Interesting patchwork, with some great scenes, questionable parts and disappointing elements

Rating: 4/10 (29 August 2009)

In this movie, Christopher Waltz is truly fantastic. Especially in the opening scene with Mr. Menochet. As a french speaker, I thought the french scenes were horrible except for the one with Denis Menochet. Mr. Menochet emotion evolves perfectly to Mr. Waltz probing in the little 20 minutes he appears on screen.
Mélanie Laurent and Jacky Ido remind me of the low quality french-acting displayed in many french movies, with boring dialogs and poor french. Brad Pitt is disappointing, and Eli Roth just plain cruel.
I appreciated the character build up of Daniel Brühl. He becomes a likable person all along the movie, seeming heroic and valiant. Mr. Tarantino then breaks up this likability by making him behave in an ungentlemanly manner to Miss Laurent. Then in 30 seconds, he becomes likable again in an almost romantic way.
All in all, the first chapter and the basement chapter are worth watching. The rest is distracting without standing up to Mr. Tarentino's earlier work. Expect a lot of crude violence.
Does being German in WWII (here German = Nazi) suffice to deserve any treatment and cruel acts? such as the brave soldier that gets his head beaten to a pulp by a parody Jew soldier? No scene displays Nazi cruelty and Germans just seem classy, well-educated and smart people. Plenty of them display the non-human behavior of the (Jew) basterds in a very graphical way, they are in my opinion the bad guys of the movie. Moreover, the cast of the basterds is almost comical, using cliché Jews that could be found in German WWII propaganda. It serves in supporting my suspicion that Mr. Tarantino constructed this paradox on purpose.
Mr. Tarantino, some of your dialogs were great, some scenes shot up to perfection and characters truly interesting (explains the 4). However, was your objective to see if the general public was brain-washed enough to appreciate a movie just on the ground that the beaten-up bad guys are Nazis and the good guys Jews. Testing whether you could display any amount of extreme and unacceptable behavior and have it welcomed by laughter? were you trying to see how far you could go using the Nazi-justification? If that wasn't your goal, this movie is truly disappointing.