At number five, we’ve got Inglourious Basterds.
Oh, and by its nature, this entire month’s list gets one of these:
****Spoiler Alert****
But don’t worry, I’ll put a reminder on every entry.
Inglourious Basterds is a WWII movie as written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, about a plot by a group of Jewish American soldiers (the self-named “Basterds”) to assassinate Hitler and the other essential figures in his regime.
If that sentence doesn’t make you desperate to see it, then… well, then it’s probably not your thing, honestly. Tarantino has a very polarizing effect on people. But if you’re one of those rare people on the fence, here are four reasons to turn back and watch it before the spoilers:
1: Christoph Watlz’s very deserving (and very creepy) Best Supporting Actor performance.
2: Brad Pitt eating up the scenery as the southern Lieutenant in command of the Basterds.
3: One particularly badass character who happens to be female, Jewish, AND French (all categories that could always use more badass credit).
4: Eli Roth in a tank top.
Okay, onto spoilers.
If you’ve already seen the movie, you might be wondering what it’s doing on this list, because its ending doesn’t twist in quite the usual way. There’s no character or object or situation that turns out to be something different from what we’ve been led to believe. It’s nothing as easy to guess as that.
No, the movie itself turns out to be something different from what we’ve been led to believe.
Being a Tarantino movie, Inglourious Basterds is an awesomely unique and bizarre experience, but it’s still a WWII movie, a historical movie. So the Basterds’ plan has to fail in some tragic way so that history can take the course we all know it did, right?
It’s a little weird to call an ending that goes according to plan a twist, but at that moment when Hitler’s brains splatter against the back of the theater box, when the movie breaks the rules and departs from plausible historical speculation into a fantasy-fulfillment alternate reality, it’s a shock more satisfying than any “wait, a trusted main character is working with Hitler, who also happens to be a vampire from space” complication you could possibly tack on.