Frustrating Experience

Rating: 5/10 (4 August 2010)

Utterly frustrating viewing experience. There is an excellent film in here but it's ruined by the way in which Tarantino breaks the contract with the viewer. There is absolutely no need to vandalise the viewing experience by insulting the intelligence of the viewer and by scribbling (literally) over the images on screen in a way that further implies the viewer is an idiot who could not follow a simple story without the guidance from an unseen hand.
The obvious thing to do to improve this film by 100% is to get rid of the Inglorious Basterds. They are completely irrelevant to the action and the storyline. You need an American covert presence in Europe to carry the story but the basterds team in no way fulfils this requirement, rather it detracts. For one thing the whole scalping and torturing your enemy storyline makes the basterds no better than the Nazis; for another the Brad Pitt character is an embarrassment from start to finish. I do not blame Pitt for this as he is clearly playing the part as the cartoon character that was defined by the script.
I'm not averse to doing things differently and I think the unexplained change to the real historical timeline and the use of contemporary music works well. The first "chapter" is a master class in creating tension as is the sequence in the cellar. As others have commented the acting of Christoph Waltz is astonishing and quite the best thing in the film. But there are other beautiful sequences such as the opening of chapter five with its superb framing and use of the colour red. Such a pity that the rest of the film is so poorly done.
Whilst I know that few will agree with me, the director Tarantino most reminds me of is Stanley Kubrick. Like Kubrick he can produce scenes of breath-taking originality but he is unable to sustain the vision over an entire film. If Tarantino could shed his sometimes infantile interjections into his own film-making process he could produce a work of true genius. Inglorious basterds is half genius, half embarrassing nonsense.