If Inglourious Basterds had been made in the 1980’s, people would laugh at it now. It would be legendarily bad, held up for ridicule as an example of how incredibly awful films were in the 1980s. The camp, the bad music, the dip-shit plot lines, the bad acting, the painful dialog, the pompous over-blown “artistry,” the clumsy attempts at suspense.

But now in 2010 this utter piece of trash is up for best picture and best director. Such are the times we live in.

This is one of the worst films of the year, by any standard imaginable. The only good part is the scene where Brad Pitt addresses his men on their mission, and this scene is in the preview basically in its entirety so there is really no reason to spend money or time watching this film. I thought the film would have a lot of cool guerrilla warfare shit in it, but really the “Basterds” are just a small piece of the movie. Instead, the film is focused on the hateful “revenge fantasy” of different people wanting to blow up a theater containing the German high command. And this primary storyline is so boring it’s incredible, especially given a) the amount and severity of the violence in the film and b) the vaunted and much-celebrated originality of the filmmaker.

Tarantino is such a bad film maker, just flat out bad, and Inglourious Basterds is a perfect case study in his hackneyed artistry. He has no sense of pace whatsoever. Many, many scenes in this film are just excruciating to sit through. They go on and on and on. Tarantino clearly thinks he is building suspense, but everything in his story is telegraphed a zillion miles ahead (it’s called bad writing) and then there you are, sitting though all this endless mousing around as he takes forever to get to the inevitable and obvious conclusion of the scene.

The storyline is like something an adolescent would dream up, an adolescent with rather limited imagination. His dialog is boring and irritating. His use of music is as clumsy and artless as I think I’ve ever seen in film. His camera work is so pompous, so bombastic! He still loves to shoot people’s heads from the back (someone should mention to him that this is a very uninteresting and uninspiring view.) He also still loves extreme closeups that are emphasized to the point of silliness. And there are several instances in the movie where his laziness and lack of skill reaches a critical mass and he resorts to bringing in a highly distracting, Sam Jackson-type narrator to just boringly tell the viewer information that even an average filmmaker would be able to weave into the dialog. All through the movie my wife and I kept laughing and saying “God, he is such a bad filmmaker!!!”

Some would say that I just don’t get Tarantino, that I am unfairly criticizing his work because I just don’t appreciate his “style.” But this is not the case. I realize that his dialog is intentionally stylized – my problem with it is that it is badly done. I don’t mind films with stylized dialog – just of the top of my head, Brick had stylized dialog, so did Juno, so did Ocean’s 11. Those were all pretty good recent films that I enjoyed. The Coen brothers are stylized as hell – I don’t like them, but I’ll admit they’re way better at it than Tarantino. The same goes for his stylized camerawork and his weird story structuring. If you think about it, you’ll realize that both are simply laziness on his part. It is much easier to do something distracting than to do something good.

As my wife pointed out, what is shocking about this film being nominated is not so much that it is bad. It shocking because the film is so unbelievably hateful. I think that’s why it is such a hit. Hate is really big right now. And the main character in the film (played by Christoph Waltz) is getting all this attention because he is basically a modern, self-centered prick who is out for himself, and we relate to that because that is what’s glorified in our society. He’s like the assholes at Goldman Sachs, fucking everyone over for their own material gain. That’s why everyone is so into this character. As for Waltz’s actual performance, in my opinion it is just okay. I personally don’t think you can have a “great performance” with a script this weak, but setting that aside, he is kind of cartoonish in his approach to the character, which strikes me as decidedly taking the easy way out (although I’m sure this is exactly what Tarantino was after.)

Along with Fame, Harry Potter 6, and 2012, this film is at the very bottom of 2009. Let’s hope it doesn’t win anything at the Oscars, so it can begin its fade to obscurity.