A new film by Quentin Tarantino isn't just another film, it's an event. Despite his talents at both writing and directing, along with his extreme adoration and knowledge of all things cinema, he's only made six films to date. Bursting onto the scene in the early '90s with the now iconic Reservoir Dogs, he then moved on to what many consider his masterpiece (and my personal favourite movie of all time), Pulp Fiction. Then came Jackie Brown, his most well-rounded film to date and one that goes underrated. Six years later he gave us Kill Bill, split into Vol.1 and Vol.2, and a few years after that, there was his seriously misunderstood and underrated half of the Grindhouse experience, Death Proof.
All of his movies consist mainly of dialogue — he's proven time and again that he excels at writing it — and despite its appearances, his sixth film, Inglourious Basterds, follows suit. Those expecting an action-packed war film need to look elsewhere as this is more about the talk than it is the walk. It's just lucky the guy responsible for the talking knows what he's saying.
Set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, Inglorious Basterds (yes, the title is intentionally misspelled) follows a group of Jewish-American soldiers, known as "The Basterds," who make it their mission to brutally kill as many Nazi soldiers as they can, causing widespread fear among the enemy in the process. The Basterds soon run into a French-Jewish girl who runs a movie theatre that the group of soldiers target after they find out most of the Nazi command structure will be attending a première there.
Inglourious Basterds is a film that's been gestating for a long time. Much in the same vein as some of his other ideas (The Vega Brothers comes to mind, a project that would tell the backstory of John Travolta and Michael Madsen's brother characters from Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, respectively), Tarantino has been saying he'd do a war film for years, but nothing came of it until now. And what he has come up with is simultaneously unique and yet full of references to various other movies. He employs his usual tip of the hat to his influences, but in a decisively more subtle way than he usually does. This is a bit less of a pop culture-ish tale from Mr. Tarantino.
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