Inglourious Basterds is certainly the ultimate revenge fantasy for every Jewish person on the planet, but Tarantino also gives all of us a “much better” ending to WWII, involving righteous beat downs, scalpings, Mexican stand-offs, and most improbably and most wonderfully, an UFA movie premiere, crammed to the gills with every evil Nazi asshole you can name from your high school history class.

In a strange way, this is clearly Tarantino’s most Spielberg-y movie, but unlike Spielberg, who plays his history fiddle as seriously as possible with great significance and studio system grandeur, Tarantino taps in to our most deepest of longings – to see the Nazis really get what they deserve.  Schindler’s List was about a good German standing up for his victims and is ultimately *mostly* a story of his redemption.  Here, in Tarantino’s world, the victims don’t need a good German. They only need a rambling pack of violence fans (aka, the Basterds, lead by a hilariously-super-American Brad Pitt), who bludgeon and scalp Nazi footsoldiers.

The other hero in Tarantino’s world is Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escaped the slaughter of her family by the “Jew Hunter” Colonel Landa (the excellent Christoph Waltz, who should be nominated for an Oscar post haste).  Just like in Tarantino’s beloved spaghetti westerns, she waits for years to enact her revenge and gets her chance to strike back when Goebbels himself wants to premiere his newest film in her Paris movie theater.  Her tart relationship with a smitten Nazi war hero (Daniel Bruhl) turned Nazi movie star feels like something ripped out of Leone. Every single one of their conversations is full of an anxious push pull.  Substitute Laurent for Eastwood and Bruhl for Van Cleef and voila! You’ll see the roots of Tarantino’s inspiration.

(I also can’t help but feel like Tarantino saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and was like, “I can do that too!  I can be historical, and feature great monologues for actors, and cut from a scene of intense violence to a scene of intense calm and somberness?” )

Did I mention that Winston Churchill is in there?  And even Mike Myers as an aristocratic high-ranking British officer? How about a beautiful German actress double agent (Diane Kruger aka Bridget Von Hammersmark)?  And horror director Eli Roth, nicknamed the “Jew Bear” whose speciality is thwomping Nazi skulls with a baseball bat? Maybe Brad Pitt’s accent and mugging as Aldo Raine might bother you at some point, but when you see him in a suave white tuxedo attempting to speak Italian at a Nazi mixer, you’ll see the inherent absurdity in such a character.

It’s an orgy of violence interspersed with a lot of loving shout-outs to cinema – UFA, G.W. Pabst, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford’s The Searchers, a little smidgen of Wong Kar Wai/Christopher Doyle, and every Sergio Leone movie ever made. I’m only surprised that Leni Riefenstahl herself didn’t make a surprise appearance.

But basically, yeah, dude.  It’s Tarantino.

PS Yes, there is a woman’s foot in it. You know Q loves women’s feet.  Women are barefoot in nearly all his movies except Reservoir Dogs…