Here’s the opening of this morning’s Inglorious Basterds press conference, following this morning’s 8:30 am screening. And here’s an mp3 of most of what was said. About 13 or 14 minutes in director-writer Quentin Tarantino delivered a great riff on what the Cannes Film Festival so special. I’ll try and find and isolate and run it as a stand-alone. As for the film…

It’s not great. It’s a fairly engaging Quentin chit-chat personality film in World War II dress-up. It’s arch and very confidently rendered from QT’s end, but it’s basically talk, talk, talk . Tension surfaces in a couple of scenes (especially the first — an interrogation of a French farmer by a German officer looking for hidden Jews) but overall story tension is fairly low. A couple of shootouts occur but there’s no real action in the Michael Mann sense of the term except for the finale. No characters are subjected to tests of characters by having to make hard choices and stand up for what they believe, and nobody pours their heart out. What they do is yap their asses off. Cleverly and enjoyably at times, yes, but brisk repartee does not a solid movie make.

The theme, I suppose is the penetrating and transformative power of film. The secondary theme is a Jewish revenge fantasy against the Nazis. (Costar Eli Roth called it “kosher porn” in this sense.) No emotional currents, no sense of realism and no characters you’re allowed to really and truly enjoy and care about. That said, the two best performances are given by Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa — a great malicious Nazi — and Melanie Laurent as Shoshanna Dreyfus, a French farm girl who escapes Landa’s grasp and winds up running a Parisian cinema.

Inglourious Basterds is probably too talky to lure the knuckle-draggers. The chat really does seem to weigh things down in the middle section. It’s an arch exercise in World War II genre filmmaking, a kind of filmic valentine for people who love film and film culture, and a put-on about World War II movies.