Cannes 2009: "Inglourious Basterds."
Quentin Tarantino's a great writer of dialogue, and no one's more convinced of the fact than Quentin Tarantino. The ratio of talk to action -- not gun fights or explosions, but just people doing stuff -- in "Inglourious Basterds" is, generously, nine to one. Again and again, characters sit down over drinks (whiskey, champagne, milk), and the stakes may be high, but the conversations are meandering and lengthy, and no matter how clever they may get, they end up defeated by their own pace and their writer's inability to let anything go. Even the opening scene, a confrontation between Nazi Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a French farmer hiding a Jewish family which is supposed to be a slow build of tension and dread, is derailed by digressions about rats and nicknames. The film's two hours and 40 minutes long, and could be shorn of an hour just by...
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