Tarantino will probably never make a film as good as the good parts of Inglorious Basterds again. Possibly because the good parts of the film–even with the Sam Jackson narration–seem so unlike Tarantino, it’s impossible to imagine him making them. It’s like, all of a sudden, an adult magically appeared and took his place. Unfortunately, the real Tarantino returns for the last twenty or so minutes, when Basterds collapses.

But I’m going to try to talk about the good things. The Tarantino conversation scene is nearly twenty years old. It’s never been used as well as it is in Basterds. The film opens with one, an unbelievably affecting scene (with a lot, in the end, owed the Searchers). It’s like Tarantino finally learned his “chapters” work better as real time vignettes, instead of jumbles of location shooting and stunt casting.

Besides his excellent writing–since it’s mostly non-English, Tarantino doesn’t bother going for cool sounding dialogue–Basterds succeeds because of Mélanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz. The rest of the cast doesn’t really matter (they’re all great, except Eli Roth, who went to the Quentin Tarantino school of lousy acting). The great film inside Basterds is about Laurent. The silly one Tarantino delivers is, unfortunately, not.

He does some really stupid stuff at the end, the kind of nonsense one would do if he didn’t want to make a real movie, but a joke.

It’s a shame Tarantino keeps growing as a director, but never as a filmmaker.

★½

CREDITS

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Sally Menke; production designer, David Wasco; produced by Lawrence Bender; released by the Weinstein Company and Universal Pictures.

Starring Brad Pitt (Lt. Aldo Raine), Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa), Eli Roth (Sgt. Donny Donowitz), Michael Fassbender (Lt. Archie Hicox), Diane Kruger (Bridget von Hammersmark), Daniel Brühl (Fredrick Zoller), Mélanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus), Denis Menochet (Perrier LaPadite), Sylvester Groth (Joseph Goebbels), Mike Myers (Gen. Ed Fenech) and Rod Taylor (Winston Churchill).