One of the most remarkable things in Quentin Tarantino’s remarkable career is that he doesn’t appear to realise just how bad his most recent films are. ‘I have sibling rivalry with Orson Welles,’ he said recently on CBS Sunday Morning. ‘I don’t think he’s that good… all right? I have sibling rivalry with him and Stanley Kubrick.’
I can understand him saying this after picking up the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994, but does he really think that Inglourious Basterds, his latest offering about a group of irregulars operating behind enemy lines during World War Two, is up there with Citizen Kane? As someone who has sat through the film — all 153 minutes of it — I find this incomprehensible.
Take the opening scene in which a German SS officer enters a French farmhouse looking for a family of Jews.
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