Dear Christ was this awful... I went into this expecting a good old fashioned war flick, with some fantastical elements and a cool grindhouse sensibility and of course some classic QT dialogue. This was 3 hours of a bunch of people talking. It was basically "what if someone set the diner scene from 'Pulp Fiction' in WWII and made it 3 hours long?" In short I was expecting a movie that was expecting was a Stone wet dream put on the screen.
This movie fucking lies to you! It's called Inglourious Basterds, and I shit you not when I say the Basterds are on the screen for less than 20 minutes of the 3 hour run time. They were basically ancillary characters. I want a movie with Hugo Stiglitz coming unglued and just knifing Geris left and right. I wanted to see more of Donny Donowitz (I really bought into the character because I know the actor is the sick fuck who directed Hostel) cracking kraut skulls.
What I didn't want to see more of was the 20 minute opening scene of the SS officer being menacing towards some french pole smoking dairy farmer we don't give a toss about. What I don't care to see more of is the interracial love triangle between a German war hero, a black projectionist and a Jewish theater owner that takes up most of the EFFING movie. Do I really need to hear them launch into debates about German film directors who've been dead for 70 years? Why do I want to watch characters I don't care about talking about crap I don't care about?
And let me tell you something, Quentin Tarantino's rapid fire dialogue does not translate well into a film with multiple languages. Now I have always been a large proponent of watching a film in it's original language with subtitles, So I'm not one of those A-holes who says "Oh, It's got
****interlude: Jocelyn typing. It was actually really entertaining and I generally hate Terentino. We now return to Aaron's regularly scheduled rant already in progress***
subtitles so I won't watch it". But the subtitles disappear almost as quickly as they go up. Picture an episode of Gilmore Girls where one character is speaking German, the other French, and every once in awhile somebody pops onto the screen and speaks English. I appreciate it didn't do what all WWII films do and have a bunch of German Officers sitting around in private and speaking English, but I think that may actually have been a better choice given Tarantino's writing style.
There is good stuff in this movie, but too much stuff I don't care about is going on.