But these clips certainly ignore the B plot characters that take up the other half of the movie.

Sorry for being a "hater" but I am just a firm believer in the US Army Field Manual and the Geneva Convention.

Why release one carefully scripted masterpiece when you could ruin the tempo and extend it into a trilogy.

"will there be any deleted scenes Quentin?"

"sure thing, all the way through the movie!"

Is Noddy Holder in it? Oh Noddy! Look Wot U Dun...

But I just see that as one of those movie convenient things. You know, like in Casablanca when the couple that plans to immigrant to America says they are only going to speak English so they can practice.

I'm always like, "Well isn't that polite of them to speak English so I can understand."

Brad Pitt and his whooping goons are round that German soldier like a bunch of would-be rapists. It cuts off before Eli Roth comes out for the final 'squeal piggy' moment.

Sorry, but give me the integrity of BAND OF BROTHERS anyday over the murderous hillbilly squad seen here.

Think i'll be cheering on the Nazis.

And, yeah, I know it is just a movie. But so was Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will.

Fuck Tarantino and his fucking racist fuckfest to hell.

That's what Tarantino settles for these days, anyhow.

His movies lately are good for one viewing...where there is a ton of tension from basically not knowing where he's going. He's good at throwing in a lot of unpredicability and sudden violence. But once you've seen it and know where it's going, it is GOT DAMNED PAINFUL watching it again, wading through scene after scene of stylized overindulgent dialogue to get to the few nuggets of true drama.

This looks like more of the same...a return to "Death Proof" QT instead of "Pulp" QT.

It's not that his movies suck, I'm not a complete hater, it's just the promise of his early brilliance was never fulfilled. Now he just churns out really beautifully shot B-movies.

Which makes this movie just more fun, i think, it's not to be taken serious at all (and I AM from germany). Although killing captives who surrendered - or negotiators as Aragorn did with Sauron's mouth in Jackson's LOTR3 - never seems right to me, devilish nazis, evil subdemons or not. Although german soldiers in WW2 surely did that too, and probably more than others. Doesn't make it right, still.

And just so you know, I am no prude who is against violence or controversial movies. I love the original Get Carter, Sopranos, Clockwork Orange, Happiness, etc. And I am actually a fan of QT’s first three films. However, I also believe that all the films I just listed their characters existed in their own universe and their moral guidelines fit the rules of their world. Michael Corleone operates by the moral code of a mafia world; Walker from Point Blank operates by the code of the professional thief; The Man With No Name operates under the code of the hired gunfighter.

These character’s exist in the universe of the US Army during WWII and their actions do not fit the moral guidelines of people in that world. Yes, there were people who shot and killed Nazis, even captured Nazis, but these people were acting outside of the guidelines set by US command and their actions were looked upon understandable but immoral. Brad Pitt and his gang are shown as the moral force, as the good guys, and the movie apparently makes no attempt to show that what they are doing is in fact wrong or that they are acting “unprofessional.” You want to show them as a bunch of soldiers who have gone off the reservation and are butchering the enemy, fine – don’t try to peddle to me these are heroes or that we should cheer them on. From what I have seen he isn’t trying to show us how much like the fascist we are but instead just saying “isn’t it fucking cool to kill people in a brutal fashion”.

I for one say “No dickhead. Grow the fuck up.”

Is it wrong of me to suggest that casting Brad Pitt in this film probably helped secure a certain budget, marketing fund and guaranteed release? Rather than casting a good actor for the role they cast a movie star.

How true - hopefully this movie will give him the confidence to find his own voice, rather than singing in the key of nostalgia (wanky wank writing intended, flamers).

I have no idea what 'GI Joe' has to do with this film but your good manners deserve some praise. You have a good time watching 'Inglourious Basterds', I'm sure gulping down plagiarism masquerading as intertextuality via QT's colon is just your kind of thing...

BOOOO! BOOOO! BOOOOO! Cokey YOU SUCK!!!!!!

