Well I went to see Inglourious Basterds, and immediately wished I hadn’t. If you like your films filled with vast tracts of dialogue about absolutely nothing, occasionally sprinkled with eruptions of ferocious violence shot with the care and attention of a tender love scene (which is essentially every Quentin Tarantino film), this is for you. It's a bit like sitting through a two and a half hour geography lesson in which the teacher pauses briefly every 30 minutes to lovingly but very noisily stick a fork into a student's eye in a slow motion close up.Tarantino is clearly at the point where he believes his own press and nobody dares tell him that, you know, perhaps that one scene didn't need to last 20 minutes, and in fact the whole story could have been told in half an hour. Yes, you need time to build tension, but we're only tense because we know it's a Tarantino film and any minute now somebody's going to get their tongue pinned to the bar with a white hot poker and have their stool kicked from under them so they turn themselves inside out before they hit the floor in a quivering pile of viscera. Or something like that.
Inglourious Basterds is only slightly better than Tarantino's last film, Death Proof, because the actors are better. Christoph Waltz stands out as a terrifying SS colonel, although even Shia LaBeouf would be better than enduring Zoe Bell's portrayal of Woody the Woodpecker on top of a wooden shed full of wood in the middle of a wood in Death Proof*. As an actress she makes an excellent stuntwoman. Oh hang on, she is a stuntwoman. Keep your trap shut then and get back on the bonnet of that speeding car!
In other, entirely unrelated news (i.e. it’s about some good films made by a good director), you people have voted for both Alien (correctly) and Thelma & Louise (incorrectly) in equal numbers as the greatest Ridley Scott films, like, ever. Nobody voted for American Gangster, which is a) surprising, as it scored 8 out of 10 on IMDb, and b) unsurprising, because finding anyone who’s actually seen it is harder than finding a good film in a Shia LaBeouf filmography.
This week, go on, tell me what The Greatest Quentin Tarantino Film, Like, Ever is. I was going to throw a Shyamalan and make it What’s The Most Overrated Tarantino Film, Like, Ever, but the answer would be all of them.
The Itchy & Scratchy Show and Quentin Tarantino - The best bloopers are here
*I’m suggesting that she’s wooden
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