BONUS The Friday Show - On the QT: Inglourious Basterds
Marc:By the way, I watched this movie with my wife and she was like repulsed about like the scalping that was happening.
Marc:And I was like, I turned to her and I'm like, they are Nazis.
Marc:So it's like, it's okay, right?
Yeah.
Marc:Hey, Chris.
Marc:Buongiorno.
Guest:Grazie.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:I guess we're just going to go starting right in on it, huh?
Marc:I mean, we gotta.
Marc:Antonio Margarete.
Marc:I loved that entire scene and the terrible Italian accents.
Marc:I feel like a lot of that is your whole life.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Is both people doing that to you, like they're like, oh, you're Italian?
Guest:Hey, buongiorno, or whatever.
Guest:And I feel like a lot of it is also you trying to undo bad American Italian from like your vernacular, like people saying like gabagool.
Guest:Are you around Italians in your life that do that, that say like Italian foods in a weird way that no, no actual Italian says like mozzarella.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like instead of mozzarella.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's like, what, what are you saying?
Marc:There's no one says, are you a hillbilly?
Marc:Like what the fuck?
Marc:That's not how Italians say it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They're Italian via Staten Island.
Guest:All of this is to say we're taking a little detour right away from our discussion of Inglorious Bastards, which has this Italian-American accent scene that we're discussing.
Guest:And this is the sixth movie by Quentin Tarantino, in his words, and his chronology.
Guest:And we have been looking at them once a month here on the Friday show.
Guest:uh so if you typically tune in to hear us talk about wtf stuff we will try to do that at the end of the episode we know that sometimes we get cranking on these tarantino movies and it just takes a long time so we'll do that right up front here and i guess the best place to start chris is to go back through our current rankings like where do you have these movies uh on your list and where does inglorious bastards fall on that list
Marc:Yeah, so my rankings, number one, Pulp Fiction, two, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, three, Jackie Brown, four, Inglourious Bastards, five, Django, six, Kill Bill, seven, Reservoir Dogs, eight, Hateful Eight, and nine, Death Proof.
Guest:So I don't remember when you started this list, was Inglourious Bastards up that high?
Guest:Like has something else moved down to allow that to be kicked up?
Guest:Yeah, Reservoir Dogs was moved down.
Guest:You moved Reservoir Dogs down.
Guest:So this one we started out was number five for you.
Guest:That's right, yeah.
Guest:Okay, okay.
Guest:So I believe when we started this out, this was number seven for me.
Guest:And so my current rankings are Pulp Fiction, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Reservoir Dogs, Django Unchained, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight, Inglourious Bastards, and Death Proof.
Guest:This sunk to number eight.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Because I had moved Kill Bill up two notches on the benefit of seeing it and our full discussion on that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The thought that really for the first half, the first volume of that, if you want to call it that, is really worth it, as is about two thirds of the second volume.
Guest:I had to reassess my general dislike of the overall product and realize that, you know, two thirds of it truly delivers.
Guest:And I bumped it up two notches, which dropped this down to eighth place on the list.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:I will give a little spoiler to say, because I think it's important in how we talk about the movie.
Guest:It required 15 years of space, which this was released almost 15 years ago to the day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And 15 years of space made me realize that I was wrong about that forever.
Guest:for reasons that we could get into, but definitely because of what came before.
Guest:Death Proof and Kill Bill and all of that.
Guest:And watching them right now, as we have been, which is in order, I am still able to, thanks to everything that has come after, and I understand this guy's full filmography at this point, I was able to look at this in a totally different way.
Guest:This movie so far...
Guest:is the one that I viewed the most differently on this watch.
Marc:Do you feel the same way?
Marc:Oh, 100%.
Marc:And just a spoiler, I will be moving this movie from its spot currently.
Marc:So yeah, this movie, when I first saw it,
Marc:I recall not loving it because it was coming off of Quentin's absolute nadir of death proof.
Marc:So the claws were already out.
Marc:And also the claws were out with like critics as well.
Marc:I remember like being spoiled about this movie.
Marc:I remember finding out what, what the twist is at the end.
Guest:Well, because it premiered at Cannes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, and I found out doing a little research on it.
Guest:He, he, he had set Cannes as a deadline for himself and,
Guest:He wanted to get it done because he didn't want to go through what he went with Kill Bill and with Death Proof, where he was giving all this time to just basically luxuriate in his indulgences.
Guest:And they went way over schedule and he kept adding things, kept changing things.
Guest:He wanted a deadline on this thing.
Guest:So he gave himself a deadline of Cannes.
Guest:He premiered it at Cannes, but he then did go and edit it more after Cannes.
Guest:So the version that released at Cannes
Guest:And whatever mixed reviews that got at the time was different than what he wound up releasing in the theaters.
Marc:Oh, fascinating.
Marc:I wonder what changed.
Marc:Well, for me, I, you know, didn't love the fourth wall breaking of the, you know, the Hugo Stiglitz with Sam Jackson narrating.
Marc:And of course the, then of course the alternate ending of World War II.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But following rewatches and I've, I've,
Marc:very seldomly rewatched this movie, but I have softened on my take of the Sam Jackson narration, the David Bowie song that's in it, which I, at the time I was like this, I, you know, there's a word for it.
Marc:What is it?
Marc:Um,
Marc:Like anachronistic?
Marc:Yeah, anachronistic.
Marc:It just felt so out of place.
Marc:But after watching this movie and watching it after Django and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I can see that the killing of Hitler and this reimagining of history is his new storytelling device or trope.
Marc:I would say it's his soul.
Guest:It's his whole reason for making movies.
Guest:He makes movies because in his mind, cinema writes the wrongs of history.
Guest:He uses movies to correct what he feels as not just unsatisfying stories, but unsatisfying treatment of human beings.
Guest:He'll be like, the movies will fix that.
Guest:To the fact that in this movie, it's literally movies that does it.
Guest:A movie is lit on fire to kill all of the Nazi high ranks.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, but like you can't say that for like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, right?
Marc:He's not re-imagining history.
Guest:Well, I don't know.
Guest:We've talked about this a little bit.
Guest:I do think...
Guest:He takes the idea that reality is fluid in those films.
Guest:He can rearrange whatever he wants.
Guest:He can tell stories out of order.
Guest:He can move the ending to the middle of the film and the middle of the film to the end.
Guest:He can make it so that the way you're viewing the film and taking it in...
Guest:leaves the story in his most satisfied version right he gets to be the guy controlling it i saw a quote of his when i was reading stuff about this movie where he said i'm the only person who can make my material best i'm not the only guy who can make my movies i've written for other people and they make them but i'm the only one who can like make the best version of my stuff because i just know it the best right and like that's like you can't argue with that really
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, look, earlier on in his career, he used nonlinear way of storytelling, like in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and to a lesser extent, Jackie Brown.
