blackwater wrote:

I missed watching it a decade or so ago, back when people still cared about Tarantino. The movie just seemed really likely to be bad, to me.

And yep, it really is very bad. All the stuff that was ever annoying about Tarantino-- the gratuitious torture scenes, paper-thin chraacters, and Hollywood in-jokes-- is just turned up to 11 in this one.

There's an aura of "you can't criticize this, since I made it intentionally bad! Postmodernism!" But the movie never really rises to the level of "so good it's bad." Movies that are made intentionally bad never do. There's something missing. Instead, the movie is more like an unfunny standup comic who just won't get off the stage after 2.5 hours of dick and fart jokes.

There's also some really painfully earnest parts of the movie. Like did you know old analog film stock was flammable and blah blah blah? Tarantino does, and he's gonna bring the movie to a screeching halt to give you a lesson about it, too. He's also going to draw arrows to point to Goebbels, Martin Borman, and whatever other Nazis he read about in his grade school history book.

Isn't this like the first thing they teach you in film school? Show, not tell? You don't need to explain how old film is flammable. Just show it burning or some shit. You don't need to draw arrows pointing to all the top Nazis. Just show some character reacting to all the top Nazis there, or making an appropriate comment.

The greatest irony of all is that even though Tarantino FUCKING LOVES SCIENCE... no... sorry... FILM!... the great directors of the past would never give him the time of day.