Inglouriously yours

I have just seen Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and
I am powerfully underwhelmed. The movie it most reminds me
of is Spike Lee's The Miracle at St. Anna. Both movies are
bloated and too long and show a remarkable lack of narrative
restraint. But where Anna has made $9 million, Basterds
has made $312 million worldwide.

Thinking "maybe it's me," I googled other reviews:

"I don't know if I've ever seen a revenge fantasy so willfully
messed up, sometimes offensively so."
- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

"Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably
leisurely."
- Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times.

"Tonally schizoid and rife with anachronisms (a David Bowie
song on the sound track, out-of-era vernacular), Tarantino's
Third Reich folly is utterly exasperating."

- Stephen Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

All of these things are true and all of them can be said of
"Anna" (with the exception of the Bowie song).

Both movies are visually impressive (some of the images in
"Basterds" are stunning), almost painterly but, in both cases,
the heightened cinematography distracts from the narrative.
Both directors have made better movies with lesser palattes.

~(no)rave!