Tarantino's 'Inglorious Basterds' is darkly comic

I finally got around to watching the movie “Inglorious Basterds” last night, and while the movie wasn’t quite what I’d expected, it was fun, nonetheless.

Released in the U.S. in August 2009, this darkly comic, alternative history movie was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It starred Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Daniel Bruhl, Diane Kruger, Til Schweiger and Melanie Laurent.

For those of you who haven’t seen this movie, it’s set mostly in Nazi-occupied France during World War II and centers on two plots to wipe out top Nazi leaders during a movie premiere in Paris.

The movie’s title is derived from the name of a U.S. military unit called “The Inglorious Basterds,” which consists of eight Jewish American soldiers that go behind enemy lines prior to the D-Day invasion. Their mission is simple: To strike fear into the hearts of German servicemen, mostly by taking no prisoners and scalping their kills.

The Inglorious Basterds are led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (played by Brad Pitt), who has a nasty scar on his throat and claims to be descended from bootlegging bandits in North Carolina.

Also, for those of you who haven’t seen this movie, be prepared to read a lot of subtitles. The movie is two hours and 33 minutes long, and the dialogue is in English for about 42 percent of that time. The rest of the movie is in German (28 percent), French (22 percent) and Italian (one percent). According to the Internet Movie Database, there is one 54-minute stretch in which less than nine minutes of the dialogue is in English, include a stretch of 25 minutes in which no English is spoken.

That is not to say that this movie isn’t worth watching. It grossed $320.4 million (against a budget of $70 million) and won a number of awards. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who played SS Colonel Hans Landa, aka, “The Jew Hunter,” won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

In the end, I enjoyed this movie, and it was a lot of fun to watch. Quentin Tarantino rarely disappoints, and you can always expect a few surprises, so if you like his movies, you’ll love “The Inglorious Basterds.”