What a weird series of contradictions Inglourious Basterds is. It's epic in look and feel, but it ends on a whimper and wisecrack. It never stops explaining itself (creating the illusion of complication), but at the end of this simple tale of revenge, it feels like the line from A to B has been a straight one. It's a Quentin Tarantino film about atrocity, yet none of the violence feels gratuitous (at least to desensitized me). It was as brutal as its story demanded, no more and certainly a lot less than the much-maligned original trailer suggested.

Despite my gorehound tendencies, I'm not disappointed about that. It felt mature, as did the dialogue, which was deficient of the fast-talking, pop-culture worship that has defined Tarantino up till now. In that respect, making a period piece must have been something of a personal challenge. I guess he got some references in by saluting things like spaghetti Westerns and the French new wave. That stuff's off my radar, and I can't imagine how far it is off the average teenager that I shared space with on Friday. It made me chuckle that these kids came expecting a bloodbath and were instead presented essentially a reading assignment, given the amount of dialogue and the fact that it's almost all in French or German. It felt like a very gentle fuck you. That's yet another contradiction.

At this point, you can't really amputate a Quentin Tarantino picture from his body of work -- it's all part of an ongoing discussion (and sometimes that discussion feels like one long declaration of self-satisfaction). More than any other working director, I can't help but judge all of his movies against his past work. I wonder how Basterds would be taken on its own, not as Tarantino's grown-up quasi-historical epic. For one thing, I suspect it would have been made to come in at under two hours. Basterds didn't feel bloated to me, save the entirely expository scene, in which a pointless Mike Myers explained Operation Kino (the military plot to assasinate Hitler and other important members of the SS). Still, I can see how it is patience-testing, as it is a lot of sitting around and talking for relatively obvious pay-off (although Mélanie Laurent laughing at her oppressors via a projection on thick smoke is about as good of cinematic imagery as any I've seen this decade -- that alone was pay-off to me). I felt like the whole thing was tense, though. It affected my physiologically -- my pulse elevated, my hand strained from clenching. The movie is essentially a series of uncomfortable conversations, in which some powerful bad guy doesn't and can't know the secret of the good guy he's talking to (whatever it may be). I think it did a tremendous job of conveying the claustrophobia of occupation.

I just have one more point, but it's a major spoiler, so it's going under a cut...