Inglorious Basterds

I saw Inglorious Basterds yesterday and it was pretty much what you would expect from a Tarantino flick-- it was a little messy, a little long, a little self-indulgent, a little violent, a little talky, and a little brilliant. It could be the world's only American WWII action/revenge flick that's really about the power of cinema and consists largely of foreign actors speaking foreign languages. The guy is definitely a huge, motherfucker of a genius but it's still hard to know what exactly the point of it all is. Everyone always talks about the violence and the gore and the love of B Movie action/kung fu flicks but what everyone forgets to mention is that he loves dialogue more. Probably, it could be argued, too too much (both "Kill Bill II" and "Deathproof" suffered from too much talking, not enough rocking).

The thing about the movie is that there's two parts of it, the Inglorious Basterd, Nazi-scalping brigade part and then the Jewish French theater owner part. Both of them are almost two separate films, one of them violent and cartoonish, the other one tense and dialogue driven (it's almost like it's the two schizoid parts of Tarantino's brain being split into two movies) and while the violent cartoonish part is the one that's played up in the marketing and the one Tarantino talks about, the heart of the movie, the most interesting part of the movie, is the part involving the Jewish French theater owner. If Tarantino just would have made the movie about the theater owner, he probably would win every possible damn award there is because it really is spot own awesome (it says a lot about the movie that the two scariest parts are a request for another glass of milk and the ordering of cream) but he couldn't let the Basterd part go so what you have then is two movies that don't quite mesh together. That all sounds bad, of course, except it's a Tarantino flick so it somehow all works or at least is done so well and crazily that you just go with it.

Someday there's a great movie in him, not "Pulp Fiction" great but "classic American movie" great but he's not quite there. This movie shows that maybe he's getting closer and closer. Maybe he should do what the Coen Brothers do and throw in a really good, straight drama into the mix every once in awhile (like "Fargo" or "No Country for Old Men") just to get the props. Or maybe he just doesn't want to, something that I think drives a lot of people (especially those film critics who don't really like his movies but still realize he's brilliant) crazy. And if he really doesn't, does it matter? Nobody does movies like him and nobody probably ever will. Either way, I'd still go see it.