Posted: 8/14/2008 5:08:26 PM EDT
I'm posting this here so more than 3 people read it  www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4530662.ece It is not so much Kill Bill as Kill Adolf. Quentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornets’ nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American. Even by the stomach-curdling standards of the US director – the maker of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs – the new film is a veritable blood bath. Filming starts in Berlin on October 13 and the controversial director is already in the German capital making his final casting decisions. The star role is to be played by Brad Pitt. His character, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, leads a group of American-Jewish soldiers who are dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans and destroy their morale. The tone of the film, provisionally entitled Inglorious Bastards, is set early on by Lieutenant Raine in a pep talk to his men. According to a leaked version of the script, the officer says: “Every man under my command owes me one hundred Nazi scalps . . . and y’all will git me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis, or die trying.” It is not just the scalping, or the carving of swastikas in foreheads, or the shooting of a German officer’s testicles, or the slow strangling scene – all shown with Tarantino’s customary love of detail – that is likely to upset the nation and its critics. It is the whole idea of turning the Second World War into a comic book adventure in which not a single German character has redeeming value. To judge by the leaked Tarantino script, the only good German is a dead one – with the suspense concentrated on how he should die. For modern Germany that represents a regression to the days of the crudest antiGerman war propaganda. “This is pop culture encountering Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force,” said Tobias Kniebe, film critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable.” For 60 years German film-makers have used war films as a pedagogic device to show how good Germans should have reacted to the Nazi terror. There has been anguished debate about whether Hollywood should be allowed to make a film about Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to blow up Hitler and the closest that the country has to a war hero. The film, starring Tom Cruise, has yet to be screened but Germany’s critics have been sharpening their pens, ready to knock it when it eventually sees the light of day. The Tarantino film, though, is more likely to give German critics cardiac arrest rather than the perverse pleasure of writing a bad review. “All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts to produce a correct image of Stauffenberg – they will be so shocked by Inglorious Bastardsthat they will savage it on the spot,” said Kniebe. “And perhaps that is precisely [Tarantino’s] plan.” In fact the director is emphasising that the film will not really be about war at all, still less about Germany. “I don’t want it to feel like a period film,” said Tarantino in an interview before coming to Berlin. “This is a modern, in-your-face movie.” The film appears to follow in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen – the 1967 work starring Lee Marvin that debunked the standard cinematic American war hero by sending hardened, unbalanced convicts on a suicide mission. There is more than a nod, too, in the direction of an 1978 Italian film, also called Inglorious Bastards, which features anarchic gun-happy deserters in German-occupied France. But if the leaked script bears any resemblance to the final product – he wants the film ready for the Cannes Festival next year – this will be pure Tarantino, right down to the brain tissue splattered on the walls. ============================== I, for one, cannot wait to see this. |
I hope he handles it like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith". He looked like he was having a BLAST in that movie. Though, I guess the fact that he was shtupping Jolie might have had something to do with that. |
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"A Soldier's Promise: The Alvin W. Shipman Story" My father-in-law was in the 65th Infantry Division from the Bulge to the fall of Germany. He and his unit liberated several concentration camps, with the old brownish pictures to prove it. He has some really interesting stories of what they did to SS prisoners. Suffice it to say that they didn't live. The guy who the above mentioned book is about was in my FIL's division at one time. The guy befriended an ex-Jewish inmate and shortly after the war the Jew pointed out the SS officer who made live hell for them. Shipman and his brother (also a soldier) beat the Nazi nearly to death and drown him in a toilet. My FIL is the one who recommended the book, as they had made contact with Shipman's daughter who wrote the book after her father's death. My FIL has no regrets about the things they did. Given what they saw, I don't blame them. Of course this was before the days of crucifying troops for things done under duress. If it was today, my FIL and all his buddies would be old-timers in Leavenworth. |
I'd like to see a performance similar to "Snatch" where you can tell he completely immersed himself in the role. |