basterds - 2009
Kill Bill Vol.3 [Rumoured] - 2014