Nazi Bloodfest – With Video
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The first trailer of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, which stars Brad Pitt as a Nazi-killing commander, was released today.
Inglourious Basterds sees Pitt play commander of the unit Lt Aldo Raine who sets about on a mission to kill and dismember Germans during the Second World War.
The film – inspired by 1978 Italian war movie The Inglorious Bastards – follows a band of Jewish-American soldiers dropped into France to spread terror among the Nazi occupiers.
The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a cinema in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
Based on the trailer, which is nearly two minutes long, cinema-goers will be in for the usual bloodthirsty and violent Tarantino style seen in his previous work, including Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films.
In the teaser, Pitt, playing the commander, tells his troops: ‘We are going to be doing one thing and one thing only. Killing Nazis.’
Speaking over a sinister rock soundtrack, he continues: ‘We will be cruel to the German. And through our cruelty they will know who we are.
‘They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disembowelled, dismembered and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.’
He continues: ‘Each man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps.’
The trailer also shows clips of incredibly violent scenes. The strapline reads: ‘You haven’t seen war, until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino.’
Inglourious Basterds features a large cast including Pitt, Mike Myers and Samuel L. Jackson and is due to be unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
It is scheduled for release in Britain in August.
We’ve Got Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Bastards’ Script…
…and it is exactly as bat over-the-top insane as we hoped.
The copy we acquired includes a handwritten cover page which we think might actually be in Tarantino’s handwriting, reading, “INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.” This misspelling of “bastards” continues through the screenplay, suggesting we were right when we guessed Tarantino was writing really, really fast. He doesn’t even have time to spell-check if he’s gonna get this movie turned around by Cannes!
The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards  a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine  the role we’d imagine Tarantino is hoping to land Brad Pitt for  described by the script as a “hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,” who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching. (“The scar will never once be mentioned,” Tarantino writes.) In a parallel story, Inglorious Bastards follows a French Jewish teenager named Shosanna who survives the massacre of her family and flees to Paris, where she winds up running a movie house during the Nazi occupation.
The Bastards’ and Shosanna’s stories intersect when a gala premiere of a Goebbels-produced propaganda film is put on in Shosanna’s theater, with Hitler and most of the German High Command scheduled to attend. Both the Bastards and Shosanna launch plots intending to end the war a little earlier than anyone expected.
The script’s divided into five chapters:
Chapter One: Once Upon a Time … Nazi Occupied France
Chapter Two: Inglorious Basterds
Chapter Three: German Night in Paris
Chapter Four: Operation Kino
Chapter Five: Revenge of the Giant Face
The first chapter, set in 1941, introduces Shosanna and the film’s antagonist, a Nazi officer named Landa who’s known as the “Jew Hunter.” The second chapter introduces the Bastards and their tactics: They kill Nazis on sight, take their scalps, and  when they let one go  carve a swastika into his forehead. The third chapter, set in 1944, reintroduces Shosanna in Paris (“This whole Chapter will be filmed in French New Wave Black and White”). The fourth sets up the Bastards’ attack on the theater. And it all comes together in Chapter Five, which plays fast and loose with history, to say the least.
The script is definitely the ur-text of Quentin Tarantino’s career up to now; it combines his love of old movies (war movies, Westerns, and even prewar German cinema), his attraction to powerful female protagonists, his love of chatter, and his willingness to embrace the extreme  visually and in his storytelling. (The flashbacks have particularly Tarantinoian flourishes: a thought bubble pops out of a character’s head to introduce one, while another is shot spaghetti Western style.) All in all, it reads like Kill Bill meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso.
We wondered at times if this script was a fake, and it’s still possible that it is  but if so, it’s such a skillful fake that the author has even mastered Tarantino’s ability to write moments that seem almost like parodies of his own tastes. Such as, for example, our favorite moment in the screenplay, with a mix of fetishism and inspired comedy that feels authentically alive. Late in chapter four, the Nazis are preparing Shosanna’s movie theater for its big premiere, and Goebbels tells her that he appreciates “the modesty of this auditorium.” Then he suggests sprucing the place up a bit, with a chandelier from Versailles and a couple of Greek nudes from the Louvre scattered around the lobby. A quick montage shows this happening, and then Tarantino describes the result:
We see Workers trying with incredible difficulty, to hoist the huge, heavy, and twinkingly fragile chandelier, in Shosannas auditorium, which now resembles something out of one of Tinto Brass’s Italian B-movie rip-off’s of Visconti’s “The Damned”.
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