The new film by Quentin Tarantino

Rating: 7/10 (26 August 2009)

Inglourious Basterds is not a war film. Nor is it historical. Inglourious Basterds is a spaghetti western. Nazi-occupied France is no more than a canvas for Tarantino to scribble his colorful stories and characters. Sometimes the results are insultingly simple doodles, but more often than not they form into cathartic assaults of aesthetics coalesced from the director's encyclopedic mind of cinema. History be damned.
Because of this emulation I found the film decidedly more fun than QT's previous efforts. That distinct "movieness" is more present than ever, in large part due to a literally film-oriented plot. Cinema is is the mcguffin here, and there were some unsettlingly surreal moments, for me as a viewer, in which the camera paints the characters as audience members themselves.
Though too high-concept and stylized to resonate emotionally, the film left me pondering the deterrence and deception of not only war propaganda, but the figurehead-edness of modern media. During the climax when the film bravely barrages into alternate history (more so than before I mean), consider the alternative; the obvious fabrication is anything but.