Review: Inglorious Basterds

I feel as if it's kind of pointless to review a Tarantino movie at this point, but whatever. You'll either love it or hate it. For me, this is a marked improvement over Death Proof, and probably his best movie of the decade.

A lot of what makes it such an enjoyable experience is that Tarantino lets the scenes play out and unfold before us. Which means that the film is heavy on dialogue. But that's OK, because it isn't of the Death Proof variety where it's basically long pieces of dialogue for the sake of dialogue. No, these scenes are long because these characters are trying to control the others, engaging in dialogue with the others to feel out any weaknesses they might possess. The two main scenes that I'm referring to is the opening scene and the scene in the bar in a basement, which build up in such a way that at anytime the incredible tension might seem to erupt at any time, and at when it does it is short, violent, and wonderful.

I don't want to say that this movie is a more mature effort, cause it does have a lot of cartoonish elements, but it does remind me a bit of Jackie Brown (which would be considered "mature") in that it seems a little bit more refined. And yet, it plays out sort of in the vengeful style that Kill Bill featured. A lot of people have written that the film plays out as as this anti-revenge fable, which in the case of this movie is pretty stupid from my viewpoint, cause the whole film is just Tarantino allowing the Jewish to kick the crap out of Nazis. It's not really deep at all, but it feels needed given how the Jews have been portrayed in Hollywood for so long.

The performances are all fairly solid. Of course, Christoph Waltz has pretty much been given every praise possible for his performance, and with good reason. But I also really liked Brad Pitt in his role; a lot of people seem to not have been as taken with his performance, which I think is because it is a much more comedic performance than anyone else gives. But it hits the right notes, and works awesomely in the scene at the movie premiere.

The only complaints I have is that the style of the film seemed a little all over the place--there's a random Samuel L. Jackson voice-over to give us the backstory for one of the characters, and it's pretty abrupt and not necessarily needed; another example has important historical figures pointed out with arrows that follow them as they weave through the movie premiere crowd, and it's kind of annoying--and there's not a lot of time devoted to developing the characters, aside from a few major figures. But still, when pretty much each scene has some great aspect going for it, it's hard to really nitpick too much.

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