A Bastards work is never done...

And neither is Quentin Tarantino's in my opinion. While I loved his latest opus "Inglourious Bastards" I must say I walked out having thoroughly enjoyed it and yet still wanting more. For a flick with their name in the title, there is shockingly little of the Bastards in the film.

Here is what we were promised in the trailers; The Bastards, Jewish-American soldiers sent behind enemy lines in WWII France, are carving a bloody swath through the Nazi ranks. The Nazi high command are going to debut a new propaganda film at a small French theater run by a Jewish woman in hiding who has her own plans of revenge for the murder of her family. Both forces of good are hurtling toward each other, totally oblivious of the other.

Here's what Tarantino got right: Character development- Not even necessarily for all the Bastards. Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine doesn't get more complex than the typically rugged, battle hardened, blood thirsty WWII soldier you've seen in a lot of other movies. The two Bastards you get the best feel for are Eli Roth's Donnie Donowitz and Til Schweider's Hugo Stiglitz. Roth's character is nicknamed The Bear Jew by the Germans and it is whispered in secret that he is a golem, a vengeful, indestructible spirit of revenge.

And one can hardly blame them, the delight he takes in cracking Nazi heads with his notched baseball bat is slightly unnerving. His thick Boston accent was dead on if a little over the top but the best part is watching him in the final reel as the Bastards' plan stumbles but doesn't fall. Even as certain doom looms around him, he relishes the bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter for any Nazi he can get his hands on.

And Schweider's Stiglitz is even more fascinating. Not one of the original Bastards, Stiglitz is an SS officer who goes on a killing spree one night, wasting 13 Nazi officers before he is caught. Sprung from prison by the Bastards he takes part in one of the longest but best tension building scenes I've witnessed in years (but we'll get to that later). He's an enigma to figure out and that's why I dig him.

Introduced, albeit briefly, in the opening scene of the flick arguably THE main character is Shosanna Dreyfus who is playing amazingly by the intoxicating 26-year-old French actress Melanie Laurent. Never hear of her before, am now in love with her. Her performance is one of two in the flick that should be up for an academy award.


The other should belong to Christopher Waltz and his portrayal of "The Jew Hunter" Hans Landa. NEVER have I seen a more devious villain on the big screen. So sure and content in what's he's doing. So amoral in his task and yet so damn good at it. Waltz steals the show clean away from everyone else in the flick.


That brings us to the second thing I love about this flick (now that I've ranted on characters long enough). The tension building. There are three big scenes that almost make you want to scream for the action to begin, not because you're bored but because the suspense makes you want to puke. Without giving away too much, the opening sequence featuring The Jew Hunter at work is one and the big scene in the theater at the end is the big another. The third is two thirds of the way through in a basement pub where two of the Bastards and one British operative are meeting a double agent. What could go wrong you ask? Well as Aldo Raine puts it "You want to know what the tactical disadvantage is to fighting in a basement? Well first it's a fucking basement."

I'll leave you with this nifty/ ironic trailer for the flick in German. You can view the English version here.

It symbolizes man's inhumanity to man...

Director Neil Blomkamp may have used the inhuman aliens nicknamed Prawns (with no real species name given) but District 9 is very much about how shitty we humans can treat each other. Set in one of the planet's ultimate bastions of tolerance, Johannesburg, South Africa, District 9 may not have been made in America but it definitely expresses the USA's current feeling that the Statue of Liberty's plaque has been changed from "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breather free" to the all-too-21st Century claim of "No Vacancy"!

Allow me to hit you with the setup first. In roughly 1989 an alien ship appeared over the city of Johannesburg, enormous, silent, seemingly dead. There is video footage of a piece of the ship falling off but search teams never found it. After a month of sitting in the sky, the government decides to cut the hull open. Inside, they find close to a million Prawns all starving to death, unsure of how their ship works or why they are there. The government puts a private military company called Multi-National United (which makes Blackwater USA look like a bunch of girl scouts) in charge of caring for the Prawns and deciphering their technology.

With their numbers swelled to 2.1 million in 2009, the Prawns are set to be transferred out of their shithole shantytown, District 9, to a tent-city with a concentration camp feel. Enter Wikus Van De Merwe, a hapless MNU bureaucrat put in charge of the relocation because he is married to an MNU official's daughter. Wikus, played brilliantly by South African born Sharlto Copley, jovially berates and taunts the Prawns as if he is on a simple hunting trip when he is really leading a raiding party into District 9 to force the Prawns to sign away their rights.

Watch the scene where he says to a colleague "Have a souvenir from your first Prawn abortion!" and tell me you didn't retch. That's when he picks up a piece of Prawn technology that sprays him with alien fuel which begins turning him into a Human/Prawn hybrid.

As Wikus goes on the run from MNU, he discovers what is blatantly obvious to the audience at that point - being dehumanized by the enemy sucks. But that is District 9's take home message, we fear what is different and "alien". We dehumanize enemies to the point where we delight in their mistreatment. While the Prawns are not human, they were the tried, the poor, the wretched masses begging humanity for help and we treated them worse than the ETs from Alien Nation. But watching the MNU sweep District 9, you can easily replace the Prawns with black South Africans, American Indians, Jews, Muslims or even homosexuals. Look at the main poster for the movie... law enforcement stopped using targets that look like real people years ago because it wasn't PC. But humans have no problem using the Prawns for direct target practice.

OK enough of that deep crap, the movie is also freaking cool! Great blend of action and suspense and Sci-Fi. Watch the climactic finale that includes a Prawn battle suit and tell me it wasn't worth the $8 for a ticket.