Sunday, December 13, 2009

Die Hitler! Die!

Watching Inglorious Basterds brought back memories of watching war movies with my brother. He would always tell me to take count of the number of soldiers at the start of the film as they would eventually be whittled down during the course of the story. Needless to say, my subtraction skills were sharpened from watching war movies:

Okay, we have 10 members in the squad...

Now, two got blown to bits by a claymore mine -- 10 minus 2,that's eight...

One bleeds to death from being shot in the thigh, must be the femoral...one less eight makes seven...

Standoff in a base or somewhere...five gets blown by mortar fire. Two remain standing...


The beauty about Inglorious Basterds is that it doesn't make pretensions to draw parallels with current issues, be an allegory of the struggle over good and evil, serve as an indictment or endorsement of any war, or even wax sentimental over the "good old days" (Band of Brothers often did this during the course of that series). It's a swashbuckling adventure. And it delivers.

In the sequence which shows Shosanna (aka Emmanuelle) in the projection room prior to the premiere of "Nation's Pride" (you'll get this if you watched the film), I thought the song playing was familiar - more particularly, the voice, which I was sure I have heard before. I bet Yunamayi that it was David Bowie (unfortunately she didn't call me on my bet). And sure enough, at the end credits -- David Bowie! Cat People!

One question: what happened to the remainder of the Basterds? I counted the the two German speaking Basterds in the pub and the two who went kamikaze in the cinema as casualties; Raines and Utivich survived, so where were the other four? Unless I missed a scene...wait -- I forgot to count them again during the baseball bat scene with Bear Jew and the Nazi officer...crap.

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