Ben is a Basterd

Five stars out of five.

As most of you have, I watched Inglourious Basterds during it's opening weekend.

I am a Tarantino whore, so I was enthralled with the film. The violent surprises and dark humor made me want to watch the movie again 100 times.

I believe that Hans Landa (played by Christoph Waltz) will go down in time as one of the greatest and most intelligent on screen villains. He is a linguistic genius who enjoys his job as a "detective" in charge of finding hidden Jewish refugees.

The long, drawn out Tarantino penned conversations that I absolutely enjoy are pivotal in the movie.

The opening scene could be the a short film in it's own right. The scene built so much suspense from such trival on-screen action. Tarantino was able to create such suspense through the use of Hitchcock's Bomb Theory:

Bomb Theory is a phrase coined by Alfred Hitchcock to explain his method of creating suspenseful cinema. The following quote by The Master of Suspense himself is taken from the interview book Hitchcock, ©1983 François Truffaut, Simon and Schuster.

Hitchcock: There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspenseknows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story. situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public The conclusion is that whenever possible