Quentin Gets a Hardon

This is about as close as Brad Pitt gets to acting

 O  kay, so this site is not exactly about the latest and greatest. We like to chew over movies, sometimes for months. Sometimes for decades. We like it that way. Time sorts out the good from the hype.

Which brings me to Quentin Tarantino and Inglorious Basterds.

I have to say, there is not much love lost between me and Quentin. After the shock of Reservoir Dogs wore off and I realised it wasn't shock, but schlock, then the rest followed in a miserable parade of cinematic excess. You've seen them: Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, maybe even his little "Grindhouse" debacle.

Well, I never much cared for Tarantino and his strutting ego; to me he'll always be the Guy Who Rewinds Other People's Rental Tapes.

He's beyond smug. He's a caricature of a filmmaker. He's a poseur pretending to be an edgy dude, and he's not shy about ripping off everyone who's anyone just so he can come off as the Film Buff's Film Buff. His violence is always crudely staged, but in a way so that he lets you know it's crude. He doesn't want to have any polish or style with it; he wants to rub your nose in it, because, well, that's actually all he knows how to do. He knows that he doesn't possess the skills to bring off anything resembling a serious cinematic effort, so he covers it up by doing the opposite: deliberately making it so clumsy and badly written that that is what you applaud him for; kind of like a Bizarro World director who makes bad movies so badly that he wants you to think they're good.

So we come to Inglourious Basterds.

Oddly enough, I want to like this film, mainly because Nazis are a favorite subject of mine, and I like nothing better than to see them bashed -- in fact or in fiction. I like the premise of the film, which is basically, payback by the Jews Times One Hundred.

But it's curious to me why Tarantino, a non-Jew, picks the Jews to be the Nazi-bashers. Why not the Italians? They hanged Clara Petacci by the heels, after all. However, as one is no doubt aware, Tarantino doesn't like to follow any rules or logic -- he just emotes, like a small child. This is why all of his films end up looking like Tintin on steroids . . . a nasty, brutish Tinitin, usually with a Haddock-like sidekick who's equally brutish, but both cartoon characters nonetheless. And that's what Inglourious Basterds is, from the ground up: a cartoon fantasy straight from the childish, one-note mind of Quentin Tarantino.

His casting choices are poor. and puzzling at the same time. Brad Pitt is hilariously miscast but that's a minor quibble compared to the mishmash of other casting choices: Mike Myers might be occasionally funny, but his British accent is actually one of his best jokes, and Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill . . . Mr. Time Machine of Morlock fame as the portly prime minister . . . well, I rest my case.

Tarantino's Hitler is basically an eight-year-old's conception of the strutting dictator and can be immediately dismissed as such; nothing about the German actor's performance goes an inch above parody.

It's obvious Quentin idolizes this dwarf

Tarantino's laborious unter-plöt about Kinema in Frankreich is absurd, but it's a transparent vehicle for Tarantino to name-drop all his cinematic heroes. However, his attempts to be subtle are completely overblown; he just can't do "subtle." He tries desperately to riff on Leni Riefenstahl and her Triumph of the Will but just ends up sounding like one of Dr. Joseph Goebbels's sycophants.

It's clear he admires WWII German propaganda films with unusual enthusiasm, even as he attempts to mock them, as in his parody of a Nazi propaganda film about the young German soldier who kills hundreds of Americans singlehandedly. It's obvious he loves the over-the-topness of the Nazis, but it becomes unclear just how much is actual admiration and where the mockery begins -- I'd vote towards the former. Like I said, Tarantino can't Do Subtle.

The storyline, while satisfying on many levels -- after all, who doesn't harbor secret fantasies about blowing up the entire Nazi regime with a single blast? (Indeed, a certain Von Stauffenberg actually attempted that feat in real life) -- ends up being a clumsily assembled comic book where every scene is a panel with speech balloons. You can almost see the Comic Sans font spewing from every actor's lips, along with the BAM! POW!! WHOMP!! of the old Adam West Batman series.

And sadly, it just doesn't work. It doesn't work because Tarantino is incapable of making it work. He's just not good enough, not professional enough, to rise above his own mediocrity, and this is not just with the look and feel or the storyline but everything: casting, violence, dialogue, concept -- the entire movie never rises above the level of a Road Runner marathon. And this is what I have come to expect from every movie he has ever made.

I just don't buy it. As with popcorn, Tarantino is mostly hot air.

UPDATE 06/03: We make it a rule here at DJ&DP@themovies never to read someone else's review before writing our own. We don't want to have to be influenced by other people's opinions -- including each other's! However, post-writing this review, I've read a few other opinions supporting my own and posted appropriate links to them. Also bear in mind that Dane and I do not always agree on each other's reviews. THAT would be sacrilege! In those cases, we amicably agree to fucking punch each other's lights out.

That said, here's some wag's hilarious comment about Quentin: "Tarantino now talks about his 'oeuvre'. Apparently he’s spent his remaining talent buying vowels."