What I've Watched: Inglorious Basterds

It's rare to find me not liking a Tarantino film. I just like his style, and the hyper-violence and witty reparté he writes into his movies is timely yet possesses so many winks and nods to other movies and directors that it's hard to keep up sometimes but enjoyable nonetheless.

For Inglorious Basterds, what really surprised me was how underwhelmed I felt after leaving the movie. Yes, it's a good movie. There is no doubting it. But I feel like a lot of things were missing and other aspects left half-finished. He doesn't come out with new movies all that often, so perhaps I expect too much from him. Either way, the movie left me wanting more, and that is because I felt it gave me so little.

For one thing, for a movie that is 2 1/2 hours long, there is not very many Basterd scenes in it. Brad Pitt is fantastic in this movie, and shows once again that when he abandons the serious stuff (like Benjamin Button) and explores characters that are kooky or more interesting (Burn After Reading, etc.), he excels. But the other Basterds are hardly ever on screen. You don't get to know them, and the only one with more than 8 lines of dialogue is Eli Roth, and the only time he speaks is when he's bashing in this dude's head. Funny, yes, but there were 7 other soldiers in this outfit and getting to see their exploits and tactics would have been cool.

Landa, the Nazi SS bad guy, is absolutely fantastic and steals the show. There are some other great characters and dialogues, but rarely do any of them have anything to do with the Basterds themselves. You get to know more about the cinema owner's boyfriend than the main protagonists, and it just doesn't make much sense.

As I said, the dialogue is awesome and classic Quentin. The french basement/bar scene is great and heavy on tension as you wait for the scene to unfold. And the way certain stories and the way they refold themselves back into the plot is vintage Quentin and those are moments you live for to see in his movies. The only other real disappointment was the music. At times it was pitch-perfect. Other times it sounded like he recycled the Kill Bill soundtrack, which while genius doesn't fit into this movie's tone and comes off as cheating. That, and it seems like cheating also when he uses the same font type in the credits as in Kill Bill.

I hope he doesn't take too much time off in making his next movie, because I feel like I only got 3/4ths of a Tarantino movie. I need more to get the real fix.