4 plays Tarantino

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2020)

Tarantino explores his own film making career with a fizzing demonstration of his writing and directing craftwork and zeal. Unbridled joyfullness in the extreme finds it's apogee with an adventure pulp fiction regarding cross and double cross under the Nazi empire in occupied France in World War Two with vengence and rebellion and spies and secret agents, Gestapo and SS, and almost every Nazi celebrity.
'Inglorious Basterds' has multiple strands unflatteringly and inconsistently brought together in an orgy of climaxes.
Tarantino used to write characters in the 1990's but often in the 21st century he seems to write caracitures and archetypes, when it works it produces screenplays that ooze Tarantino's vision and films fetid with his styles and signifiers. In this film I believe that it doesn't quite work out.
In 'Inglorious Basterds' this forceful pulp fiction treatment of characters certainly inhibits nuanced or implicit acting by all except for the actors playing the cinema owning French "undesirables" who are playing their parts as if in a different film from the rest of the cast. And in many ways they are. Which is the central criticism of the film as a whole.
In a worthy effort at irreverent and intemperate iconoclasm and madcap imagination regarding the second world war 'Inglorious Basterds' seems less than the sum of it's considerable parts.
At times gorgeous scenes, particularly in the first period, contrast with the vile behaviour of Nazi Germans in uniform and stylish violence and chaotic action scenes are trademark stamped like punctuation through the two and a half hours that the film lasts for.
However my sense that this is an incomplete work, because it's own parts are somehow incompatible, despite the best efforts of Tarantino to write and direct them until they do gel, is my abiding impression.
I rate a 6/10 overall because there is a good 4 films worth of bombastic and vibrant historical adventure material here and taken in smaller degrees much is to be appreciated but the work as a whole is not a fair comparison to the great work put into it.