Edited

Quentin Tarantino came back with a vengeance in 2009 after a mostly quiet mid-2000s to redefine his popularity by … really just reminding us of the stuff we’ve all enjoyed seeing him do for a couple decades now. But he has a greater thirst for blood now, and sometimes that’s all it takes. If anything, this is his giddiest production, with its cheerful go-for-broke aspirations masked under the nominally serious façade of a war movie. It’s also, curiously, his most nihilistic, with a sort of “what the hell!” attitude likely driving many of the script’s twists and turns and characters who are suitably marked for, and ready for, death at any point in the film. It is also his most fully-rounded film since Pulp Fiction, as well as, intentionally, his sloppiest. Within, the film’s seeming flaws (it’s having fun with the dour subject of men at war and general savagery, its lack of any semblance of sensible narrative form) actually become strengths under his subversive, indomitable vision of the world where all films are functionally nonsense and he’s simply reading this reality to its logical extreme by having fun with them. This is a man who will be swayed by no one, and he’s ready to shove our faces in that fact before he goes off laughing to the bank. Continue reading →