Films I Missed or Fell Asleep Watching 1

My favorite movie of summer 2009 was District 9. I was really excited and pleased that it got a Best Picture nomination, although I knew it hadn't a chance of winning. I saw D9 in a theatre. I didn't see Tarantino's Basterds until tonight. The idea of a QT WW2 movie didn't really excite me much. Deathproof had been so talky and awful that I really wasn't much interested in what our national film lummox had to say, or make of, the second World War European Theatre.
I was happily mistaken.
True, Tarantino's characters still talk too much. Some of his concessions are odd. He seems to have agreed to let Brad Pitt do his character in a bad George W. Bush voice. But it's the ways in which he makes this unmistakably a Tarantino film that are actually, well, almost enchanting.
The rest of the casting is good to fine, like the contents of a bookseller's catalogue. Christoph Waltz, even in his Springtime for Hitler moments, is a fine actor who's also great fun to watch. I was glad to see Julie Dreyfus again. She makes the most of a tiny role. Melanie Laurent ( cineaste Shoshonna) really surpasses Uma Thurman. Her character is as tough and noble as Jackie Brown. I actually did a little fact checking before writing this piece. Rod Taylor, who plays Churchill, is that Rod Taylor, the one known to scifi movie fans old enough to remeber The Time Machine and First Men in the Moon.
Basterds is a really satisfying, even elegant film. It's not as good as Verhoeven's Black Book but it's good enough to mention in the same sentence. I'll have to withhold judgement on Tarantino's next project, even if it's a gangster version of Firbank's Sorrow in Sunlight.