Old comment which acts as a review, kind of...

I had posted this as a comment last year on The Bit Maelstrom review of Inglourious Basterds.

Someone at work had just seen the movie and I knew I had written something about it somewhere. I thought it was on the above mentioned blog, but searches there were in vain (I probably misspelled Inglourious Basterds). I searched on Althouse, where "Blake" the author of The Bit Maelstrom sometimes comments and found a few posts about the movie in question. Naturally, being an inveterate and excellent movie reviewer, he had a comment there with a link to his review. I made the following observations in his comments section:

My wife and I saw this last weekend.

Yes, the lack of distinction between regular German soldiers and NAZIs really bothered me and I am glad someone else noticed this too. My wife thought that since most people don't make any distinction, it would have complicated the story. My view is that if there is a distinction to be made, the filmmaker should make it. They had the time to talk about nitrocellulosic film stock, but maybe they had time to do that because it is a subject that interests our filmmaker.

A couple of other things too: 1) The Zoller character was, I thought, presented in a positive light early on. But then right at the end he is kind of a jerk. Wife reminded me that he did have the girl essentially arrested in order to join him at lunch with Goebles and that was kind of jerky... 2) There were two independent plots against the theater and neither of them interfered with the other. There could have been some very nice tension if--in each case--something unexpected happened that left doubt as to the plot's success. After the denouement, all the plotters would come to the conclusion that their plot worked since they don't know about the other one. This could lead to all kinds of post-event intrigue. There was a better movie in there somewhere.