Ben Gui (benjaminguilbert2)

Just did not get into the film, too airy, too strange, too slow. And quite frankly I do not care about the inner life of angels.

Beyond bad. Not even much fun to poke out of it. Mélanie Laurent's great however.

Post scriptum:
When I left the theater and wrote this I thought it would be evident for any one that this film was plain bad. But turns out it ain't, many of my friends actually quite enjoyed it. So here are a few arguments:

- I don't see the interest of having two stories totally unrelated to each other within this film. The producer should have grown a pain and told Tarantino to pick inbetween two plots not to go for both. The result of this is that at the end they end up killing Hitler three times. Surely the guy was bad but to the point of needing to be shot, blown to pieces and then burned, just to make sure, that's a bit of overkill. The result is that you cannot build up interest for any of the two stories they canabilize one another.

- Still on the story side, in as much as I have nothing against the scenaristic idea of killing Hitler, I do have a problem with pretty much all the rest. Frankly, who is to believe that a bunch of renegade Jewish soldiers could ever go around France for weeks without speaking French? In the same way who ever heard of Jewish dairy farmers in Western Europe? Etc. all these huge mistakes accumulated create a totally unbelievable framework that prevented me from appreciating the flick.

- I really appreciated the effort of using a handful of languages in the film, it is always interesting. BUT for heaven's sake please have someone who speaks the language as well help the director, The result is that Tarantino was certainly unable to tell at what point Diane Kruger and specially Jacky Ido were off when playing.

- It is understandable that Tarantino wants to break the codes or whatever he wants to do, but sometimes it just goes too far. In particular, the spectator is expected to care about a number of character he knows nothing about and who die tragically. It simply does not work like that.

I could add a few other stuff, but most importantly, the film is ugly. It looks like it was edited by a monkey under drugs, the set is awful and the image looks like it was dept in milk for 4 days.

So let me restate what is for me the obvious: this film is crap.

PPS just remembering this white light makes me puke...

BTW I've been told that Renoir used to say that humanism in movies was to give every character a reason to act as he dos, bad guys are not doing bad thing because they are bad but because they see it as good for them. For many characters in I.B. this aspect is totally missing, why is Brad Pitt character so anti-German? And it is true for most of the characters (I mean hello, Marcel accepts to burn alive for a love that is barely suggested, that's a bit too much).

Oh and I forget to mention that I like some brain in my movies (I don't mean brain matter spread on the carpet but intelligence), just a touch, and frankly there is none whatsoever in this one. Come on, a story about an occupation force should have talked to an US director in the naughties. But no nothing. Quite unfortunate that Trantino forgot Melville who he said he loved and who has shot some of the rawest scenes about France during WWII.

The best film ever? well maybe not. But definitely the one that touches me the most. A great feature about how the giant machinery of war crushes heartlessly the little men trapped beneath it. The most important thing in this film is how it depicts courage without heroism. The characters are not some kind of supermen. They are fallible and above all fear is constantly present as it seems humidity and cold. Even the sun looks wet, cold and fearful in this film. In this film characters start being combatants out of free will and for noble cause, but they only go on fighting because that is the only way for them to survive. In a way, their fight is much closer from the gangsters v. police struggle than from the image of war cinema usually presents. All the characters speak low as if they were afraid that death may hear them and pay attention to them. Moreover, the storyline is not constructed as any other. Instead of having a well structured narration leading gradually to a climax, here each scene is a new episode and the characters are somewhat astonished and happy to be still alive at that moment. They enjoy each moment simply because they are still breathing. I also loved the modesty and the seamlessness of the camera work. There is no music and next to no artistry as it should when men and women are looking at their own death.