Marc:But what I didn't realize the first time I saw this movie is that he wanted to just revise history as a storytelling device.
Marc:And he's done that in Bastards, Django, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Marc:Like...
Marc:taking this as a feature and not a bug.
Marc:The ending sits so much better for me.
Guest:My memory of seeing this in 2009, I was very down on this guy, right?
Guest:Like, you know, coming off of the last things.
Guest:And, you know, I think a lot of it was basically like how much I had invested in him, like in my teenage years.
Guest:And like, I felt like, like, hey, I'm growing up.
Guest:This guy should too, right?
Guest:And those last projects...
Guest:annoyed me for their inability to to progress and is kind of uh being stuck in this you know uh genre muck that he was stuck in and so you hear about this movie it's a world war ii movie he's gonna take on you know nazis and the holocaust and it's like okay like it's this is he gonna actually do this
Guest:Or is it going to be Grindhouse 2, right?
Guest:Is it going to be the 14 fists of McCluskey, right?
Guest:Ultimately, that joke, which comes up in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is like, what I thought this was going to be.
Guest:And frankly, it's what he thought it was going to be, or it's at least where he got the idea to make it, because he had this whole...
Guest:Category of World War II movies that, you know, in that period of time when he's sitting around just watching movies and like not making them and he's talking about him with his friends, he says this was a genre in and of itself that they called inglorious bastards movies.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:And they were calling it that on the basis of this 1978, you know, kind of low budget war movie about a battalion of soldiers called the Inglorious Bastards.
Guest:It's kind of like a Dirty Dozen ripoff, I think, made in Italy.
Guest:And so, you know, he makes this thing with that in mind.
Guest:And I think, I don't even know if I knew that at the time.
Guest:I just had the feeling like, okay, so he's making a World War II movie, but is it going to be like...
Guest:just, you know, a B-movie and B-movie sensibilities, you know, filled in the edges with Tarantino style.
Guest:Because that was the trajectory, right?
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:It was all pointing that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I very specifically remember...
Guest:the beginning of this movie, and I remember it just because I'm re-watching it now, it hit me just the same way, that the first shot of the movie, let alone the first scene, the first shot, I was like, oh, hold the phone.
Guest:Like, this is a gorgeous vista.
Guest:This looks like a Sergio Leone movie.
Guest:Like, we might be doing something here.
Guest:We might be cooking.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we will get into it, of course, we will get into it more in a second.
Guest:I don't want us to think that we're just going to breeze past this first 20-minute scene.
Guest:But I will say, in order to make my point of where I was at at the time, this scene, this farmhouse scene, I watched it and was certain this is the best thing the guy's ever done.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And I thought, like, now we're cooking with gas.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the next scene is the introduction of the bastards.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's also really good.
Guest:Like you're like, wait a minute.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Now we're getting the flip side of this Nazi.
Guest:You got the, you know, American war hero and it's Brad Pitt.
Guest:And this is all very compelling.
Guest:And then that fucking thing comes on the screen that looks like, you know, Pulp Fiction.
Guest:And you hear Sam Jackson narrating these guys.
Guest:And you're like, God damn it.
Guest:It's sunk.
Guest:Like my, my guts sunk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I will get back to how I felt about it now when we, you know, as we're talking about this, but that was where I existed with this.
Guest:And I don't think I fully recovered from that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:For the rest of the movie, because then I was just spotting that throughout the movie.
Guest:Like, why do you make Michael Fassbender a film critic?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, what does that have to do with the price of eggs?
Guest:And like, you know, all this stuff that you're like, oh, these are these little things that he can't avoid is like, you know, the idiosyncrasies of his movie going and his lifetime of absorbing this stuff.
Guest:He's got to vomit them back up in these scenes or in these characters.
Guest:Of course, I've seen cat people.
Guest:So I know that that's where that song is from.
Guest:And I'm like, like, there's this feeling that he can't shake it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in the meantime, I watched this first 30 minutes of this movie.
Guest:It looked like one of the best World War Two movies I was ever going to watch in my life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So like I was like, all right, he's not fully gotten this stuff out of his system.
Guest:But there was promise.
Guest:I think that was my feeling was like, all right, we might be back on the right track, but we're not quite there.
Guest:And that was what I went.
Guest:And I don't think I've ever sat down and watched it fully since then from start to finish.
Guest:I've definitely watched parts of it.
Guest:Needle dropped it here and there.
Guest:But I don't think I ever sat down and fully like gave it reconsideration until right now.
Marc:Yeah, I think that, man, that Hugo Stiglitz thing, like, it just takes you out of the movie to an extent.
Guest:This is the introduction of one of the guys in The Bastards, and it's just all of a sudden done like you're watching like a comic book movie, right?
Guest:Or, you know, a Pulp Fiction dime novel.
Marc:And the... I can't...
Marc:I can't express it enough, but when you're in a movie theater and the lights go down and you're just magically transported to a place, you're in it.
Marc:And then if something that breaks the fourth wall, you're just like, oh, I'm now in a movie theater.
Marc:I'm watching this.
Marc:And you're just completely taken out of it.
Marc:Meanwhile, this is a movie that has
Marc:four languages being spoken.
Marc:So, you know, I'm not fully grasping it, at least that first time.
Marc:So it took, like you said, 15 years for me to really appreciate this movie.
Guest:Well, and I think part of it is in those 15 years, I have come to accept...
Guest:what he has become as a filmmaker.
Guest:And I'm not expecting him to be like the guy who's going to make the Spielbergian World War II movie.
Guest:He is making his own version of a World War II movie.
Guest:And now that we know what he is, right?
Guest:And he's not just kind of like this guy who had some talent and then lost it in a haze of marijuana smoke and hanging out in Austin.
Guest:Like he...
Guest:Actually, clearly has talent.
Guest:He's got talent in this movie, in spades, and is quite a gifted writer of dialogue and film composer.
Guest:He has just a brilliant mind for composing film and shots and putting the right elements with it, whether it's the music or whether it's the color saturation at any given point.
Guest:That was one thing I was noticing in this rewatch.
Guest:Man, all of these things line up perfectly.
Guest:There's no point when you're watching it where you're like,
Guest:well, this doesn't exactly seem like, you know, this part of France at this time.
Guest:Like it's his first real period piece, right?
Guest:Like it's in a period.
Guest:We talked about that about the other movies that they kind of exist in no time and place.
Guest:Like Death Proof is supposed to be modern day, even though it seems like it's the 70s, right?
Guest:So like this is his first strict period piece.
Guest:It has to happen at the years he's saying it's happening in.
Guest:And it feels like that.
