Mini movie review: Inglourious Basterds

Well now, here you go: another Best Picture nominee crossed off the list: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.  Problem is, I'm so late to the game, and so much has already been written about this movie that it's tough to know what to even say - I'm not even going to recap the plot, everyone knows it - but I got some snippets at least:

Since Mr. Mouse likes QT movies, at least he likes Pulp Fiction and will tolerate Reservoir Dogs although it's really too bloody for him, I had hoped that this would be a movie he and I could watch together, and I had specifically (1) moved it up the queue ahead of some other horrorish DVDs for him as well as (2) planning our day so we would start the movie early enough that he wouldn't fall asleep in the middle of it.  It's a dang long movie, y'all.

However, like so many of QT's movies, this one is extremely talky, interspersed with frenetic violence.  Which is fine - except that 90% of the talkiness was in subtitles (something I had astonishingly not picked up on in all my reading about this flick).  I like subtitles but Mr. Mouse doesn't not, plus our movie is old and small and subtitles are a bit of a challenge on them.  He gave up after 30+ minutes, poor guy. 

I liked it although I know for a fact that I got maybe 0.2% of all the movie references Tarantino threw in there.  I thought Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent were just wonderful, particularly Waltz, and I am grateful to Tarantino for populating his film with actual German and French actors, not just Americans faking the accents.  (And, in poking fun at the Hollywood penchant for doing just that, having Brad Pitt's Aldo Raines be the "best" at speaking Italian was hilarious.)

Despite the scalping (just a few) and the shooting (really quite a lot), this is not your typical Tarantino fare, what I said about the talkiness notwithstanding.  I've always though that QT was a great filmmaker.  With Inglourious Basterds, however, he's finally grown into his early promise.