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Inglorious Basterds (Arrow Video) UHD Review

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    Ian Jane
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  • Inglorious Basterds (Arrow Video) UHD Review

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    Released by: Arrow Video
    Released on: January 14th, 2025.
    Director: Quentin Tarantino
    Cast: Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Eli Roth, Sylvester Groth, Til Schweiger, B.J. Novak
    Year: 2009
    Purchase From Amazon

    Inglorious Basterds – Movie Review:

    Quentin Tartantino's Inglourious Basterds has very little to do with Enzo G. Casterllari's Inglorious Bastards, a war film that starred Bo Svenson and Fred ‘The Hammer’ Williamson in a Dirty Dozen style suicide mission. There are nods to that first film, sure, but this is hardly a remake even if it may have at one point been slated as such.

    When the movie begins in occupied France during the Second World War, a French dairy farmer and his three daughters are approached by a German SS officer, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) who suspects the man of hiding Jews in his home. His suspicions are correct, and his men murder the family hidden under the floorboards in cold blood - though their teenage daughter, Shoshanna, manages to escape with her life. Fast forward a few years to Paris and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) is running a posh theater. After being approached by a war hero-cum-film star named Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) whose romantic intensions don't interest her at all, she winds up being forced to dine with Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and his interpreter (Julie Dreyfus) who ultimately decides to host the premiere of Zoller's film debut, A Nation's Pride, at her theater. Anyone who is anyone in the Nazi party will be in attendance, including Landa, and so Shoshanna and her black boyfriend decide they should sabotage the event and burn all the attendees alive.

    While all of this is going on, a rag tag group of American Special Forces soldiers, of Jewish descent, led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine and populated by the likes of Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) and Donnie 'The Jew Bear' Donowitz (Eli Roth) are running around France scalping any Nazi's that they encounter. Eventually they meet up with a British agent (Michael Fassbender) who, after a meeting with General Ed Fenech (Mike Myers) and Winston Churchill (Rod Taylor), puts them in touch with a German actress named Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who is willing to help Raine and his men get into the premiere being held at Shoshanna's theater so that they can kill Hitler and any other Nazis who might be there.

    Despite Pitt's headlining status in the marketing campaign, he's only a supporting actor here, though he steals pretty much every scene he's in, playing his Aldo Raine with a ridiculous southern accent but with an equally ridiculous amount of enthusiasm. You definitely get the feeling that he and his fellow Basterds are having a blast with the material here. On the more serious side of the same coin are Laurent, Waltz and Bruhl, all three of whom deliver excellent performances, Laurent in particular. Her Shoshanna is entirely sympathetic, her revenge driven by the purest of motives and entirely patriotic and selfless in its intent. On top of that, Tarantino throws in a lot of fun cameos from many of the aforementioned performers, many of which are so subtle you may not even recognize them (Bo Svenson and Enzo G. Castellari both have blink-and-you'll-miss-it on appearances). The acting in this picture is very strong across the board, and all involved handle not only the humor and the action that the picture contains but also the more dramatic aspects of the picture with equally impressive skill.

    Of course, this being a Tarantino film you expect some of his trademarks, so don't be surprised to hear plenty of borrowed music or to see a foot-tastic sequence or two. The sounds of Ennio Morricone run rampant through the film but feel entirely appropriate, while pop numbers from David Bowie and others add an interesting contrast to the score and lyrically speaking at least fit the tone of the picture very well. Some moments of shocking and sporadic violence, not the least of which is some graphic scalping on the part of the Basterds, reminds us that war is a nasty thing but at the same time is so over the top as to be comedic in a twisted sort of way. The film is also beautifully shot and stands as the best looking of any of his pictures so far in terms of cinematography, set design and color composition.

    Thematically speaking you can't help but feel that this movie is really just one big, flashy love letter to European cinema. At one point a character says “This is France, we respect director's here” and the film literally allows the theater to save the day not only metaphorically speaking but physically as well. The backgrounds are peppered with marquees containing references to the likes of Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst but to French and Italian filmmakers as well and there is all manner of interesting German, Italian and French movie posters scattered throughout the picture as well. An obvious film buff himself, you get the feeling that Tarantino has basically made a movie for movie lovers. He's created a picture that shows drama, comedy, romance, action, adventure and horror and he's (not surprisingly) thrown in loads of tributes to those who preceded and influenced him. If that weren't enough in and of itself, he's done it with loads of style and made it a whole lot of entertaining fun.

    Inglorious Basterds – UHD Review:

    The HEVC encoded 2160p high-definition transfer, framed at 2.40.1, on this UHD release from Arrow Video looks really good. The colors really pop here, without looking too pumped up, and black levels are nice and deep. There’s excellent detail and depth to the image and a lot of appreciable texture as well, and skin tones look very lifelike and natural. The transfer always looks like proper film, retaining the grain that it should but showing no real print damage at all. Noise reduction, edge enhancement and compression artifacts are never a problem either. This looks a fair bit better than the past Blu-ray edition, it’s a very strong presentation.

