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Tarantino on bloody mission to take Cannes
2009-05-20
CANNES, France (AFP) - Quentin Tarantino sent a squad of Nazi-killing "Inglourious Basterds" into Cannes Wednesday on a blood-and-guts mission to capture the top prize at the world's premier film festival. "It's the power of cinema that's going to bring down the Third Reich!" said a buoyant Tarantino after he led chief "Basterd" Brad Pitt and other cast members into a press conference after the movie's world premiere. The new work by the cult US director, who has already scooped the Palme d'Or award here with "Pulp Fiction," displays his trademark mix of sparkling dialogue, extreme violence, quirky humour and cinematic allusions. The Jewish revenge tale is one of 20 films from around the globe in the running for the top prize to be handed out on Sunday. The "bunch of guys on a mission movie," as Tarantino described it, shows Pitt playing Lieutenant Aldo heading a squad of Jewish-American soldiers slashing their way across German-occupied France. Aldo tells his men to bring him the scalps of 100 Nazis each, and vows to spread fear among the German army by the "disembowelled, dismembered and disfigured bodies we leave behind us." A paralell storyline that eventually converges with the main plot involves a young Jewish girl who seeks revenge after witnessing her entire family being wiped out by the Nazis. Hitler, Goebbels and other members of the Nazi top brass appear in the movie which culminates in a plot to take out the German leadership at the Paris premiere of a Nazi propaganda film. "It's obviously outrageous!" laughed Pitt at Wednesday's press conference, adding that "none of us (the cast) have seen the film yet." "I like dealing in genres. (War movies) is a genre I've always really liked," said Tarantino, whose career took off with his 1991 film "Reservoir Dogs" and who went on to win the Palme three years later with "Pulp Fiction." Wednesday's press screening, ahead of the red carpet premiere later in the day, was the most crowded projection to date of the festival which has pulled in some 4,000 journalists from around the world. "It's a movie I think was well-designed for Cannes, with allusions to movies, a genre movie about World War II, film critics, Americans who don't speak many languages," said Anne Thompson of film industry magazine Variety. "I don't know how commercial it will be, though it is Tarantino. It has Brad Pitt, it is very amusing. But it's not a broad movie," she said of the film, 70 percent of which is acted in French or German and subtitled. The ensemble cast includes Mike Myers, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, and the upcoming Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who is in another film, "Fish Tank," in the running for the Palme. The orthographically-challenged title of Tarantino's film borrows its name from a 1978 Italian flick called "Inglorious Bastards." Tarantino refused on Wednesday to say why he had mispelt the words, saying it was an artistic device that would be ruined if he had to spell out its meaning. "I'm never going to explain that!" he chortled. Cinema itself is a theme of Tarantino's movie, as it is in "Broken Embraces" by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who is also one of the contenders for the Cannes trophy. With more than half of the 20 competing movies screened at the festival, a French prison drama, "The Prophet" by Jacques Audiard, was on Tuesday rated as the favourite by two separate critics' panels. A period romance titled "Bright Star," by New Zealand director Jane Campion, was also getting warm praise, as was Ken Loach's film starring French football legend Eric Cantona. The blood and guts seen in Tarantino's movie -- notably close-up shots of Nazis being scalped by "Basterds" -- have been matched in many of the other films vying for the top prize. A controversial thriller on love and madness by Denmark's Lars Von Trier ends with a shot of a clitoris being sliced off with rusty scissors, while Korea's Park Chan-wook offers a blood-guzzling vampire priest in "Thirst."
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