Guest:It absolutely does.
Guest:I think it's important to note that he had written this.
Guest:It was going to be the movie he made after Jackie Brown.
Guest:Like he was very intent on making something that he wrote after he made Jackie Brown.
Guest:He didn't want to do another adaptation like he had done for that.
Guest:And this was a thing that he had an idea for and he couldn't get the ending.
Guest:In fact, he just kept overwriting it and it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Guest:And he put it away thinking, one day I'm going to make this as a TV series.
Guest:This is going to be like, you know, either miniseries or multiple episodes of this World War II thing.
Guest:Because he just kept adding characters.
Guest:He kept adding ideas.
Guest:And there's this interesting quote I saw him say about when he was doing that.
Guest:He thought, movies were no longer big enough to contain my vision.
Guest:And it's like...
Guest:That's a big problem.
Guest:That alone was probably part of the problem with Kill Bill.
Guest:It's why it's fucking four hours long.
Guest:It's why this ridiculous indulgence of Grindhouse where it's not just his movie, it's his movie plus somebody else's movie plus five other filmmakers doing fake trailers and this whole conceit.
Guest:He was feeling boxed in at the idea of, no, you have to make a two-hour movie.
Guest:And in a lot of ways, the antidote to that
Guest:is force yourself to make something quickly.
Guest:And he puts himself on this deadline to make this movie.
Guest:And the thing that I was reminded of with that is Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Guest:So Spielberg comes out of making 1941.
Guest:It's a big bomb.
Guest:He wants to make E.T., but it's an ambitious movie.
Guest:And he just got done with making an ambitious movie that...
Guest:basically knocked him down a few pegs.
Guest:And he decides, as we're prepping E.T., I'm going to make a run-and-gun movie.
Guest:And this thing that he had been talking about with George Lucas for several years was make a flip side to Star Wars, or not a flip side, but an extension of Star Wars, of instead of the Flash Gordon type of movies that they saw as kids, what about the adventure movies they saw as kids?
Guest:But he puts this on himself as like, I'm going to go get this done in like eight months.
Guest:And we're just going to run and gun and do this.
Guest:And it gave him no time to overthink it.
Guest:It was like boom, boom, boom, fast, fast, fast.
Guest:And Tarantino talks very similarly about the making of this in Glorious Bastards that he was like, if I only had like two hours to pick up one shot, that was it.
Guest:I had to get it in those two hours.
Guest:I couldn't belabor it.
Guest:I had to just do it.
Guest:And, like, I think that kind of thing forces you into making good decisions.
Guest:Like, if you're already talented, you already have the ability to do it, and then you're not overthinking it, I think that helps.
Guest:And I absolutely think that's what happened to him, you know, in the construction of this film.
Marc:Do you know what struck me while watching this movie?
Marc:What's that?
Marc:That Quentin is basically a Billy Bean Moneyball filmmaker up until this movie.
Yeah.
Marc:And what I mean by that, for those of you who are not Major League Baseball aficionados, is Billy Bean was the general manager of the A's in the 90s.
Marc:And there was a book written about him by Michael Lewis called Moneyball.
Marc:And Billy Bean and some statisticians found players who were being undervalued by the rest of the league and used them in a way to maximize their output to win a lot of ball games.
Marc:Quinton found John Travolta, obviously, for Pulp Fiction.
Marc:Pam Greer and Robert Forrester for Jackie Brown, Kurt Russell for Death Proof.
Marc:But in this movie, he signs the biggest talent out there, Brad Pitt, at the height of his fame, right?
Marc:And this is something he's never done before.
Marc:He has the star wattage and he's found, honestly, the true MVP of the whole movie is Christoph Waltz, who has a performance that is just undeniable.
Marc:It makes the whole movie.
Marc:If he didn't find him, I doubt the movie would be made.
Guest:Well, I think he basically said that without saying it.
Guest:He said that when they auditioned everybody, like all these people in Germany, to find this actor.
Guest:And Christoph Waltz, who had not really had any American breakthrough at this point, he auditions for it.
Guest:And Tarantino turns to his producer, Lawrence Bender, and he's like, we got a movie.
Guest:The movie's a go now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't know that that means he wouldn't have made it, but he definitely knew when he got this guy, oh, we can make this.
Guest:This works now.
Marc:Dude, the degree of difficulty to make this movie is astonishing.
Marc:Like, it's like those old McDonald's Larry Bird and Michael Jordan commercials where they're upping the ante of trick shots.
Marc:They're playing horse.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Off the floor, off the scoreboard, off the backboard, nothing but net.
Marc:Like, you have to make a movie that is by design spoken in four different languages.
Marc:So you have to find actors who can speak these languages and then act in these different languages.
Guest:Well, and also act in those languages in Tarantino dialogue.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, do you know how far that is?
Guest:That's one of the pleasures of the movie, actually, is hearing these people speak a foreign language.
Guest:And then you see in the subtitles, Tarantino jokes.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:You know, like, I'm like, wait, I want to rewind that now and hear how you say that in German.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you got to set up not just one lead, two leads.
Marc:You have three leads in this movie.
Marc:So you have to set up their motives.
Marc:You have to have the audience invest and care about each of them.
Marc:And it's probably the highest degree of difficulty to pull off of any Quentin Tarantino film.
Marc:And he fucking nailed it, dude.
Guest:Well, I will back off that a little bit from my side.
Guest:I think... I mean, I obviously feel like this movie is much more successful than I felt it was when I saw it the first time.
Guest:But I do get to the end and feel like...
Guest:He falls short of nailing it on the front of what you're talking about for one big reason that's not necessarily his fault.
Guest:Although when you're a director and the thumb is on the scale for one thing over another, it is somewhat on you to try to calibrate that.
Guest:I'll get to it when we get there, but I will just say I think the film's greatest strength...
Guest:becomes somewhat of an obstacle to it being like an unqualified success.
Guest:So we will get to that when we go through it.
Guest:But let's go back to this movie starting out with this farmhouse scene.
Guest:Now somebody wrote in, and I didn't find this anywhere else.
Guest:I have no reason to doubt it, but it's a story that comes from one of our listeners, that they claim Tarantino wrote this scene because one of his favorite scenes that he had ever written
Guest:prior to this was the Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken scene in True Romance.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he always wanted his own version of that, right?
Guest:Because he didn't make True Romance.
Guest:He didn't direct it.
Guest:So he set forth to write a scene that could capture the same type of tension in
Guest:as that scene oh wow whether that's true or not i believe it like i believe it whether he's ever said that that's got to be like his brain working making a scene with a two-hander scene like that same guy wrote both of those things so of course there's similarities to it as a sicilian i love that scene by the way
Guest:I bet you do.
