Personally, I love Tarentino.

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2009)

It's hard not to like Tarentino, isn't it? The aplomb and charsima with which he conveys brain-exploding sequences of tension mixed with violence, or violence mixed with tension, with just enough humour to make us laugh nervously is stylised and unique. In many ways, he has become his own genre. Surely this, at some point, must or will go to his head? Inglorious Basterds sees the big Q getting a bit carried away with... well, just about everything. Some scenes run on for far longer than they should and the soundtrack races far past his usual post of 'quirky' and 'hip' and keeps rolling to 'just plain strange'. In one of the film's many tragedies the chosen song is quite clearly in no way affiliated with the genre of the film or the tone of the scene. This seems to matter little to Tarentino – it's as if he thinks we are happy to take a bit of 80s rock ballad with our World War II Flying Fist of Judaism revenge film because, after all, he is Quentin Tarentino.
This is a revenge fantasy war film set in the Second World War where a dirty dozen-type-platoon, led by Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine, is dropped into occupied France to brutalise and terrify the Nazis, and eventually to assassinate a number of high-ranking SS officers, including Hitler, in a cinema. Before this, however, the Basterds will 'collect one hundred Nazi scalps' to petrify the hell out of any Nazi soldier daft enough to believe that Hell is not where they are headed anyway.
It is not hard to feel an intense support for Pitt's boys, and this feeling is heightened all the more after having met Christoph Waltz's Col. Landa, the Jew hunter, in the first scene of the film. In a charismatic smile and a stare of cold efficiency, Waltz captures the polished leather and lapels of the administrative Nazi; his sense of self-authority oozes from every pore of his being. He is so fantastically overbearing in his authority that I have never in my life watched a man eat a strudel and feel as tense as I did in one key scene from this film. This is the man that the Basterds must avoid... Ha! Of course, they meet, of course the tension and violence Quentin-meter shoots back up into the red and we remember why we love Mr T so much.
Due to the ultra-graphic nature of the final slaughter scenes, some have called this film 'Kosher porn'. I disagree. Many of us gentiles will watch the cleansing of the Nazis with a similar 'well, they deserved it' smile. This, I think, is the most interesting thing about this film. It makes us ask the question: what, really, does this say about us? Overall, Inglorious Basterds is beautifully shot, majestically edited, painfully funny and violent at the same time and it makes us question the nature of justice. Is it a nice neat courtroom and a well-carpentered gallows, or is the fiery bullet-soaked hell of a burning room where criminals slowly melt into the floor and metal of red-backed theatre house chairs? With the right soundtrack, it could be anything Quentin wants it to be.