On second thought....

When I saw Inglourious Basterds in August, my initial reaction was mild disappointment. After months of hype, I'd built up a fantasy movie in my head featuring wall-to-wall Nazi-killing courtesy of Brad Pitt and a cadre of bad-ass Jews. and when Basterds turned out to be an altogether more oblique, experimental film, I held it against the movie that my baser urges weren't satisfied. But then, I found that i could not stop thinking about the movie, about Tarantino's bold use of off screen action, long stretches of dialogue, and mostly about the fact that Basterds marked the first Tarantino film to take the director's preoccupation with cinematic history and use it to provide genuine insight. Then, I listened to an interview with noted cinephile and comedic genius Patton Oswalt, who condemned above all the film viewer who rejects a movie just because it doesn't give them exactly what they were expecting going into it. Within a few weeks of thinking and writing and reading about the movie, and I was convinced that Inglourious Basterds marked Tarantino's best movie since Pulp Fiction. Tonight, I watched it again at a dollar theater in a mall (whose sign actually said, in Brutalist block capitals: DOLLAR THEATER) and seeing it again, I have to revise my thoughts further: Inglourious Basterds is definitely Tarantino's best film, period.