Guest:But the other thing about this scene is the writing is wonderful, and Christoph Waltz, he shows up, and he's just fantastic.
Guest:But this is... It still is.
Guest:I had the same feeling watching it this time that I did when I watched it the first time.
Guest:He...
Guest:Quentin Tarantino opens this film with the best thing he's ever directed.
Guest:He directs the fuck out of this scene.
Guest:The angles that you're at to feel just the walls closing in on this guy and the ratcheting up of that tension, it's all in his hands.
Guest:And yes, like he is getting an amazing assist by his star player here, right?
Guest:Like this is where you put the ball in a guy's hands and you're like, you got to take the shot, but you're the coach.
Guest:You've designed the plays, right?
Guest:It's all got to work out.
Guest:And like this, it really is.
Guest:I could not believe that.
Guest:that I went and put my finger on like the cursor to see how long had elapsed when this scene was done.
Guest:And it was like 22 minutes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It feels like it's like 90 seconds.
Guest:It's so amazingly involving.
Guest:Like you, you cannot pull yourself away from this scene.
Marc:The editing in this scene is great.
Marc:The eyes of these actors are incredible.
Marc:And I don't mean the eyes of the Dreyfus family who are just under the floorboards.
Marc:I mean the family, the petite family.
Marc:The farmer.
Marc:The farmer, his daughter.
Marc:Hey, Lea Seydoux, I had no memory that that was her as the daughter.
Marc:That's unbelievable.
Marc:But yeah, she's incredible.
Marc:But she shares a glance with her dad.
Marc:And look, this is early on in the movie.
Marc:You have no idea what to expect.
Marc:One daughter closes the window.
Marc:Are they going to poison him with wine?
Marc:Is the father going to pull a fucking samurai sword off the wall and chop his head off when he goes to get his pipe?
Marc:Everything is on the table.
Marc:It's all so menacing.
Marc:But there's so much going on in this beautiful scene.
Marc:Again, two different languages are happening and you're just fully invested.
Marc:And honestly, I was like, oh God, am I breathing?
Marc:I had to like remember to breathe because it was tense.
Marc:What a tense scene.
Guest:Tense, but also it's got the perfect ability to throw little jokes in there.
Guest:Visual.
Guest:Obviously, the gimmick with the pipe is a great laugh and pulling out this pipe.
Guest:But then also, you realize that he is modeling this guy.
Guest:off of Sherlock Holmes.
Guest:100%, right?
Guest:And what that does to you is that you're like, wait, so is this the hero of the movie?
Guest:Nope.
Guest:And nope.
Guest:Then at the end of the scene, he slaughters these people under the floorboards.
Guest:So he's not the hero, but you can't help but...
Guest:Be drawn to him.
Guest:There's some magnetism there.
Guest:And this is going to come up in the movie again and again and again.
Guest:It's not moral relativism, because I do think the morality of the film is pretty straightforward.
Guest:But he absolutely is dealing with...
Guest:the wages of violence.
Guest:And this guy who, from the moment he first made a movie that has a guy cutting another guy's ear off, has been talked about as this gratuitous violence peddler.
Guest:And his movies are so graphic and he doesn't care.
Guest:And he used to give, you know, antagonistic interviews where he would say, like, I have violence in my movie because it's fun, you know?
Guest:And that was just, you know, him being an edgelord and having piss takes on people.
Guest:But like...
Guest:This guy knows the impact of violence.
Guest:And there's plenty of scenes in this movie where you watch people unsettled by their own violent actions.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he has to like he knows you're dealing with this in the context of World War Two, where millions of people were being killed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:right?
Guest:And how are people dealing with that?
Guest:And he's not, he doesn't have battle scenes in this movie.
Guest:He doesn't have, you're not out there in the fields.
Guest:He wants you to sit with people.
Guest:How are people dealing with this?
Guest:How do people deal with the fact that a guy with a gun is telling you that he just has a newborn baby and doesn't want to die?
Guest:What's the, what's the solution to that?
Guest:If you are involved in this, if you are also sitting there with a gun, how do you get out of it?
Guest:Well, eventually you kill that person.
Marc:Right.
Marc:By the way, the dialogue in this movie is the complete polar opposite of Death Proof.
Marc:Like, incredibly captivating, right?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Like, it's a complete 180, and I couldn't be more enthralled by everything that was coming out of Christoph Waltz, but also...
Marc:We get to Brad Pitt showing up and man, does that guy chew some scenery.
Guest:He does.
Guest:And it's, it's great because he's allowed to, it also made me realize that he is essentially playing just like Christoph Waltz does in the next movie we're going to watch next month, but plays a version of the same character and like wins two Oscars in a row just by basically doing the same part with little tweaks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Brad Pitt is basically Cliff Booth in this movie.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:Like he just is, is a military version of him, but he's Cliff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it again goes to show that like going back to that quote from Tarantino, I can make my movies best.
Guest:It's like, yeah.
Guest:And I'm going to put like these people in these situations.
Guest:Now he's a Nazi, you know, a little while later, I'm going to make a movie in the West and he's going to be a bounty hunter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they're like, it's all the same guy.
Guest:And you're just going to love him no matter where I do it, because I know how to do it.
Guest:I know how to command this guy's use of language, this guy's presence.
Guest:I'm going to put it on the screen and you're going to love it.
Guest:And people keep giving guys awards for doing this.
Marc:Brad Pitt wins an Oscar for doing it.
Marc:But talking about Christoph Waltz, did he do anything prior to this?
Guest:Nothing in America, but lots and lots of German stuff.
Guest:He was a very known German theater actor, television, and movies.
Guest:He just had no American breakthrough, which was the thing.
Marc:Gotcha.
Marc:On the rewatch, I realized that Landa and Brad Pitt's character are both from the mountains.
Marc:They're from different mountains, but both from mountains.
Marc:I love those two points.
Marc:And we can kind of see those two guys working in very similar but very different ways.
Guest:So, okay.
Guest:But then let's get to the part that we both talked about as the moment that kind of derailed this for us when we first saw it.
Guest:So you get all this set up.
Guest:You set up both the hero and the Nazi, okay?
Guest:And they're kind of two sides of the same coin.
Guest:It's this very intriguing premise.
Guest:And it's presented like absolutely the most mature kind of cinematic feeling movie that Quentin Tarantino has done up to this point in his career.
Guest:And then you get the Sam Jackson narration and all the genre trappings.
Guest:And I think my initial resistance to this, as we talked about, was based on the past.
Guest:And I really think that my ability to let it roll now is based on the future.
Guest:It's based on me being like, I know what a Quentin Tarantino movie is now, and I don't have some outsized expectations for him.
Guest:He doesn't have to deliver for me.
Guest:Like a World War II epic.
