Quentin Tarantino has once again tapped his “Kill Bill” cinematographer Robert Richardson to be the director of photography on his WWII epic, “Inglorious Bastards.” Richardson is known for creating the above-the-head, “halo-glow” look first popularized in the work of Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” and then abused hence forth by every cinematographer known to man, (while the film’s look was amazing, first-time DP, Malik Hassan Sayeed went a little overboard with this technique on Spike Lee’s “Clockers” for just one example).
If you remember the big set-piece fight scene in “Kill Bill,” you’ll probably remember some of the overlit, halo-ish touches that were evident, but a bit more muted this time.
Meanwhile, the German people and press are still in a tizzy over all the supposed Nazi stereotypes in Tarantino’s script that has leaked and everyone and their mother has read by now, including pretty much all of Germany. All the Nazi WWII films in production these days (Tom Cruise’s “Valkryie,” Spike Lee’s “Miracle At St. Anna”) are really pissing off the Germans who’ve worked hard to rise above this past the continues to haunt them.
“All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts will be so shocked by ‘Inglorious Bastards’ that they will savage it on the spot,” Tobias Kneibe, film editor of the Suddeutsche Zeitung, wrote.
The newspaper writer apparently likes the script but is worried about the effect it will have on the German people. “The collision between Tarantino-style pop culture with the themes of the Holocaust and Jewish revenge (the ‘Bastards’ of the film are Jewish-American Nazi hunters) is unprecedented in Germany and its results are completely unpredictable.”
What will piss off certain people even more is that the film will likely receive German state financing and automatic tax breaks from the country’s DFFF film fund. Not everyone is complaining though and certainly not the German actors pretty happy to be cast in this popcorn-ish flick.
