Why don’t I give a shit about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards? Is it because I sat through (and even partially live-blogged) his masturbatory “lecture on cinema” in Cannes––is it just too soon? Is it because I’ve seen Pulp Fiction so many times that I can no longer actually see anything in it at all? Is it because I walked out of Grindhouse saying. “Well, THAT joke isn’t funny anymore…”?
I don’t know what it is! But I know that some of you probably care, so if you haven’t already, check out Vulture’s preview/review of the script.
Having read the whole thing, Vulture says it’s “definitely the ur-text of Quentin Tarantino’s career up to now,” and maybe THAT’s my problem with it––I don’t think I’d be able to get into one more parade of Stuff Quentin Likes, especially if its greatest virtue is that it’s like what he always does, but more so. Some keywords/key phrases that pop out: “Greek nudes from the Louvre”; “This whole Chapter will be filmed in French New Wave Black and White”; “the film’s antagonist [is] a Nazi officer named Landa who’s known as the ‘Jew Hunter’”; Brad Pitt will maybe play a “‘hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee, who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching.” Um…well, at least he’s expanded his purview beyond Los Angeles and Japan, right? Is that enough?
UPDATE!: Jeff Wells is ticked off that he hasn’t seen a copy of the script when “A guy who works at John and Pete’s liquor store on La Cienega was reading a copy last night between customers.” So he calls Tarantino a “borderline illiterate”, then admits that it’s really his “script sources” that he’s mad at. “It hurts. It feels badly.” 
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Don’t worry– I agree with you Karina.
A part of my lack of enthusiasm is that I prefer Tarantino’s work he did in the 90s to what he’s been doing the past ten years. It seems as if Tarantino has resigned himself to his immature, movie-obsessed tendencies and just decided to make movies about other movies. Also, I can’t see how any film-maker could make a war movie that’s “fresh and exciting”.
Granted, I find some of the supposed European influence on Inglorious Bastards interesting, but other than that… I’ll go see IG, but not as rabid enthusiast.
There’s an interesting anecdote about Tarantino in David Thompson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film that attests to his fundamental nature (and how self-aware QT is): after Pulp Fiction, QT was looking for a literary property to adapt into his next film. One of the properties he was offered was Kit Carson’s screenplay adaptation for Walker Percy’s book The Moviegoer, but QT politely turned it down. His reason? He felt it was “too grown-up” for him.
And to add: Happy Birthday!
Can I take the second part first? Jeff Wells: shut the hell up. Maybe if he spent less time trying to get directors to send him nude pictures of young actresses and more time developing contacts, he’d already have the script.
As for Tarrantino, he’s sort of fallen into the same camp as Kevin Smith and M. Night Shyamalan. The more movies they make, the more I realize that I don’t want to have to sit through their increasingly poorly-written movies anymore.
I haven’t abandoned the Tarantino bandwagon, but I try to keep my distance from it for fear I’ll get nerd on me.
I watch with interested skepticism that could become actual enthusiasm, but some guy’s opinion of a script he read is going way too far.
Wells says “It feels badly.” And Tarantino’s the illiterate?
If you don’t give a shit about Inglorious Bastards then why are you writing about it?
Its just amazing how people complain about the lack of creativity in art and yet are pretty much unable to apreciate a creative artist when it comes around…but i guess that great artists apreciate art in a way that is beyond the way that art is apreciated in his time
I’m sort of embarrassed for QT that he’s so desperate for some validation he’s leaking his own script (misspellings and all) to the fanboys.
Wouldn’t it be more productive to be like, storyboarding or something?
The crisis of our age is not, as Disney would suggest, to simply be ourselves. The crisis of our age is the ease at which we can encase ourselves in media bubbles and become self-delusional.
Tarantino, Shyamalan, Lucas, Kevin Smith, and Mike Meyers have all shown that they do not mind surrounding themselves with yes men who do nothing but praise each instinct as unprecedented genius.
As I am fond of saying, “I don’t need to love QT. He loves himself enough for both of us.”