    Arrow provides both 5.1 and 2.0 Stereo options in 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio tracks on this disc. Gof ro the 5.1 mix if you can. You'll notice from the opening Morricone track just how rich and full the score sounds here, spread out nicely across the soundstage and really pushing right out of your speakers without ever sounding forced or heavy handed. Levels are properly balanced allowing the quieter and more conversational aspects of the film to ring through nice and clear while simultaneously letting the more action intensive sequences pack a hefty punch. Gun shots sound very strong, and there are a few spots where you'll probably jump a bit, but that's obviously the intended effect. Bass response is strong and bouncy, filling out the lower end of the mix beautifully. The mix here never feels over the top, rather, it suits the film perfectly. There's absolutely nothing to complain about here regarding the audio, it sounds excellent.

    The only extra on the first disc is a new audio commentary with Tim Lucas, who delivers a hyper-detailed talk that goes over the scores of cinematic influences that have worked their way into this movie, offering up loads of detail on the cast and crew involved in the production, the music used in the movie, thoughts on the cinematography and production values, context for specific scenes, thoughts on the performances and lots more. It’s a great mix of fact, trivia and critical analysis.

    The second disc, a Blu-ray, includes a host of additional extra content, starting with What Would Sally Do?, a new interview with editor Fred Raskin that runs eleven minutes. He worked as the late Sally Menke's assistant editor on the film and here he discusses how he got into film editing, what it was like to collaborate with Menke and what she was like as a person, his thoughts on working with Tarantino and what his experiences working on the movie were like.

    Blood Fiction, a new interview with special make-up effects supervisor Greg Nicotero running twenty-two minutes, lets the man speak about how he came to work with Tarantino and what their relationship is like, what went into creating some of the effects set pieces featured in the movie, some of the challenges that he and his team had to overcome on set and what went into some of this problem solving.

    Doomstruck is a new twelve-minute interview with actor Omar Doom who talks about how he first met Tarantino and how he came to be cast in the movie after auditioning for his role, what it was like on set, getting along with some of his co-stars, memories of shooting certain scenes in the movie and more.

    Making it Right is a new visual essay by film critic Walter Chaw, author of A Walter Hill Film, that runs twenty-two minutes and goes over the complexities of Tarantino's work and how it can often be remarkably kind and sensitive while simultaneously dealing in hyper violent concepts and set pieces.

    Film History on Fire is a new visual essay by film scholar Pamela Hutchinson, author of BFI Film Classics Pandora's Box, that runs twenty-one minutes and sees her explore the concept of using film as a weapon to combat evil and the use of film as propaganda throughout history as it ties into World War II and Inglorious Basterds.

    Filmmaking in Occupied France is a new sixteen-minute interview with film scholar Christine Leteux, author of Continental Films: French Cinema Under German Control, that covers the state of cinema in France while the country was occupied by German forces during World War II as well as some of the key players and the work that they created during this period.

    Also quite interesting are the three deleted scenes that are included here, which we originally saw on the Universal Blu-ray release from 2009. Running a combined twelve minutes, here you'll find an extended bit from the scene where Shoshanna has lunch with Goebbels, some excised material from the scene where the drinkers are playing their game in La Louisiane, and an alternate version of the scene leading into the premier of A Nation's Pride. None of these are particularly important nor do they really change the movie much, but they're fun to see.

    Again, carried over from the original Blu-ray release is A Nation's Pride, a short film that Eli Roth directed is presented here in its six-minute entirety and seeing it without the feature surrounding it gives you a pretty good appreciation for just how closely Roth nailed the look and feel of the German propaganda films being made at the time. A four-minute making of documentary accompanies it and gives us a look behind the scenes as Roth was shooting this film within a film.

    Also carried over from the older Universal Blu-ray is a half hour long Roundtable Discussion in which Tarantino and Pitt talk with Elvis Mitchell about their work on this production. It's an interesting talk that covers the production schedule, Tarantino's constant working and reworking of the script, character development, casting and rehearsals and plenty more. There's a good sense of humor to all of this but it's also pretty revealing.

    From there, again taken from the Universal Blu-ray, is a bunch of shorter, less interesting supplements, most of which are amusing more so than they are informative. The Original Inglorious Bastards is an eight-minute bit that pays tribute to Enzo Castellari's original film and talks about the cameos that some of the players from that picture had in his reimagining while A Conversation With Rod Taylor is a brief seven-minute discussion about how Tarantino used the legendary actor to play Winston Churchill in the movie. Rod Taylor On Victoria Bitter is a three-minute bit where he talks about Tarantino and beer and how it all relates - amusing enough. Tarantino's Camera Angel is a three-minute collection of one-liners that a clapboard operator on the film spouted off during production, while Hi Sallys is a two-minute collection of greetings that Tarantino and his compatriots sent to editor Sally Menke when they shipped the footage off to her.

    Rounding out the extras are eight-minutes’ worth of trailers and promo spots, a film poster tour segment that shows off all of the film posters that we see in the background of the feature, menus and chapter selection options.

    Note that as Arrow has only supplied test discs, we can’t comment on any packaging or physical inserts included with this reissue.

    Inglorious Basterds – The Final Word:

    Well-acted, well-written and beautifully shot, Inglourious Basterds is not only a really well-made film from a cinematic standpoint, but it's also seriously entertaining and Arrow has done a very impressive job bringing it to UHD with an excellent presentation and a load of extra features thrown in for good measure.



    Click on the images below for full sized Inglorious Basterds Blu-ray screen caps taken from the Blu-ray release and intended only to illustrate the film and not the quality of the UHD transfer.

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