Guest:He just needs to deliver for me a Quentin Tarantino film.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Whatever that means that he's going to do it, he can do it.
Guest:Now, are there some mistakes in there?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right in this scene, Eli Roth comes walking onto the screen.
Guest:He's terrible.
Guest:He's really like just terrible through the whole movie.
Guest:There's never a point in the movie where you're like, oh, okay.
Guest:Well, at least he figured this out.
Guest:Like, no, he's bad the whole time.
Guest:And I'm like, why'd you do this?
Guest:This is an important part.
Guest:They were going to give it to Adam Sandler, which I would still argue would probably have been a problem.
Guest:But yeah, Adam Sandler was supposed to play this.
Guest:He was making funny people.
Guest:He couldn't get out of it.
Guest:And so he gives it to Eli Roth, who just stinks.
Guest:And you're like, this is a very substantial part.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Although I will say Eli Roth's Boston accent.
Marc:As someone who grew up in the Northeast of America, I've encountered my share of Boston accents.
Marc:I got to say, he was spot on.
Marc:Like, he sounds exactly like that.
Marc:No, I'm kidding.
Marc:It just made me wish that Sandler was in there.
Marc:Without question.
Marc:Like, shit.
Marc:I wish he could have gotten fucking Ben Affleck to do it.
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Marc:Like someone from Boston or something.
Guest:The other thing is, like, you get to this point with Tarantino where you start to realize that he does this thing where he pockets knowledge and...
Guest:And then he's going to insert it into his films in places where you will then learn something the way he did.
Guest:Like he's almost like this guy who just wants to tell you things all the time.
Guest:And like, I think you said you were reading the screenplay of this, right?
Guest:Oh yeah, sure.
Guest:And I feel like there's stuff throughout the screenplay that's just like him giving you information in along with the screen directions, right?
Guest:The stage directions.
Yeah.
Guest:And it works at times in this beautifully, like the three fingers.
Guest:That's just clearly some little bit of knowledge he has, right?
Guest:Like, oh, in Europe, they put the, you know, the thumb, the forefinger and the middle finger up to say three.
Guest:And if you do the other three fingers, American three fingers, they're going to know.
Guest:And that's a great way to smuggle in your like knowledge.
Guest:Less great is that nitrate film lights on fire, right?
Guest:And it's fine that you need that as a plot device, but it fits so poorly in this.
Guest:He has to have a guy come in and narrate it, right?
Guest:Like Sam Jackson has to reinsert himself into the movie to tell you this stuff about the nitrate film.
Guest:So he has not yet worked out fully.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which I feel like by the time you get to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I never have problems with this in that movie.
Guest:Like Bruce Lee all of a sudden telling you about kickboxers and stuff.
Guest:You're like, oh, this is some bit of Tarantino knowledge, but it's coming through Bruce Lee.
Guest:So I'm like, okay, cool.
Guest:That's fine.
Guest:In this, there's still this slightly ill-fitting quality to some of it, but the edges are smoothing a little bit.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Definitely.
Marc:So after that scene where the bastards are introduced, and by the way, I watched this movie with my wife and she was like repulsed about like the scalping that was happening.
Marc:And I turned to her and I'm like, they are Nazis.
Marc:So it's like, it's okay, right?
Guest:But I really do love that he allows for that to happen, but in the same scene with the guy who will not give up the locations of the Germans.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the bear Jew comes out to beat him with the bat.
Guest:And he does that thing.
Guest:He's like, what'd you get that medal for?
Guest:Killing Jews?
Guest:And the guy says, bravery.
Guest:Oh, yeah, bravery.
Guest:Bravery.
Guest:he fucking stares this dude down as he bashes his own skull in with a baseball bat.
Guest:And that's purposeful.
Guest:It's like, hey, just because these guys are on the wrong side, that doesn't mean they don't have the same human attributes
Guest:as people on the allies.
Guest:Like there could be fucking brave Nazis.
Guest:That doesn't mean you're like, yay Nazis.
Guest:It just means like, well, yeah, that's part of humanity.
Guest:You have to deal with the fact that there were going to be people here who believed in the cause as much as the allies believed in liberating Europe.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, we talk about the screenplay, or at least you mentioned the screenplay.
Marc:In the screenplay, there's a lovely scene with Shoshana and Marcel, her lover.
Marc:And they're talking about burning the theater down.
Marc:And Shoshana says, in a wolf fight, you either eat the wolf or the wolf eats you.
Marc:If we're going to obliterate the Nazis...
Marc:We have to use their tactics.
Marc:And I wish he left that in, but it might be a little too on the nose because it's basically the story.
Marc:It's like, hey, what if- I think that's exactly why it's gone.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like, what if we sunk to the Nazis level of fighting?
Marc:And that's what this movie is all about.
Guest:Yeah, but it's also sunk to the level, but also at the same time, if you go by the Aldo Rain character, the Brad Pitt character, they make a very big deal out of him being half Apache, right?
Guest:And...
Guest:Right up through the very end of the film, he cannot let Hans Land go without the war scar that he gives him because it's in his code, right?
Guest:And it's like, I take that to mean that it's like, look, all people of all nations and places and creeds have violent tendencies that they believe are justified.
Guest:And this dude, the good guy of the movie is like...
Guest:I've agreed to this deal.
Guest:We're going to let you go.
Guest:But first of all, I'll kill the guy next to you because I didn't agree to letting that guy go.
Guest:Second of all, I cannot allow... It is beyond my code to allow you to walk out of this without a permanent scar on your head that I will do with the most horrifying knife possible in real time.
Marc:I'll get chewed out.
Marc:I've been chewed out before.
Marc:Man...
Marc:Every fucking line that Brad Pitt says is gold in this movie.
Guest:Yeah, I realized that the times I found myself actually laughing in this movie were at Brad Pitt, which if you had asked me before I watched it, hey, is Inglourious Bastards funny?
Guest:I would probably say, look, it's not like hilariously funny, but like, man, that like Christoph Waltz, he's got some killers, right?
Guest:And I realized watching it, it's like, they're not funny lines.
Guest:They're like, you marvel at the dialogue coming from Hans Landa because they're so, it's audacious that this guy is so confident and suave and debonair, but evil at the same time.
Guest:They're like astounding lines.
Guest:They're not funny, but it's like Brad Pitt.
Marc:That's a bingo there.
Marc:That's pretty funny.
Guest:Is that how you say it?
Guest:Even that, that requires Brad Pitt to be funny because he's like, no, no, we just say bingo.
Guest:Bingo.
Guest:But the other thing that like, but like the Brad Pitt stuff is like, you know, well, I'm best at Italian.
Guest:He's second best over there.
Guest:He's third best.
Guest:I don't, I don't speak any Italian.
