Throwback Thursday (7/25/19)

Ten years since my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie

Author’s note: I’m unintentionally writing this in a Kill Bill t-shirt

Ten years ago this August, my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie came out and, especially because Tarantino is set to release his new movie this week, I figured it would be appropriate to discuss why it is my favorite. I’ll give just four simple reasons.

Brad Pitt

Pitt is a good person to mention right off the bat because he’s starring in Tarantino’s new film Once Upon in Hollywood alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, the lead actor in my other favorite Tarantino flick (Django). Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of the Basterds, a US special forces group of Jewish-American men who specialize in scalping and instilling fear in German soldiers. He is hilarious and pleasant, yet extremely violent and cruel.

Pitt’s acting in this movie is can to head-to-head with any of his other stellar performances. There’s this grimacing look he does throughout the movie that is extremely difficult to replicate.

I can’t tell if Pitt’s southern accent is good, bad, or just plain funny. Doesn’t matter either way. Similar to his character in Oceans 11, Pitt is always eating in this movie and there is something oddly endearing about him talking with food in his mouth. I don’t know, he’s just talented like that.

Christoph Waltz

While I mentioned Aldo Raine first, he’s not the first memorable character that the audience meets — SS colonel Hands Landa (played by Christoph Waltz) is. Waltz’s performance is the best in the movie and the best of the year, it was acknowledged as such when he received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

He’s just so evil, but in this charming I’m-really-just-a-friendly-guy way that is even scarier. He embraces the nickname “The Jew Hunter” as if he’s a local sports legend, fiercely proud of his accomplishments. Waltz, Austrian-born actor, has an incredible musical style to his voice that pairs well with how we articulates every single word. With some movie villains, you don’t want to see them on screen because they’re just so unappealing, but Waltz’s performance makes you yearn for him to reappear.

How the film uses and addresses other languages

One of the main reasons I couldn’t get into HBO’s popular show Chernobyl is because they refuse to at least attempt to speak Russian or speak with a Russian accent. There’s lots of dialogue in French and German in this movie, yet I don’t mind the subtitles at all.

Tarantino does a really clever job addressing language use as well. In the first scene, Landa (Waltz) says, “I’ve exhausted the extent of my French. To continue to speak it so inadequately, would only serve to embarrass me. However, I’ve been lead to believe you speak English quite well?” This is a really cool way to switch into English instead of just speaking it without noting the reason for the use.

Inability to speak a language is also an important part of the movie — the people under the floorboards can’t speak English so they don’t understand it what is happening, the American officer exposes himself as a spy because he does the hand symbol for “three” in German wrong, and Raine and the Basterds’ inability to speak Italian effectively leads to them being discovered.

The one-liners and dialogue

In my family, movie line quotes (a large part of our communication) come primarily from two sources — The Big Lebowski and Inglorious Basterds. While this movie is not as funny as Lebowski, it provides similarly great lines to repeat. Some of my favorites come from the scene where Raine and his team are trying to get information from a captured German infantry unit.

“We’re not in the taking prisoners business, we’re in the killing Nazi business, and cousin business is a booming!”

“Now take your wiener schnitzel-licking finger and point out this map what I want to know.”

“Donnie, we got us a German who wants to die for country, oblige him.”

“Teddy f**king Williams knocks it out of the park! Fenway Park is on its feet for Teddy f**king ballgame. He went yard on that one, on to f**king Landsowne street!”

That’s it. Follow me on Twitter if you feel like it. Peace.