Spider-Man movieverse fic: The Cost of Wearing Masks (10/24)

So, hey, remember that time Mary-Jane left John Jameson standing at the alter? Yeah...

( Chapter 10. )

Inglorious Bastards

So I watched Inglorious Bastards and I’ve been digesting it for a few days and to be honest, it’s a pretty disappointing product. It’s well-executed, but the plotting is just… way off. You’d think after the panning Death Proof got (and I know some of you probably liked it, but let’s face it, you fast-forward to Zoë Bell when you watch the DVD), he’d go back to the drawing board determined to be less self-indulgent and talky. But if anyone, Inglorious Bastards is more talky and self-indulgent then his other stuff.

There are just way more scenes of people talking about doing stuff than people doing stuff. And I know that’s kind of Tarantino’s thing, but seriously, way overboard on the talking. Even Death Proof—it had a lot of build-up, but then it had that amazing car chase at the end. Inglorious Bastards has about a minute of Nazi-killing action, tops.

You get things like Aldo Raines talking about how they’re going to kill a bunch of Nazis, then you only see one scene of that. Then there’s this long scene where a British movie critic talks about how he’s going to parachute into Nazi-occupied France and meet up with the Bastards, and they immediately cut to him in the bar doing his chat with the Bastards.

Now, admittedly, Tarantino does infuse these talking scenes with a lot of tension and suspense, but even that has a limit. Which is that pretty much all the time, they cut away from the Bastards to show this Jewish woman named Shoshana who is hiding out in France and gets mixed up with the Nazis. And you kind of tolerate it because you think, hey, this must be building up to something. It’s not. At all. You could cut away her entire half of the movie and it would not affect the story one bit. And let’s face it, she’s just not as much fun to spend time with as Brad Pitt and Eli Roth and their kooky Nazi-killing Jews. At least Reservoir Dogs was ABOUT the Reservoir Dogs.

To get into spoilers, ( SPOILERS! )

So I feel we all would’ve been better off if instead of trying to quantify his ‘men on a mission’ war movie and apologize for it and place it in a longer context and say “hey, Holocaust victims are the real heroes” (or whatever the hell the point was of the Shoshana boredom, because that is going to lose so much replay value), he had just made a movie about the Inglorious Bastards.