#2201

Where cinema rewrites history and dialogue becomes a weapon.

Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 black comedy war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The title (but not the story) was inspired by Italian director Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 Euro War film The Inglorious Bastards, but deliberately misspelled as "a Basquiat-esque touch". (see note 1 at bottom) Tarantino wrote the script in 1998, but struggled with the ending. The film is co-production between the United States and Germany and was filmed in Germany and France

Cast including Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Mélanie Laurent and Mike Myers.

The film received critical acclaim, with Waltz's performance as Hans Landa being singled out for praise, but some criticized the historical liberties taken. It also won multiple awards and nominations, among them eight Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay).

The film tells an alternate history story of two converging plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's leadership at a Paris cinema—one through a British operation largely carried out by a team of Jewish American soldiers led by First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), and another by French Jewish cinema proprietor Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent) who seeks to avenge her murdered family. Both are pitted against Hans Landa (Waltz), an SS colonel with a fearsome reputation. Inglourious Basterds - Wikipedia

WATCH FILM BELOW

Why Tarantino Considered Inglourious Basterds His Filmographic Masterpiece...

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LISTEN and read along.

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NOTE 1

Misspelling as Intent: Tarantino’s Basquiat‑Esque Gesture

When Quentin Tarantino titled his film Inglourious Basterds, he borrowed the name from Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 war movie The Inglorious Bastards — but only as a point of departure. The story is unrelated, and the title itself undergoes a deliberate mutation. The altered spelling is not a quirk of typography; it is an aesthetic decision that signals authorship, attitude, and a refusal of conventional correctness.

The key to understanding this gesture lies in the reference to Jean‑Michel Basquiat. Basquiat’s work is full of words that appear broken: misspelled, crossed out, repeated, or fractured into syllables. These distortions are not errors but interventions. They disrupt the smooth surface of language, forcing the viewer to confront the word as an object — something with texture, energy, and resistance.

Tarantino’s title performs a similar act of disruption. By transforming “Inglorious Bastards” into “Inglourious Basterds,” he marks the film as something intentionally off‑kilter. The misspelling becomes a kind of graffiti on cinematic tradition, a way of claiming the inherited title while simultaneously breaking it open. It announces that this film will not follow the expected path, that history will be rewritten, and that the familiar will be made strange.

The Basquiat‑esque touch is therefore not about imitation but about spirit: the spirit of altering a word to reveal its charge, of using language as a visual and conceptual strike. The title becomes a signature — not a reference to the past, but a declaration of creative intent.

xanela DADA

for my  “cat” friend S...

@da-da-sk