Hmmm. I just watched this. Some thoughts that are still fresh, that came to me at various points in the film...

It's full of ideas, full of interesting scenarios in themselves; I loved the knowing play with language and language-barriers in various scenes.

The film is never dull.

The best scene is in the tavern basement. It's a masterpiece of tension. Fassbender, what little has time he has, almost steals the film. Extending from this: Tarantino is a great craftsman, of both narrative and visual direction.

I didn't find it as objectionable as I thought I might; I suspect this is more to do with the casting - everyone's great - and the actors' delivery of dialogue. I had forgotten that Tarantino knows how to stage a scene.

Tarantino writes dialogue for scenes as if he's seemingly wanting to be quoted, to be watched in script-writing schools; some of it works - in this film, most of it works (I don't think it did in the Kill Bill films, though it's been a while...).

It's the final twenty minutes of the film where it kind of nosedives; it's set-up to be some grand fantastical pay-off, a sort of self-justifying indulgence that translates to, 'Hey, we've gone this far with the fictional story, a little further won't go amiss - what do people expect?'

Yes and no: while the final twenty minutes aren't much more historically inconceivable than the rest of the film, I felt it was a major misfire. The climax in the cinema bears a direct visual resemblance to both history proper and more accurate WW2 films; Klimov's horrific Come and See came to mind. This shift, from tense, playful, witty storytelling, to almost identical role-reversal of history (and the whole 'epic' finality of it), is reprehensible.

It's just so beautifully put together that it's very easy to see how people could consciously enjoy the film without even considering its problematic issues; and these issues are far from insignificant. Tarantino is far from unaware of reality; he knows exactly what kind of political climate he's making a film in. As with Kill Bill, revenge is not only validated here, but actively endorsed - how else are we meant to respond to the sheer upbeat hipness of the way violence is depicted here? The accompanying music - one example in particular is when The Bear Jew is ascending the cinema stairs at the end - and the way Tarantino chops it up, cuts it off, as if not only to remind us of his authorial control, but also to make us enjoy the fact we've been made aware of it. It's a post-Tarantino film made by Tarantino.

This film is too self-conscious for its own good; it's more calculated than artistic. Sself-indulgence is a defining feature of art; but that doesn't necessarily make a good work of art. Art consists of and offers us much, much more than what transitory sensory pleasures. There's a whole, enormous baggage that comes with any work of art, because no art is created in a vacuum. Tarantino's clever-dick self-consciousness tries to evade all accusations of repugnance and so on before the fact - he thinks he's ahead of his own critics; I just think he's seen a lot of films and thinks knowing how to craft one in your own image is enough to be acclaimed.

Artists like this - or, to keep with my term above, 'calculators' (opportunists) - thrive in a time of critical ineptitude. The professional critics heaping very serious praise on this film are more annoying than the film itself, because very few of them are actually engaging with what the film relates to, what it represents, the issues that it unavoidably and inherently raises as a conscious response to history. Such 'critics' - and they are many - expose their own lack of seriousness.

I guess when so few are thinking about the same world that they're actually disillusioned with, films like this can get away with 'escapism'. It's just cynical exploitation.

It's frustrating, because in terms of technical control of the cinema apparatus, and even of narrative structure (though he's self-indulgent, I never think his films are too long), I'd like to rank Tarantino as an exciting, informed contemporary film-maker; but as an artist, as a thinker, without some kind of major U-turn in his approach to life, I don't think he's capable of creating a significant work.