Inglourious Basterds

Drew's Thoughts:
I wasn't expecting much from Quentin Tarantino's latest but I should have been expecting a lot less. Other than a good supporting performance by Brad Pitt, the film really has nothing to offer.
I was expecting it to be along the lines of Kill Bill, not a good movie but an entertaining shoot 'em up adventure instead I got a Jackie Brown/Kill Bill 2-style borefest. That's no hyperbole, the movie is really fucking boring. The 2 and a half hour film amounts to about 10 really long scenes of really boring conversations. Except for a brief section near the end of the movie that's driven by plot, the movie feels pretty interminable no matter who's talking.
Quentin Tarantino has been a joke for a long while now, but with Inglourious Basterds, which apparently took him 10 years to write, the disparity between what Tarantino thinks of his films (that is very highly) and what he actually produces (that is very shitty) has never been so stark. A film that he supposedly spent so much of his life on, seems slapped together, not unlike some of his previous films. The guy actually thinks he can ape The Dirty Dozen for a few scenes, throw in a scene imitating a British espionage movie and, of course, a couple of scenes where characters drop movie references needlessly set all to old Ennio Morricone scores and abra-kadabra he's a got a movie.
Also by naming the movie Inglourious Basterds and putting only Brad Pitt holding a rifle on the poster, I was under the impression the movie was going to actually be about the "Basterds" going around kicking "Nat-zi" ass, which in my opinion is a perfectly good premise for a silly action movie. I think had Tarantino done that, the movie might have faired a tad bit better. But instead they are introduced and not seen again until the end of the movie. Pitt, the only actor in the film that actually makes something out of Tarantino's silly dialogue, is fun to watch channeling a humorous combining of Jesse James and Tyler Durden with a touch of Lee Marvin for inspiration; and his impersonation of an Italian is pretty damn hilarious too. I can't help but wish there was more of him, maybe the movie wouldn't have felt like such a waste of time. Christopher Waltz, who won best actor at Cannes, was alright as the Nazi baddie but didn't strike me as anything special and I'm not sure anyone else in the movie is worth noting, except maybe that Mike Myers's impression of a stuffy British intelligence officer was amusing.
Anyway, sorry for the rant but this movie blew.