Langorous, talky, snappy and tense.

Rating: 9/10 (22 August 2009)

Quentin Tarantino's impact on 90ties Hollywood has been praised up and down since his first feature-length debut in 1992 with 'Reservoir Dogs'. Now, seventeen years and five movies later, he's released his war-film 'Inglorious Basterds' - a completely outrageous tale about a Nazi-killing crew of American-Jewish soldiers who scalpels their victims and beats them to death with a baseball bat. Lead on by Brad Pitt as the Tennessee-hillbilly Aldo "The Apache" Raine, the group of soldiers is a motley crew, including a stylish British lieutenant (the very good Michael Fassbender), a German-born psychopath (Til Schweiger), "The Little Man" (American Office's B.J. Novak) and the "Bear-Jew" (Eli Roth) to mention the more important. And with his titled crew Tarantino makes for great entertainment and characteristics, but - the biggest revelation comes from the other side; Christoph Waltz won the Best Actor award in Cannes for his performance as Standartenführer Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter", a creation so fabulous that he steals every scene he's in, and is quite possibly the finest single character Tarantino's ever created. His romantic swagger, his confidence and cruelty, and his odd inconsistency is riveting. As for the two female performances, we're given two shallow, but breezily enjoyable performances by Melanie Laurent as cinema-owner Shosanna, and Diane Kruger as German actress Bridget von Hammersmark.
The dialogs snap in 'Inglorious Basterds', and they often tend to act out full of thrill as the film is paced and behaves often like a espionage thriller - after all, we are behind enemy lines all the way throughout Tarantino's neat five chapters (remember Kill Bill?), and he's doing a interesting thing in messing with the usual, conventional narrative storytelling there. Running for 148 minutes the film never seizes to entertain, and Tarantino uses his usual homages (Sergio Leone, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Aldrich) in elegant ways that makes that pure cinema loving heart pump. But I am glad to say that Tarantino doesn't rely enterily on his influences as he did in his Grindhouse-feature 'Death Proof', he directs finely operatic at times and relies solely on performance and dialog (which is brilliantly very often spoken in German, French and even Italian) - and it's delight! I found myself grown sick of Tarantino's often overrated talent as it seemed like this guy was simply growing younger instead of older, so it was with a pleased feeling that I left the cinema yesterday having seen his seventh film.