There! That saved me a heap of trouble. THIS--needed another dialogue guy. I do like our lady from Troy but still. I'll pass. Mikey Bay time.

It always fucks me off when Empire spend months hyping Lucas' new film or suckling at the teet of Spielberg/Bay or whoever has a marquee feature on the horizon and those films turn out to be the pile of gash everyone with any sense knew they would be. But wtf, they make loads of money at the box office and help sell more magazines.

Do you read Little White Lies? Now that's a film magazine to enjoy because it understands the importance of independence.

Harry here has been selling his soul to set visits and movie mates for years, there is no independent integrity to be found on this site other than in these Talkbacks which are, always, very fucking funny and informative...

But hey, now i'm ranting. And if the T4 review is up by the time I finished writing this, then hey, i'm the asshole.

Maybe it is just a general trend though. Q magazine is heading downwards too, though not at as fast a rate; and, for all i've said, I keep buying them. Mainly because i've got subscriptions and I am a lazy man but I really do need to let my wallet do the talking. I've tried all the others, and they're just as bad. I've just got this trace memory of Empire when I was a kid and I used to be excited around the 23rd/24th of the month when I knew it was going to hit the shelves (it always changed by a day or two every month, or whenever they could be arsed to send a shipment crawling all the way to Tenby, West Wales

jo hnnylawless2 you are spot on in your assessment of Empire. It bothers me that Kim Newman won't get himself on a more respectable publication - he's a fantastic film journalist. I guess maybe the paycheque = golden handcuffs? Who knows...

And no amount of goodness can rescue such a film as Basterds from that clusterfuck Roth and Brad Pitt's hideous delivery: it's Sofia Coppola in Part III all over again...*cough*, *cough*

what would be even better is if this offended the hell outta people. Long live socially challenging films.

But the dreaded 'hip' word worries me. This conjures up images of it being about 7 inches tall, half a centimetre thick, £7.50 an issue and printed at a 'cool' coffee shop/nightclub in Reykjavik.

it used to be a solid judge of films, but now you can't trust it, and I'm defnitely not trusting this first impression thingy. I'm gunning for a massive Tarantino comeback and I have a sneaking suspicion that this could be it, but I'm gonna wait for a few reviews reviews from this screening before I get my hopes up.

I'm not surprised Fassbender is one of the standouts, he's gonna be the next big actor that will actually have a long and great career.

If that makes the publication 'wanky' then I guess it's doomed to be bought only be Shoreditch scenesters. And me.

And I don't think it's a matter of being sneery - I just can't stand the hypocrisy that has filtered down through both Empire and this website. Maybe I'm naive to expect anything less in our jaded and cynical world but if you can't keep your own fucking website above such 'kowtowing-to-the-man-antics' then it's a damn shame.

And Empire tend to only pass negative critical jugement after the fact...like in DVD reviews, etc.

What the hell was anyone expecting from the fourth film in a franchise directed by the guy who made Charlie's Angels. But isn't this EXACTLY what most of the people who want to see it were expecting? Sounds like McG did exactly what he was supposed to do...Was anybody expecting cutting-edge sci-fi? Something new and revolutionary?

Case in point: not seeing STAR TREK, have no plans to, and I'm seeing SALVATION no matter what anyone says. BASTERDS looks like more of the same QT masturbation, so fuck that, too.

Finally saw SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE last night on DVD and you know what? My instincts were right: It WAS last year's CRASH...middlebrow, liberal-baiting and predictable. THE WRESTLER was good shit, though, just like I knew it would be.

Critics are good for comparing notes, little else.

He says in his review, he was hoping it would be good, but it's not.

Peter Bradshaw didn't give Mamma Mia a good review, He gave it one star http://www.guardian.co.uk/cult ure/2008/jul/11/filmandmusic1. filmandmusic6 Mark Kermode did. Mamma Mia is a terrible movie, but very watchable. It's a so bad it's good.

