Inglourious Inglouriouser

My first Tarantino experience on the big screen turned out to be a big disappointment.
The Inglourious Basterds started even before the movie began. The archaic font employed in the credits and the use of the old Universal logo reeked of Tarantino, which inherently is not a bad practice but repetition of such a device has transformed it into a gimmick; a means of perpetrating a vibe without actually creating it through storyline and character development. The ‘tool’ seemed like a crutch and sent across the message that Tarantino didn’t want to evolve as writer and director. The movie was sporadically exciting, intermittently breathtaking but ultimately squandered the goodwill it built by dropping all pretence and revelling in its squalid existence. There were a lot of characters, some of which seemed like they could have been cut without doing the film much harm. It was a one man show though, Christopher Waltz portraying a cruel, arrogant Nazi, Hans Landa who is above all, motivated by self-preservation. Hans Landa was mesmerizing; his every on-screen moment was compelling. But therein lay the film’s most egregious failure; Landa simply had no equal in the film, no counterpart who could match him in verbal dexterity and charisma. The other performers were scattered along the spectrum, Mike Myers’ appearance as a British officer was so laughably bizarre that any semblance of story went out the window. The plot was not complicated and unlike previous Tarantino movies, there were very few stories running in parallel. All his detractors had complained about the length of the movie and to a large extent their argument was valid; 148 minutes were mostly filled with inane dialogues and long drawn out scenes. Few ‘stills’ were memorable like Landa’s exchange with the undercover agent(read actress) and her subsequent cold blooded murder, but it seemed that on more than one occasion Tarantino had trouble putting all the individual scenes together. The Inglourious Basterds didn’t have the filmmaking panache and wit of the moving image to forgive it, its sins like Kill Bill. It was a slightly more contained bout of silliness, but silliness nevertheless.