This is a movie that has been praised by many people. In fact, this movie is not that good. If there is anything worth watching in this movie, I think it can only be Quentin Tower. Lentino's "personal touch".

However, this personal style is not shown much in this film. Most of the time, this personal style is hidden in the story, and many times it is difficult for the audience to discover this style. displayed.

In Quentin Tarantino's early works, such as "Reservoir Dogs", "The Unbreakable", the "Kill Bill" series, and "Pulp Fiction", Quentin even participated in screenwriting and co-writing The works he directed "Natural Born Killers" and "Sin City"... all have a very strong personal style in them.

When watching most of Quentin's movies, you will find that his works are always constructed around a novel-like structure, which is the "chapter style" in novels that we often mention. , this structure helps the audience to subdivide the paragraphs of the film to a large extent, making the film more easily accepted by the audience.

Chapter screenshots from Reservoir Dogs

Chapter screenshots from "Pulp Fiction"

And the chapter-style presentation in the movie "Inglourious Basterds"

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However, the concept of violent aesthetics is becoming increasingly blurred. Why do I say this?

Let’s take a look at the main elements of Quentin’s films and we’ll see. Most of Quentin’s films are famous for their talkativeness. However, this kind of endless dialogue will not have a big impact on the audience’s viewing experience. The most important reason for pressure is the addition of what we call violent aesthetic elements.

Violence, gore, human irony, multi-clue and multi-perspective narration, and exciting music are combined into a song called K-Billy's "Super Sound of the 1970s" that makes people dance involuntarily. People have endless aftertaste.

In the film "Inglourious Basterds", these elements are almost fragmented.

The movie is constructed against the broad historical background of World War II and uses a two-line narrative method to narrate the entire story. The first story tells the story of a young girl Shoshana whose family was killed by a German colonel. Hans killed her, and only Shosanna escaped. A few years after her escape, Shosanna came to Paris, France, and inherited her aunt's inheritance, a movie theater.

Later, Shoshana met Frederick, a German sniper hero. Frederick fell in love with Shoshana at first sight. As they got to know each other better, Shoshana became more and more interested in Frederick. Familiar with each other, I also began to find that Colonel Hans and Frederick had a good relationship, so I wanted to use my own movie theater to carry out a large-scale revenge operation against Colonel Hans and Germany.

This is Shosanna's story.

As for the story about the "Inglourious Bastards" in the army, the most dramatic one is the close-range game between the two parties in the underground bar. The camera is enhanced by switching between multiple perspectives and fast editing of action scenes. The role of character tension.

All the details and movements are handled well, but it always feels like there is a lack of atmosphere. What atmosphere is missing?

Just watch "Lust, Caution" and you will understand. The tension of conflicts between people not only relies on the display of dialogue and actions, but also a concrete and formalized description of the characters' inner emotions.

When we discuss the style of a movie, we often define the style by discussing a paragraph or a scene of the movie, and many times, one scene is enough to show the style. The ideology of a play comes.

To give a few examples: the robbery sequence in the opening of "Pulp Fiction", the several game sequences on the mahjong table in "Lust, Caution", the chatty sequence about "who wants to default on the debt" in the opening of "Reservoir Dogs", The scenes of Pu Yi being taken away in "The Last Emperor" are all paving the way for the film's ideological display. In the movie "Inglourious Basterds", I can hardly find anything that can be used as the "ideology" of the film. Shown fragments.

Many film critics are a bit covert when talking about many details of this movie, such as the different expressions of "German" and "British" about "three" that appear in the underground bar scene in the film. The meaning - in the film, this section is shown to the audience, and in the subsequent plot, this interpretation is conveyed to the readers through the actors. This is very taboo in film art.

Show, don’t tell. Expressing the thoughts and concepts of directors and filmmakers through various visual expressions such as movements and actors' expressions is the most important and most convenient method of visual communication.

How to convert text encoding into image encoding is a very important option that tests the director's ability.

Back to the story, friends who have watched the movie may still remember that this is a two-line narrative story, and finally the integration of the main story lines is completed through multi-perspective narration (multiple personal perspectives in the same cinema) , in the first story, Shosanna's goal is to kill Colonel Hans, while the goal of "Inglourious Basterds" is to eliminate the high-ranking German officials - because of the unity of goal, the story also forms a unity .

This simple story could have been summarized in just over an hour. Quentin spent two hours and thirty-three minutes. So what did Quentin do in the remaining hour? ?

Foreshadowing and setting off.

The form and style of a movie need to be set off by the film itself. Even in many movies, the appearance of some film clips does not advance the plot, but cannot be deleted - these clips serve to establish the film. In terms of style and ideology, the packaging and modification of the film is completed through some seemingly superfluous fragments. This is a process of artistic reshaping and sublimation.

Therefore, Quentin spends the remaining hour of this movie establishing the overall style of the film, but this style is not mature at all and is particularly messy.

Not only is it procrastinating but also extremely boring. The reason is that it doesn’t put enough effort into style creation, and even abandons its own “style”.

At this point in the article, I can’t help but ask: What is the aesthetics of violence?

What I understand as violent aesthetics is to elevate violence and bloody elements to the level of philosophical thought. On this basis, Quentin wrote "Natural Born Killers" and directed "Pulp Fiction". Creating the existential philosophy of killing and violence is Quentin's outstanding contribution to movies.

Unfortunately, the same problem also occurred in Quentin's subsequent work "TH8". Quentin began to get further and further away from the path of violent aesthetics.

Without the name "Quentin Tarantino", "Inglourious Basterds" may only be a mediocre film. However, most people only pay attention to the form and not the connotation. What we need It is a spiritual sublimation, not a material gain.

Many film critics begin to discuss metaphysical things like "artistic conception" before their ideology is clear. The lack of a solid foundation "structure" will naturally greatly reduce the quality of film reviews.

Meaning is greater than form, but form is the skin of meaning. Even though the soul is precious, without a skin, it cannot withstand the cold.

Finally, thank you for watching