Hitler's Table Talk

Rating: 4/10 (16 February 2014)

One good thing about waiting several years after a very well received film is released is that you can step back from it and judge it on its content without all the hype . Sometimes if you go against the grain you do feel you're in danger of being branded a blasphemous heretic who should be locked up in order to keep little children safe at night or worse still to protect film makers from unpopular views . To be honest I have real excuse for missing Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS except that it never popped up in front of my radar until now . After finally getting round to seeing the movie I can put my hand on my heart and say I didn't miss all that much
It's interesting that so many professional critics agreed that the best thing about the film was Christoph Waltz performance * and that this was qualified by the critics saying stuff along the lines of " I found my interest waning when Waltz wasn't on screen " . This sums up the entire problem with the movie - the scenes go on for far too long and lack a brevity of storytelling .A character sits down at a table and talks . And talks . And talks . There's a saying that jaw jaw is better than war war . Noble sentiments indeed and one hopes in an alternative universe that Tarantino is the British prime minister while Tony Blair is a cocky Hollywood movie brat but for a film lasting almost three hours there's little incident and actually feels longer than three hours
Two selling points might have been that it's a war film and that it's a post modernist film . In other words it's a film that should make intelligent fun of all those terrible B movies featuring criminals in uniform who have the choice of a hangman's noose and volunteering for a suicide mission but there's not a lot of fun to be had here . One had hoped for constant knowing cheeky winks to the audience but this doesn't happen . There's certainly very little action to the movie and most of the film is composed of characters sitting down and talking in German or French or English . Just because a film contains subtitles doesn't make it worthy and you're left feeling there's no way this film would have been produced if it wasn't for the name of Tarantino . Little of importance happens in the narrative except to illustrate the film's own underserved self importance
* Strangely enough when DJANGO UNCHAINED was released the critics once again praised Waltz as being the best thing about the movie . This is obviously critics code for " Wait for this movie to appear on television because it's overlong , arrogantly self indulgent and often boring "