Guest:Like I said, third best.
Guest:You keep your mouth shut.
Just the best.
Guest:so yeah I mean like it's got all these tremendous like pleasures of dialogue and setting and place and I guess what I want to know from you is where did you wind up with this once the once the plot gets in motion and you get to the ending and everything and we you know you've seen it before so you know how it's going to end did you feel like it's over and you're more satisfied than you were the last time you feel like it totally delivered how did you feel getting to the end of it this time
Marc:It's funny, because of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I was enjoying the ride so much more than the previous times I've seen this movie.
Marc:And it was just, it was kind of a laugh riot, like you were saying.
Marc:And I was very satisfied with the ending.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, there are a couple bumps in the road there, you know, like choking the actress and everything.
Marc:But yeah, for overall, I was thoroughly satisfied with the ending.
Marc:How about you?
Guest:Well, so yes, I was much more satisfied than I was seeing it the first time.
Guest:In fact, I agree with you.
Guest:I think it's like having in my head the knowledge of his other films really helped.
Guest:I will say the thing that did...
Guest:put the blocks on this a little bit is that when it gets to that last act you show up at the movie theater right and it's where kind of everything's coming together you've got all your separate plot strings there are three have been three plot strands throughout the film that are now landing in this place you've got the Shoshana plot and the bastards plot but then there when they arrive is Hans Landa right because now he's running security at the movie theater and
Guest:And he's so fucking amazing as he immediately has sniffed out this, you know, terrible plot that they have.
Guest:Because he knows that she was a double agent, the actress.
Guest:And him, you know, goading these guys to try to speak better Italian is, you know, like just so brutal.
Guest:But I'm watching and I'm realizing that...
Guest:Getting from there, especially when you watch it the first time and you're like, oh, this guy's just got them trapped.
Guest:He's going to kill them or whatever.
Guest:And then the fact that then he doesn't kill them
Guest:You're watching it the first time, you're like, what's happening?
Guest:Why is this guy, he won the movie.
Guest:And then you realize he's, you know, creating a deal so that he is not on the losing side of the war and eventually, you know, facing a military tribunal.
Guest:So he's going to get out of it, right?
Guest:You're watching it.
Guest:I'm watching it this time thinking like, this guy is...
Guest:He is owning this movie so much.
Guest:And every time he's not on the screen, I'm wanting him to be back on the screen.
Guest:And what that did was it muted the impact of the Shoshanna story specifically.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You wanted to get through that.
Guest:Even beyond getting through it, it just, when it was happening, when that is happening at the beginning of the film, you're like, Oh my God, this is like a brutal, like backstory for this character to have been through this and watch your family be killed.
Guest:And then you get that scene where they meet over dessert over the strudel.
Guest:And it's also very tense.
Guest:And you're like, you know, he keeps ordering milk and you're thinking he's onto who she is and whatever.
Guest:And yeah,
Guest:The movie would kind of tell you this is where the ultimate catharsis is going to be.
Guest:You're going to feel good about Shoshana.
Guest:You're getting comeuppance on these people somehow, which she does.
Guest:She gets her revenge.
Guest:And because of her single minded focus on revenge is also her own undoing.
Guest:She gets killed.
Guest:That doesn't land as hard because by that point, two plus hours in, you're so taken with Christoph Waltz and his performance, right?
Guest:Like you're just like, this is the most fun Nazi I've ever hung around with.
Marc:And I've hung around with some Nazis.
Guest:I can't believe how much fun I'm having with this guy.
Guest:And it does, again, I only give it minor demerits on that level because what are you going to do?
Guest:It's this gold this guy is spinning for you.
Guest:But it does then become incumbent upon the director to even the playing field a little bit.
Guest:And it just can't get there with emotionally.
Guest:You can't get there with this plot.
Guest:Like, I don't know.
Guest:I don't really feel it when this guy, you know, her lover throws the cigarette into the thing and you're realizing like he's saying goodbye to her, but also fulfilling her wishes as this place goes up in flames.
Guest:Like, that's great.
Guest:But like...
Guest:I don't have that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That, that feel is not there.
Guest:And it's largely just because you're like, right, but, but what's going on with Aldo and Hans Landa?
Guest:Like, go bring me back to there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, I wish, I wish Quentin kept a scene that was in the screenplay, but wasn't in the movie where Shoshana meets the bastards with Landa in the movie theater lobby.
Marc:And, uh, she's actually the one that leads, uh, Margarete and Dominic DiCocco, uh, to their seats.
Marc:Uh,
Marc:Uh, it's actually a touching aside because, uh, you read that, uh, Hirshberg, one of the bastards going to the seat is actually filled with guilt.
Marc:Um, because, you know, as she lets him know where his seats are, he looks back at her and he's thinking, if I'm successful, I'm going to blow this, this sweet French girl, the smithereens.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And Shoshana is looking back at this guy and she also feels guilty knowing that if she's successful, uh,
Marc:She's going to burn this guy alive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, but also she, she clocks that, oh, I'm going to burn this Jewish looking guy alive.
Marc:So like, yeah, I kind of wanted that.
Marc:Like there was a little, that was a little bit missing.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's interesting though, because that's one of those things where he's, again, going back to his thing about thinking that his, his ambitions and visions were, were,
Guest:more outsized than movies like that bit of information exists better on a page yeah it exists better as like a novel which you know he goes on and writes this once upon a time in hollywood novel that's totally different from the movie and you can see that he has that in him he has it in him to take the stories he's telling on screen and expand them and make them make them larger um yeah
Guest:I also think it's very... You're talking about that other scene, too, that he cut out and saying that it could have just been that it's too on the nose to point out the... As we talked about, the wages of violence and what you have to do to survive and essentially bring yourself down to the level of the people who are killing you in order to kill them.
Guest:And I also think there's a line in here that is so...
Guest:like underlined and gone over with a highlighter and circled.
Guest:But it, for some reason it works to me.
Guest:I didn't feel like it was intrusive on the movie.
Guest:And it's when Londa is sitting there with, with Aldo and the, the, what's he called?
Guest:The little man.
Guest:They call me the little man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you're, you're not a giant, but you're kind of normal sized guy.
Guest:You're not, you're not, you're not a circus midget.
Marc:You're just a tiny bit.
Guest:So he's sitting there with them and he lays out the whole score.
Guest:Here's what's going to happen.
Guest:And if I was in your shoes, I might not take this, but here's the deal.
Guest:And he presents them the phone and says, if we make the phone call, we can get this going and make the deal tonight and end the war.
Guest:He goes, what will the history books tell us?
Guest:And then it cuts to the theater where it cuts right to Hitler, who is about to be killed, right?
Guest:Which is not in the history books, right?
Guest:The history books do not tell us this.
