Tarantino's latest

Tuesday, 25th August 2009

Around the time that "Pulp Fiction" came out I interviewed Quentin Tarantino in a Manhattan hotel and found myself marvelling at the most unbuttoned display of teenage egomania I'd ever witnessed. He was so in love with his self-proclaimed genius that he would probably have started snogging himself if he could have found a body double. I was never a member of the fan club, and I don't think I've seen anything since "Jackie Brown". Still, David Denby's New Yorker review of "Inglourious Basterds" is such an enjoyable hatchet-job that I'm tempted to drop in to the multiplex simply in the spirit of Schadenfreude:

Moral callousness has been part of Tarantino’s style in the past....But, in “Basterds,” Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn’t carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes...
Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque. “Inglourious Basterds” is a hundred and fifty-two minutes long, but Tarantino’s fans will wait for the director’s cut, which no doubt shows Shirley Temple arriving at Treblinka with the Glenn Miller band and performing a special rendition of “Baby Take a Bow,” from the immortal 1934 movie of the same name, before she fetchingly leads the S.S. guards to the gas chamber.

[Thanks, Simon]