7) Inglourious Basterds
I’m always surprised that Inglourious Basterds isn’t universally regarded as Quentin Tarantino’s singular masterpiece. I would have thought more people would have seen it the way I have come to think of it, as his most mature and coherently realized piece of work to date, although Django Unchained comes close. There’s an undeniably cool and stylistically exciting aspect to his work before Basterds, which came to define his unique brand of filmmaking, Pulp Fiction being the quintessential example of a Tarantino movie. All these movies, from Reservoir Dogs to Kill Bill, were important, but I think of them as stepping stones to the achievement of Basterds. Everything I’m trying to describe is captured in the film’s prologue scene.
It was as if someone said something to Tarantino, the way Andy Kaufman is told that the key to comedy is silence in Man on the Moon, that inspired a revelation. He was known for indulgence in all his work that came before, but from the very first moments in Basterds, we see that he has decided to trade that tactic in for a brand new one: restraint. The tension throughout this movie makes No Country for Old Men’s tensest moments seem like Home Alone by comparison. And perhaps the most masterfully composed tension comes in the opening scene, orchestrated with the assistance of a virtuosic and eccentric performance by Christoph Waltz.
Tarantino has never felt so deliberate, and starting out with a scene like this makes every detail of a movie feel important. It’s not that his priority of making stuff cool in his previous movies wasn’t terrific and brilliant, but here we see him taking a huge chance in trying something different, and exercising some different directorial muscles, and the result is some of the finest filmmaking of the past decade.
