a master popularizer at his very best

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2009)

Tarantino was never much of a philosopher, humanist, or world historian – just someone so utterly immersed in cinema that he could translate his obsession into terms that seemed not just relevant but also emotionally engaged. Now, at a rather troublesome and ambiguous moment, he takes on the Nazi film, with Bowery Jews and Southern lieutenants teaming up in a simple-minded crusade against Evil. In so doing, he offers more evidence that he's drinking from a bottomless well – that the movies can, and should, do anything. This is especially propitious since it comes along at a moment when cinema history is going down the toilet almost as fast as world history. More than ever he's playing the film prof here, but unlike his Americanism, his cinephilia is not triumphalist: he knows too much about his subject to lie about it. Glorious tributes to Sergio Leone and Raiders of the Lost Ark (and King Kong!!) vie with articulate digs at Pabst and Jannings and nitrate film. And yet it's anything but an in-crowd movie; I'm sure I don't get half the references myself. Instead, he sculpts these elements as a master popularizer, boiling them down into a teeming, bizarre concoction that is both devastating and offhand, manic yet full of grace, a jokester who delivers the punchline as if his life depended on it. And while you can always hear him talking, it's the overtones and cross-rhythms of his superbly attuned cast that bring it to life. This is as close to profundity as this man will ever get - pretty damn close.