Bob's Take: ‘Basterds' a good Tarantino flick, but not his best

I missed director Quentin Tarantino's “Inglourious Basterds” when it came out last August.

But last weekend, a newsroom colleague who loves Tarantino lent me his newly purchased DVD of the movie, and I watched it at home with a friend.

All three of us had a different take on the movie — not entirely surprising, since my two favorite movie critics also reacted very differently to it. More on that in a moment.

I made a point to catch “Inglourious Basterds” because it is playing such a prominent role in award season this year. The Producers Guild, the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review, the American Film Institute and the Screen Actors Guild have all chosen it, or its cast, among the year's best.

I can readily understand why.

Tarantino is a highly entertaining, devilishly clever writer-director. He loves the movies, and his movies always reference other movies. “Inglourious Basterds” opens with music that takes us back to the spaghetti Westerns of the 1970s, then an early scene bows to “The Dirty Dozen.” The film's title references a B-movie “Dirty Dozen” ripoff from the 1970s.

The primary location of “Inglourious Basterds” is a movie theater, and its climactic scene involves a violent movie shown within a violent movie.

Tarantino sucks up the devices of other moviemakers spanning the world history of film, then spits them out with a wink and a nod. It's not plagiarism. It's fan worship. If you're a serious movie nerd, there's much to appreciate. If not, he relies on other qualities to keep you entertained.

He creates outrageous characters, larger than life, and equally outrageous situations in which they define themselves. Tarantino's style of storytelling is so over the top that it's almost, but not quite, satire. This is as true of “Inglourious Basterds” as it is of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” movies that put him on the map, or the pair of “Kill Bill” movies.

I can certainly appreciate a stylized movie. I appreciate it more if it's style with substance.

Here Tarantino has made a movie about a unit of Jewish World War II soldiers who hunt down and terrorize Nazis. That sounds interesting, but the movie largely ignores that they are Jews as it rewrites history, including the outcome of the war.

I have a theory that Tarantino's movies aren't about anything as much as they are about Tarantino.

For me, “Inglourious Basterds” felt self-indulgent in its leisurely pacing that stretches it to 2½ hours, its talky one-on-one scenes that went on too long, its many movie references, its eye-rolling liberties with the fate of the Third Reich. I never got lost in the story because I was so aware of the way in which it was being told.

But my main objection to Tarantino movies is the extreme, in-your-face violence that marks every one of them. In a Tarantino movie, violence isn't presented in that grisly, over-the-top fashion because it's necessary to the story or to make a point. It's titillation. It's the main event. It's there to entertain.

And it certainly does entertain millions. That includes millions overseas, where American movies have convinced the world that this is a savagely violent country.

I can think of better ways to be entertained than by the close-up scalping of Nazis, head-bashing with a baseball bat, two slo-mo shootouts, a lengthy and lethal choking scene, torture by sticking a finger into a fresh wound, turning a human face into Swiss cheese with a semiautomatic, or carving a Swastika into a screaming man's forehead with a Bowie knife.

After a second viewing, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times loved “Inglourious Basterds.” The friend I saw it with loved it, too, calling it clever and entertaining, even as he winced with me at some of the violence. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times admired some things about it but said its episodic chapters and uneven pacing kept it from coming together as a whole. My colleague who lent me the DVD liked “Inglourious Basterds” but said it was not Tarantino's best.

In a way, I can't totally disagree with any of them. I sure wasn't bored as I watched this movie. But I definitely think other Tarantino movies, including “Pulp Fiction,” are better. And it's always hard for me to get past that extreme violence as titillation.

But I totally agree with widespread accolades for Christoph Waltz, who played a Nazi SS officer. It's a completely original character: unctuous, campy, formally polite, brutally sadistic, diabolically clever and slightly unhinged. What a performance.

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