Is it Good-good or Inglorious Basterds "good"?

Apparently all of it. What's you point? How am I supposed to know that you don't think IB is also a "legitimate, no-strings-attached GOOD" movie?

Just got out of seeing it, and I have to say I'm kinda disappointed.

It's a really really good, fun movie, but it's a major step down from Inglourious Basterds, and I think it's one of the weaker Tarantino films. I like it more than Death Proof, but less than everything else.

I think it's unfortunate how safe and simple he played a lot of it given his past films, this really is just a simple straight-ahead revenge movie. Inglourious Basterds was also a revenge fantasy on the surface, but what made it brilliant was the way it subverted the whole idea and humanized the nazis, and made the basterds seem like psychopaths you shouldn't be rooting for throughout a lot of it.

Here, he plays it safe and has every southern white character be a horrible irreedemable asshole who Django will later murder. Granted, probably largely accurate historically, but it's still disappointing to see Tarantino making a movie entirely about getting the audience to cheer for the wholesale murder  of white people immediately after he's made a movie critiquing that exact thing.

In that way, tonally this is closest to Kill Bill Volume 1, but there's 2 major differences.

1. Kill Bill Volume 2 exists and brings in the depth and pathos to that story, making Volume 1 retroactively stronger

2. Volume 1 is much more tightly constructed and well paced than Django, and delivers one of the all time greatest action sequences. While Django has some really strong shootouts (1 in particular is quite awesome), I don't think it reaches that same level of iconic.

Also, maybe it was just me, and I know there's a potential selection bias at play knowing that this was the first Tarantino movie not cut by Sally Menke, but some of the editing felt off to me. Unlike most of his movies this plays ahead basically straight ahead linearly, but he cross-cuts the end of scenes with brief flashbacks of the earlier parts of the same scenes several times, and some of those edits felt off. In general I'd say the movie feels a bit long to me, but I'd have to see it a few more times to say that with certainty.

I know I seem really down on it, which is unfair, because the movie is still quite awesome and you should totally see it, still one of the best of the year, I just wish it took more chances morally and took itself more seriously at times. Some of the stuff in this feels like it belongs in a Rodriguez movie more than a Tarantino movie.

But the whole bar scene in that movie is about Nazi soldiers just hanging out having a good time drinking on a Friday night and celebrating that one of them is going to be a father, and then they all get murdered.

From the people I've talked to, there seems to be a distinct split, where people who love Inglourious Basterds don't like Django as much, and vice-versa.

Spoilers:
I still love large stretches of Django (first 2 hours specifically), don't get me wrong, it's a damn good movie, but something about the second half really throws me off. I can't tell if it's an editing thing, a tone thing, or a story structure issue (maybe a bit of all 3), but I dislike how he handles the climax. Like it goes into that one amazing shootout, then abruptly stops and loses all that momentum to show him captured and escaping again (with horrible tarantino cameo that gets slightly redeemed by how he ends it), and the final final climax is disappointing to me. For something that's a spaghetti western tribute, there's no real traditional final showdown with an antagonist, which is something I always love about these movies. They get rid of DiCaprio early, which is fine, a cool subversion, but that leaves Django without a real primary villain to be against, he just one-shots everyone really quickly. Samuel Jackson is in many ways the main villain, but he's a cripple who poses no threat, so the whole last 15 minutes feel really perfunctory.

I think the difference is that Django is telling a much more traditional type of story, so structural issues are both more noticeable and more detrimental to the story. As I said, Kill Bill V1 is the closest analog to this one, but has a much tighter and more carefully laid out story so it works better.

Basterds in my opinion isn't even attempting a traditional story structure at all, it's basically like 5 extended scenes stitched together, I just happen to love the shit out of all of those scenes, so the more freeform/sloppy nature of it isn't a big deal to me.

Still, I should re-iterate I still really like this movie, it's certainly one of the good ones, just feels like one of the least mature of Tarantino's movies to me, save for Kill Bill V1 and Death Proof.

Last edited by bullet3 (2012-12-28 09:09:28)

All of this.