Inglorious Basterds reviewed

Seeing this movie was a laborious process for me.

1. Reading reviews. Most of the reviewers I read thought the movie was good. I looked forward to seeing it.

2. Waiting. I don't like seeing movies in theaters because the Great Unwashed make me ill. They smell bad, they're noisy, they have no respect or even common courtesy for fellow human beings, and they're stupid. I have no choice but to wait for illegal download DVD.

3. I watched Inglorious Basterds at home a couple of days ago. HUGE FUCKING DISAPPOINTMENT. Unfuckingbelievable waste of time. How could Quentin Tarantino spend his time on something like this? Did he owe somebody a favor? Who wrote all those glowing reviews that conned me into a rental fee at Hollywood Video? Sons of bitches.

The movie is terrible. It is so slow and unimaginative, I kept thinking I was hearing a clock ticking in the background, just off screen. For the first time in my life I was salivating for explosions and car chases. A good line of dialogue would have been fine, or even a bit of humor. Pretty cinematography? Nothing.

The story is simple and worth nothing. Also, there's no suspense, no mystery, and very little good dialogue. One-dimensional (yes) characters don't grow or develop, and I don't care about them in the slightest. I kept it rolling just to see if anything would happen to redeem my investment of time. Nope.

Tarantino must have owed somebody a big favor. Did a Weinstein or some other Hollywood jackass come to him and say, "Remember that thing? That thing back in the day? Yeah. Now you have to do this for us."

If Tarantino's next film is excellent (on par with Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), I'll have been proved right. He needs to make something extraordinary to earn back some of the respect he lost with Inglorious Basterds.

The moral of the story? I should have read more reviews. Here's one from the Guardian:

Quentin Tarantino is having what Martin Amis readers might call a "Yellow Dog" moment - something which happens when, following a worrying, mid-to-late period of creative uncertainty, a once dazzlingly exciting artist suddenly and catastrophically belly-flops, to the dismay of his admirers.

It's too bad Peter Bradshaw, the reviewer, writes for the Guardian. It's a pathetic, pro-jihad paper, so I won't be spending much time there.