Guest:So again, I feel like the central element of this movie is also the central motivator of Quentin Tarantino as a person is like, I am going to use cinema
Guest:to do everything that I want in life.
Guest:It's not just going to tell stories.
Guest:It's going to tell history.
Guest:It's going to reconfigure history.
Guest:It's going to make you feel emotions.
Guest:It's going to go make you read books.
Guest:It's going to go make you find other movies.
Guest:It's going to go make you, you know, do a podcast about the movie I made.
Guest:Like he centrally believes in the ability of like cinema to unify everything.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:do you think Landa knew who Shoshana was when they sat down and ate Strudel?
Marc:That's, I mean, I feel like that's a briefcase question.
Guest:Unanswerable question.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like, what is, what is it?
Guest:Because you can go either way and it's totally fine, right?
Guest:Like, it's like, if he thinks she is who she is,
Guest:What's why would he like if she if he does think that this is the same farm girl that I remember.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What good does it do to spring the trap there?
Guest:Right.
Guest:When he knows like, oh, we're going to be at this movie theater.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that all the German high officers are going to be there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:they might be trying to set a trap and that's why his hackles are up.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like that, that's, that's my thinking.
Marc:I think, cause this guy is Sherlock Holmes.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I think in that scene, he is, you know, he caught her again and,
Marc:and about to just drop the bomb on her, so to speak.
Marc:And he's calculating in that moment, and he's pretty much setting the dominoes up, being like, oh, if I let her go, and I let this movie premiere happen at this theater,
Marc:She is A, going to try to take revenge on Nazis.
Marc:And B, there's also this other plot to happen.
Marc:I feel like he is calculating it all.
Marc:And at the end of that scene, he's just like, I forgot the other thing I was going to say.
Guest:Because he never forgets anything.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:Like he was going to say something and he decided not to.
Guest:So that's your choice.
Guest:You have to make up your choice in your head.
Guest:What was he deciding not to say?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:That structural scene was great.
Marc:But, man, we have not talked about Michael Fassbender at all.
Marc:And that is a shame.
Marc:That's funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Especially because that whole scene is amazing.
Marc:But he's great in it.
Marc:That is another scene where I'm just like, I am so nervous right now.
Marc:There's no oxygen in this room.
Marc:I am just...
Marc:I am just captivated by what is happening.
Marc:And the heads up game.
Marc:These people are amazing at heads up.
Marc:I play heads up and I stink.
Marc:But these people are just great at it.
Marc:But that whole scene and the...
Marc:the accent, and it's all just so compelling, especially on rewatch.
Marc:Because when I'm first watching it, look, I'm a stupid American.
Marc:I'm reading the words.
Marc:I'm barely looking up from the words to the actor.
Marc:And on rewatch, man, I am just... I'm captivated by these performances and these actors and their ability to...
Marc:you know, convey like, oh, you're, where are you from?
Marc:And like, it's all just brilliant, brilliant acting.
Guest:Also the direction of that scene, just like the farmhouse scene is, you know, you're in this tight enclosed space, but it is never static.
Guest:He's always moving the camera around.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It also has all these very old style, especially old from the 40s movies, shot compositions where people are in deep focus, where you have a person who's very close in the foreground of the shot and someone who's somewhat behind them, blocking-wise, and they're all in perfect focus.
Guest:Movies don't do that now.
Guest:That's an old style that went along with like black and white photography.
Guest:Like if you think about like Citizen Kane, like that was the big thing.
Guest:Oh, there's all these deep focus shots of people in the background, foreground and middle ground.
Guest:And you see them all exactly the same.
Guest:So, you know, I'm noticing that in this and it's like, that looks like a little weird.
Guest:Because your brain's not used to a modern movie in digital projection looking like that.
Guest:But you're like, oh, but this was how it looked in World War II.
Guest:This is what the style of filmmaking was.
Guest:And also just how he conceals that other guy in a part of that basement that you don't know is there until he comes out.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:On rewatch, I see the bartender walking over the boot of beer, which I have a boot of a glass when I went to Germany.
Marc:But yeah, I saw, I clocked that on my rewatch.
Marc:It's kind of crazy.
Marc:This movie has like seven scenes in it.
Marc:Like you can basically, I mean, the shortest scene I think is Mike Myers, you know, like that whole scene, which is lovely, by the way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's where you're first introduced to Fassbender, who, by the way, did you know that he was not supposed to play that part?
Marc:No.
Guest:It was Simon Pegg.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:That wasn't even like a Sandler thing where like he wanted Sandler, but he couldn't get Sandler.
Guest:This was like he had Simon Pegg and then Simon Pegg had to drop out.
Guest:Uh, because of like shooting commitments on, I think the, uh, the adventures of Tintin or something like that.
Guest:And which was like, you know, way big budget.
Guest:So you had to keep making it, you know, Fassbender, like this is his coming out party.
Guest:Like nobody really knew him before this.
Guest:This was, he had been in films obviously, but this was his big presentation to the world, which, you know, there's other people in the movie that, that, you know, were the same in that sense.
Marc:But yeah, I mean, when, when, uh, when he dies fast, but when Fassbender dies,
Marc:He has possibly the best ending ever.
Marc:Well, if this is it, old boy, I hope you don't mind if I go out speaking the kings.
Marc:I mean, that's a fucking all-timer of an end moment.
Marc:Goddamn.
Marc:Then he shoots him in the balls.
Guest:I also do love that.
Guest:That's another perfect example of like how he shows all these sides in the war have similar types of individuals playing out.
Guest:Like you can't just ascribe one type of humanity to each side of this war, right?
Guest:Every side has every type of human.
Guest:And so the good guys have a fucking psychopath with them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like this guy Stiglitz is a fucking psycho.
Guest:Like he wants to kill everybody at all times.
Guest:And you're like, man, that's just one of the good guys.
Guest:Like he's like in, in some other version of this movie, like, Oh, there's the terrifying villain, Hugo Stiglitz.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:By the way, all of Hugo's kills for me were more hilarious than the next.
Marc:Like I was, I was laugh out loud.
Marc:The one where he shoves his whole fist through a guy's face.
Yeah.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So obscene.
Guest:So I think the important thing now is to find out where we rank these because we clearly are both moving it up in the ranks.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now these rankings, these are our favorite, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What else are they?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:We decide no one else can ever think of these things in any other way.
Guest:No.
Guest:Where do you rank them?
Guest:Like, what's your feeling?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So I was coin flipping this because Inglorious Bastards, for me,
Marc:is either number one or number two.
Marc:It was a fun time.
Marc:And I think it's going to settle at the second best Quentin Tarantino movie for me.
Marc:So right under Pulp Fiction is now Inglourious Bastards.
