And then there's history, which Tarantino raspberries with lunatic abandon. Suffice it to say that Adolf Hitler does not die in a bunker in April 1945. Tarantino has other plans for the führer.
Like Kill Bill before it, the writer/director's Inglourious Basterds is divided into chapters. The first, set in Gallic cow country, introduces Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), an SS officer with the sobriquet "Jew Hunter." He arrives at a farmhouse to root out a family of Jews he believes to be hiding there. There is plenty of patter between Landa and the farmer LaPadite (Denis Menochet), a considerable amount of it in French, before the duo switch to English - for the edification of the audience, yes, but also to facilitate the discovery of the Jews (they're within earshot but don't understand English).
Eventually, after pipe smoking and winking badinage, a grim massacre ensues. But one of the daughters - the beautiful Shoshana (Mélanie Laurent) - escapes. She will be heard from again.
Cut to Chapter 2, and the introduction of the Basterds - a team of Army recruits under the command of Lt. Aldo Raine (sounds like Aldo Ray, the actor who excelled in macho military roles). Brad Pitt plays the lieutenant with a jaunty mustache and a Tennessee twang. He cuts a formidable figure, and he wants the eight soldiers, six of them Jewish Americans, to join him in cutting Nazis, too. He's being literal: slicing the tops off the heads of the enemy, "Apache-style" - 100 scalps per man.
In this "bushwhackin' guerrilla army" are Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Roth), who beats Nazis with a baseball bat, and five other Hebrew schoolkids-turned-avengers (Omar Doom, Michael Bacall, B.J. Novak, Paul Rust, and Samm Levine). The Basterds also include a renegade Nazi and an Austrian expat.
