ah, the blogger's moan

So, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is not an "armor-plated turkey". That's that out of the way, then. Todd McCarthy veers closer to it, calling it "a completely distinctive piece of American pop art" but it never quite reaches the levels of greatness that its script and QT-ness promises. Shame.

Nostalgia time: before I saw the DVD of Kill Bill, Vol 1, I was just another kid who liked the movies but knew nothing of directors, film festivals or really, any film scene beyond the American and British mainstream. Kill Bill and Tarantino turned me onto cinema - now I am totally 4000% in love with the world's greatest art form, and at university studying Film and Media, hoping to shoot my own short films as soon as my pre-production starts making sense. So thank you Quentin.

But nostalgia aside, QT's war movie isn't his best moment. It is, I hate to say, his weakest effort thus far, a long way away from being the pop-culture war movie epic many expected. Where it is merely a good (albeit disappointing) film, it would have made a pretty incredible TV mini-series as was once planned. The fourth chapter, "OPERATION KINO", is stunning and the bar scene within it can be filed as yet another classic Tarantino moment... but with its cliffhanger involving Christoph Waltz' "Jew Hunter", it is unavoidably obvious that what made good cinema here would have made incredible TV. As The Playlist said back in May:

"Inglourious as it stands now does not really flesh out the characters well and even at a longer cut version, it doesn't feel like there's much more you can do (there's a decent amount on the cutting room floor, but not that much). It works on the page, but not the screen. So the right thing to do would have been to follow each story (Shosanna's exploits at the Cinematheque, the Basterds voyage to Germany, a little bit more story on the British Unit and Col Hans Landa's) and then culminate in the same way the script is written. Tarantino's initial instincts to make this film a mini-series could have served the story very well in a "Band of Brothers" manner (a series he himself had referenced as an example)."

EXACTLY. Forget what Luc Besson said, and imagine... one of the best TV experiences ever. Like, literally, EVER. The motives in the final act would have made a bit more sense and the deaths of apparantly important characters would have been much more powerful. And one last thing - I thought Death Proof was fantastic, so all this "return to form" advertising stuff I can understand but noitsnotrightokayokay.

But the music? Well, that's another problem... there's not really many amazing stylistic cues (Charles Bernstein's "White Lightning" cue from Kill Bill is reused at one point) aside from the David Bowie song below and the Ennio Morriconne song that plays over the credits (no mp3 as of yet, sorry). No "Didn't I Blow Your Mind" or "Battle Without Honor or Humanity", I have to say.


David Bowie - Cat People (Putting Out Fire)

You can make your own mind up when Inglourious Basterds comes out this weekend. As far as pitch perfect reviews go, The Playlist and Den of Geek have it covered. And no, I didn't hate the film. It's just... agh, Michael Leader's DoG review says what I think but better.