Inglorious Basterds (2009, USA/Germany)

Quentin Tarantino directs like a kid in a candy store. He’s the ultimate film nerd, and fifteen years after Pulp Fiction, it’s like he still can’t believe his luck. This exuberance has its benefits and its pitfalls. On one hand, few directors can match him for sheer energy and entertainment value. On the other, his films are often little more than individual scenes strung together, with little glue in between.

But wow – what scenes. Starting with the obvious – the opening marathon between Christoph Waltz’s SS Colonel Landa and a French dairy farmer played by Denis Menochet – and continuing through such meticulous gems as Landa’s initial meeting with the grown Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), and the excruciatingly tense sequence in La Louisiana, Tarantino crams in so much detail and so many homages to his film heroes that it would likely take a dozen viewings to unpack them all.

And this is probably my favorite thing about Basterds - Tarantino is finally making some natural, if occasionally totally insane, statements about the power of film, something that he’s only played with stylistically with earlier works like Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. From the tongue-in-cheek references to Leni Riefenstahl and other German propaganda films, to the fact that (SPOILER!) film, physical film, is used to rewrite history and literally kill Hitler and his cronies, Tarantino has made a propaganda film of his own that is all about the power of the movies to color our perception of the world. The characters reference films constantly (one of my favorites is in the La Louisiana scene – “Am I the story of the Negro in America?” “No.” “Then I must be King Kong!”), and the movie itself employs the hallmarks of various genres, jumping back and forth between. This works sometimes – the Spaghetti Western and the war film are natural allies – but occasionally oversteps, as with the Blacksploitation introduction of Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger). It’s funny, but also more than a little distracting. But would it be a Tarantino film without the excess? Now at least he has a little sub- to go with his text.