First off, that's just ridiculous journalism; even AICN wouldn't stoop so low as to post a fully-formed opinion based on a trailer (incidentally, I wouldn't be surprised if articles like that are the Guardian's attempt to cash-in on the over-opinionated, under-researched blog boom that AICN helped kick off). Secondly, it seems pretty clear that they don't quite get/appreciate the intentionally shlocky tone Tarantino's going for here. And thirdly, that guy must have seen all of three movies. Manos: The Hands of Fate, anyone?

I was made see it but I must admit I came out with a spring in my step, and the whole cinema audience had a smile on their face.

It's cheap, it has terrible acting and singing, a dreadful story, and it's visually retarded, but somehow its watchable and you have a good time.

Forget what you think you know is such a cliché, but here it more than applies. Tarantino has made a career out of subverting expectations – this is the man who made a heist flick without a heist, after all – but he’s outdone himself with Basterds. It’s an action movie that has barely any action. The Basterds themselves, including Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, are off-screen for long periods of time. And it takes wild liberties with history.

But that’s all set up by the opening title card (the film is divided into five chapters), ‘Once Upon A Time In… Nazi-Occupied France’. Not only does that allow Tarantino to use Spaghetti Western-esque musical cues and swipe the odd shot and convention from the likes of Sergio Leone, but it frees him up to take those liberties. This is a fairytale world, in which American soldiers can ghost behind enemy lines, scalp hundreds of Nazis and never get caught. And in which… no, we won’t go there. Not yet. But the ending is so thrillingly audacious that this reporter laughed out loud when it happened. Even when, having read the script, I knew it was coming.

The performances are superb across-the-board. Pitt is hilarious throughout, lending his lines that air of cocky movie-star insouciance that was a touchstone of his turns in the Ocean’s movies. But the standouts for me were Michael Fassbender, who deserves to become a star on the basis of his turn as British officer Lt. Archie Hicox, and Christoph Waltz, as the movie’s villain, Col. Hans Landa, aka The Jew Hunter.

A complex creation, refined, calculating and yet utterly monstrous when the time comes, Landa was the role that Tarantino struggled to fill, so much so that he might have had to pass on making the movie had he not filled it. But in Waltz, he’s found gold. He may look like an evil Rob Brydon, but the Austrian actor is fantastic: oleaginous, chilling and often devilishly charming. He may be a shoo-in for a Best Supporting Oscar nom, and even though it’s mighty early yet, he could become the first actor to win for a Tarantino film.

There are flaws, of course – what film doesn’t have flaws? But they may be exaggerated depending on your feelings about Tarantino. Some of his Grindhouse flourishes – large captions stamped on screen, the usual flirting with structure and chronology, offbeat musical cues (a David Bowie track shows up at one point) and the sudden introduction of a hip narrator (Samuel L. Jackson) – may irk some, but this movie-movie approach has been Tarantino’s forte since Uma Thurman drew a box on the screen in Pulp Fiction.

It’s certainly very talky, and there’s no doubt that Tarantino is in love with the sound of his characters’ voices, but QT dialogue is so much better than most other screenwriters that it’s hard to quibble. If all scenes in movies are about control, Tarantino understands that perhaps better than anybody, and some of the scenes here – the opening exchange between Landa and a French dairy farmer, and the Reservoir Dogs-esque scene in French bar, La Louisiane – are masterclasses in how to switch control from character to character. Indeed, both scenes are as tense as anything Tarantino has ever done in his career.

Remember, though: this is not the official Empire review, simply a reaction to this morning’s screening. Empire’s official verdict may differ from mine, so bear that in mind.

http://tinyurl.com/o4gzvj

Fuuuuck.

And that semi-positive Empire review... talk about an 'apologist' piece of writing. Empire have been in bed with QT for a long time and even gave the atrocious DEATH PROOF 4/5 stars.

The summer of our discontent rumbles on.

War movies can have music and laughs, but the most important feature is the depiction of brutality.