CINEMA SEEN - "Fore-Skinned!"
By William Margold

     It’s taken me well over a month to finally deal with the film on this page. And although Quentin Tarantino and I have never met...our lives have wandered down way too many similar paths for me to simply dismiss his latest effort...and move on in the hope that perhaps he will eventually create something worthy of my praise.
     Quentin and I share reflective screen time in the recent documentary NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD (Mark Hartley’s amusing look at Ozploitation), and recently I noticed that his name is attached to a press release announcing the 40th anniversary showing of THE WILD BUNCH (www.julesverne.org) which just happens to be one of my two all-time favorite films (the other being "High Noon"). Since I am planning on attending the event at The Million Dollar Theater on Thursday November 12, and will, in fact, dedicate my November 6 page to it, I figure that this page needed to be out well in advance of our possible meeting. You see...I strongly suspect that we are also linked at the mental hip by the fact that our only escape from the geekdom of our last-to-be-chosen-unless-we-created-the-game-ourselves childhood was the salvation that could be found as we spent many, Many, MANY years of our lives in comforting movie theaters...and a certain amount of validation in our ability to provide evidence of that immersion into movie-going...as we are both obsessed "film fanatics."
     But those factors alone---plus the modicum of pleasure in the knowledge that I’m sure he has been reading my cinema review columns for the past three plus decades---are not enough to prevent me from the following laceration of his current attempt at movie making.
     An imitative intolerability...Quentin Tarantino’s INGLORIOUS BASTERDS was such a miserable viewing experience for me...that by the time I staggered out of The Vista Theatre into the eerie loneliness of Labor Day’s cool twilight, I couldn’t resist the urge to scream out "I want my foreskin back."
     Tarantino has obsequiously fashioned a career out of cinematically salivating over the entrails of many film masters, and has fooled quite a number of easily pleased movie reviewers---who lamely think that homage is art---in the process.
     Well...this time out...Quentin’s folly is a clutterment of lame Leone, puerile Peckinpah, awful Aldrich, and krappy Kurosawa.
     Pitting a "Dirty Dozen-esque" squad of Nazi-killing and then scalping (for good measure) dullards under the command of a constipated looking Brad Pitt against the cool machinations of a fellow known as The Jew Hunter (played with tongue in more than one cheek broadness by Christoph Waltz), and placing lovely but doomed Parisian cinema owner Melanie Laurent in the muddle...I mean, middle...Q.T. capriciously exploits the horrors of World War Two, with a rank form of wishful thinking/revisionist history, while rather lewdly displaying all the concern of a fellow competing in the board game of Risk.
     And by the time most of the cast find themselves trapped in a burning theater, I found myself wishing for the same fate. But surrounded by a gaggle of giggling ninnies in The Vista, who were apparently overwhelmed by Quentin’s underwhelming images, I realized that I wasn’t going to be so lucky.
     Yeah...but if I were given my foreskin back...perhaps I could fashion it into a noose.
     And I’ll leave it to you to figure out around whose neck I would place it.
     end
     NOTE: Originally published in LA Xpress, October 22, 2009 issue.

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