It’s no secret that I’m a huge admirer of Quentin Tarantino’s films, to the point where I generally avoid the subject in public – lest I come off as some kind of obsessive drooling fanboy who tosses aside all critical objectivity every time someone says word one about QT.

But, since the teaser trailer for Tarantino’s latest, the Dirty Dozen-style WWII adventure Inglourious Basterds, was released earlier this week, please allow me to toss aside all critical objectivity and come off as some kind of obsessive drooling fanboy for just a moment:

OMFG I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THIS MOVIE!!!




Okay, rational Nick is back now. And rational Nick remembers that he found QT’s last film, the half of Grindhouse known as Death Proof, deeply disappointing on a whole lot of levels (not so Robert Rodriguez’s half, the delightfully disgusting zombie epic Planet Terror, which I loved). So even a guy like me has to take the hype for Inglourious Basterds with a grain of salt, despite how exciting this well-put-together teaser trailer may be. I’m not saying that QT has lost his mojo or anything – heck, a lot of folks really liked Death Proof – but the war-film genre is untested territory for him, and already there’s been a low rumble of complaining from fans on the web who aren’t quite buying Brad Pitt’s “I want my scalps” bit from the trailer.

But I’m confident that Tarantino will surprise us all once again with Basterds, just as he did with the Kill Bills – a pair of films I wasn’t entirely sold on when I first read about them, but have come to appreciate just as much as all his others.

A few assorted things about the trailer:

1. This flick looks violent. Like, seriously violent. I know over-the-top bloodletting has been a staple of QT’s cinema from the grue-spattered opening of Reservoir Dogs onward, but something in this trailer makes me think that Inglourious Basterds is going to significantly up the ante even for him. Aside from Pitt’s character’s “disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured” speech – which elicits a sick little smile from co-star Eli Roth – we also get a baseball-bat-to-the-head bit that’s tough enough to watch even in TV-sanitized form, a character charging through a building with minigun blazing, a guy with a swastika carved into his forehead (yowch!), and so on. Some will argue that stylishly horrific violence is all QT had going for him in the first place, but I strongly disagree – and I hope that this film offsets its nastiness with humor, intelligence, and personality just as skillfully as his earlier films did.

2. The teaser trailer offers only a few quick glimpses of Melanie Laurent’s character, a Jewish girl who has fled from the Nazis, even though her role is supposedly a pretty big piece of the overall story. I’m really interested to see what Tarantino does with this character, since it seems as if she appeared rather late in Basterds’ very, very long development cycle. If anybody can successfully shoehorn a hard-boiled heroine into an otherwise testosterone-drenched Dirty Dozen/Magnificent Seven-type setup, it’s Tarantino, and his knack for crafting memorable female characters (The Bride, Jackie Brown, Mia Wallace, etc.) bodes well for Laurent’s contribution to the film.

3. That Hitler thing at the end is really, really corny. If that’s the payoff to something, I hope whatever it is is very well set up.