I was invited to participate in IndieWire’s Quentin Tarantino poll. The results, published yesterday, had “Inglourious Basterds” garnering the most votes and named the best film of QT’s career. There weren’t too many participants, ‘Basterds’ earned 11 votes, but if this were a larger poll, with hundreds of critics participating, then it would have been a cakewalk for his chef d’oeuvre “Pulp Fiction” to win.
I saw “Inglorious Basterds” back in the summer of 2009. It was a big deal for most movie fans, Tarantino hadn’t released a feature-length film since 2004’s “Kill Bill: Volume Two”. Suffice to say, people were all hyped up for ‘Basterds.’ The resulting film was a little more problematic than expected, albeit I still maintain the outrageous finale at the French movie theatre (“the Face of the Jew!”) is one of the best, most flat-out breathtaking sequences of Tarantino’s career. Rather, my main qualms with the film have more to do with Tarantino being so punch-drunk in love with his own dialogue that it veers towards pretension. This was Tarantino a little too full of himself, knowingly snarky and proud of it.
An assemblage of close to 40 characters, ‘Basterds’ was also his most ambitious film to date. Christoph Waltz won the Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Nazi officer Hans Landa, but It was Melanie Laurent who stole the show for me, what a fantastic performance that was. Also, this was to be the beginning of Tarantino’s fetish with historical revisionism.