IG Review the first of many to come?

Not Quent’s most glorious moment
http://www.cityam.com/lifestyle/reviews/1harczcq75.html

Timothy Barber
Film
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
Cert: 18

THE LONG opening sequence of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is a piece of scintillating cinematic bravado that must rank alongside the café scene that opens Reservoir Dogs and the “watch up the ass” passage from Pulp Fiction for virtuoso brilliance. In it, an urbane, superficially-charming Gestapo official – who relishes his nickname The Jew Hunter – visits a French farmer’s remote rural house and gently interrogates him. It’s a scene that throbs with quiet menace and impending tragedy, as Tarantino’s enthralling wordplay and some fabulously subtle acting keeps you riveted. It’s QT at his best.

Sadly – to quote one of the filmmaker’s older lines – that’s as good as it’s gonna get, and it’s never gonna get that good again. Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s attempt to mesh his filmmaking obsessions to the old-fashioned war movie genre, is a flabby hotchpotch that meanders, stutters and eventually runs out of steam, while being only sporadically entertaining.

It’s a shame, because there’s much in it that should be great fun. Brad Pitt has a laugh playing Lt Aldo Raine, a thick-jawed cowboy leading a group of badass Jewish G.I.’s into occupied Europe to cause havoc and scare the bejezus out of the Nazis. Eventually they set their sights on wiping out the entire German high command when they attend the premiere of Joseph Goebbels’s latest propaganda masterpiece at a Parisian cinema, while the beautiful young owner of the cinema – a secret Jew – develops similar plans of her own.

Like all of Tarantino’s work, it’s a swirling tapestry of cinematic references – to exploitation cinema, revenge dramas, war movies, schlock horror, film theory – and has more nuances and ideas than the rest of the week’s releases put together. Ireland’s Michael Fassbender does good work as a gentleman Brit commando (and former film critic – a very Tarantino touch), and Diane Kruger does a gutsy turn as a Dietrich-style film star, while Christoph Waltz acts everyone off the screen as the fearsome Gestapo man. The dialogue bubbles, boils and amuses as Tarantino rewrites history to suit his own groovy fantasies with wild abandon.

And yet. The film’s a complete structural mess, Tarantino apparently having abandoned any impulse to self-edit, and it all ends up being resoundingly tiresome – there are only so many loose ends and narrative cul de sacs you can take. You get the feeling Quentin’s become more interested in amusing himself than his audience, and that’s sad.