"Inglourious Basterds" huh? Should have been called, "Furious Masterbation."

Now that's not to say the movie wasn't totally cool and probably Tarantino's best yet, but as I was watching the film I could almost hear him, off-camera, shouting, "Yes, yes, that's it Brad, look mean and beautiful ... oh, I'm the most awesome. director. EVER!"

The cinematic auto-fellatio comes to a climax during some dialogue in which two characters are talking about the famous German director G.W. Pabst and even though I'm not a film buff I could tell that Tarantino was drawing correlations between himself and this Teutonic messiah of cinema.

Tarantino even goes so far as to light the figurative post-coital cigarette in the final scene when he has Pitt look directly into the camera and say, "I think this might just be my masterpiece."

I gagged.

And that's the only part that made me gag, which is surprising.

I mean, I sat through over two hours of scalping, hacking, bleeding, bludgeoning, shooting, heads exploding in hails of gunfire, charred skin, explosions, fire and pained faces – nothing, not a quiver from my stomach. But the "masterpiece" bit? My gut just couldn't take it.

Oh, the egotism. Oh, the humanity.

I mean Taratino's style is just bits and pieces of other film-making genres. I don't see how he can be so self-congratulatory when his entire career is merely an intricate tapestry, beautiful though it is, woven from other people's ideas.

On the other hand, war crimes never looked so cool. And the idea of employing Apache guerrilla war tactics on Nazis to scare them shitless was brilliant. There was something deeply satisfying in seeing some cold, hard mofo's bring down the pain, wild-west style.

For what it was, which was scenes of gratuitous violence followed by scenes building up to gratuitous violence, it was good.