Guest:Well, all right.
Guest:Knowing that you've still got three movies to watch.
Guest:Exactly, yeah.
Guest:I understand that.
Guest:I cannot put it that high.
Guest:Definitely not.
Guest:But considering that it was sitting at number eight on my list, it has some room to climb.
Guest:And I realized that one of the things I consider a virtue of it is now, which I didn't necessarily at the time, is that it is a really good text of what Quentin Tarantino is as a filmmaker, right?
Guest:Like,
Guest:If you could only show somebody one of his movies and this is the one you have to show them, you're not doing a bad thing.
Guest:It's not like you're like, but this one's not really representative.
Guest:No, this is a great representation of him as a filmmaker and it's a good movie.
Guest:And where I think that gives it an edge over another movie that I'm going to put it in front of is Jackie Brown, to me, does not feel like that.
Guest:and we talked about it when we did Jackie Brown, is that I think that movie is a little bit hamstrung by it being an adaptation of something that is not his.
Guest:The kind of devotion he has to making sure he gets Elmore Leonard right keeps him at bay in the movie.
Guest:I am ranking this above Jackie Brown, which puts it in at number five on my list and puts it right behind what we're going to watch next month, Django Unchained.
Guest:And I think in my mind, my memory of Django Unchained is that he fully gets...
Guest:where I expected him to get with this movie, right?
Guest:Oh, interesting.
Guest:He has fully kind of unburdened himself of those blocks that got put on him in those earlier years, right?
Guest:And I also think there's probably what I'm anticipating feeling a little more strongly is that he gets a better usage out of Christoph Waltz
Guest:In terms of keeping him even with the rest of the movie and not making it so he absorbs the whole thing.
Guest:And that's my memory, because thinking back to Django Unchained, I'm like, well, there are a lot of people who are on his level in that movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It doesn't feel like he's dominating it so much.
Guest:And I will be interested to see if that holds true.
Guest:I could I could be wrong and it could feel like, you know, not as good as this movie felt.
Guest:But this movie felt really great.
Guest:Like watching it, I was very impressed at how good this held up 15 years later.
Guest:So much to the point where I rank it fifth.
Guest:You rank it second.
Guest:That is shocking to me.
Guest:I got to be honest.
Marc:I loved it, man.
Marc:It was such a jolt of adrenaline to me.
Marc:After what we saw with Death Proof, this was like, give me more.
Marc:I just want to, you know, mainline, you know, all these Quentin Tantino movies.
Guest:Well, we will.
Guest:I mean, we'll take it a little slow.
Guest:It's going to take three more months to do it.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, look, you and I, we're not the same people.
Guest:I just, like, I couldn't, I could never...
Guest:think of getting this to a point where it leapfrogs the first two movies on our list i just it just doesn't it doesn't even come close in my estimation no it does you know we'll we'll see where we where we get when uh when we re-watch uh once upon a time yeah yeah um as i have some suspicions about that quite frankly in terms of where it's going to wind up on my list
Guest:Uh, but that is for another day.
Marc:And, uh, as we wrap things up here, uh, man, now all I, all I want to know is you, what you, what you meant by that.
Marc:And we can't even talk about it because we do this podcast.
Marc:God, that's right.
Marc:Now we're not going to talk about it for till October.
Uh,
Guest:But anything else this week that we wanted to... I mean, did you hear Mark's list of movies?
Marc:I did.
Marc:What a list.
Marc:What a goddamn list.
Marc:He's really been making the most of that time in the trailer.
Marc:Churning it out.
Marc:And good for him.
Marc:And that's exactly what I want him to do.
Marc:I loved that Royal Tenenbaums was on the list.
Marc:And man, thank you for just...
Marc:You know, golf analogy.
Marc:You're chipping away.
Marc:You're putting away.
Guest:Nudge him in there with bringing that up to Owen.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I loved that.
Marc:And yeah, keep on doing that.
Marc:And Royal Tenenbaums, one of my personal favorite movies.
Marc:I'm pretty sure I modeled my entire sort of adolescence and early adulthood on Royal Tenenbaums.
Marc:like not the kids but of royal i like i'm a bit of an asshole and uh you know like and you know as uh glover says in the movie it's like i don't think you're an asshole i think you're just a bit of a son of a bitch like that's basically me like in a nutshell so i don't think that's true at all but it's i'll let you go with your uh with your your enjoyable uh analogy there for yourself
Marc:Can we get Mark to watch a Quentin Tarantino movie or two?
Marc:Like, I want to know his thoughts on maybe Inglourious Bastard.
Marc:Oh, sure.
Guest:I'll tell him we just watched this.
Guest:I mean, I know that he's seen all of these movies and that he likes at least the ones I've talked to him about.
Guest:I remember he liked this at the time when it came out.
Guest:He liked The Hateful Eight when he saw that.
Marc:I do wonder about, like, because I know Jewish people have a...
Marc:different or differing opinion on Inglorious Bastards or like can be differing opinions.
Marc:Can be, yeah.
Guest:I don't know that it's monolithic, but yeah, sure.
Guest:I mean, I've heard plenty of people all over the map talk about it.
Guest:And I think, you know, he...
Guest:He definitely liked it.
Guest:In fact, you were the one who pointed out to me, like in one of our early episodes, I think like episode two, he talked about it having just watched it.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And yeah, he watches Once Upon a Time in Hollywood all the time.
Guest:It's one of his like all the time rewatches.
Guest:It probably falls into that category of ones he has to like put on the shelf because he doesn't want them to stop being enjoyable.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I know, like, all the time.
Guest:Especially on a plane.
Guest:He'll be on a plane, and he'll text me, and he'll be like, just watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood again.
Marc:Amazing.
Marc:Loved hearing his thoughts on Ren Faire.
Marc:Really great stuff.
Marc:I loved that thread.
Marc:And I had the same thoughts about Long Legs.
Marc:Like, it could have been more.
Marc:Just, it could have been more scary, honestly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, it's just it just kind of look, my wife loves scary movies.
Marc:She loves to be scared to death.
Marc:There just wasn't enough of that.
Marc:It just was kind of kind of a dull thing that happened there.
Marc:But yeah, great, great stuff.
Marc:I love I love talking movies.
Marc:So I really, really enjoyed Mark and you talking about that.
Guest:All right, well, we will wrap things up this week.
Guest:And anything else you want us to talk about, why don't you write in to us?
Guest:We have a link there in the episode description.
Guest:Just click on that.
Guest:Send us your thoughts.
Guest:Send us your comments.
Guest:Send us your ideas.
Guest:Keep them coming.
Guest:And until next time, I'm Brendan, and that's Chris.
Marc:Say Auf Wiedersehen to your Nazi balls.
Marc:Peace!