Doesn't looking at Cary Grant in his prime count for anything?

Fair enough, and I'll even grant that his performance has nothing to do with Cole Porter because of the script as opposed to any flaw in the performance itself.

Inglorious Basterds:

Yes, Christophe Waltz was incredible. Also, I never would have imagined it, but when translated into French and German, Tarantino dialog becomes downright poetic.

But having seen the movie, I am completely baffled by this comment from David Denby's review in the New Yorker:

In brief, Tarantino has gone past his usual practice of decorating his movies with homages to others. This time, he has pulled the film-archive door shut behind him—there’s hardly a flash of light indicating that the world exists outside the cinema except as the basis of a nutbrain fable.

Um, the whole first section of the movie is an homage to Sergio Leone. The movie eventually morphs into other homages, but how anybody who's ever SEEN enough movies to qualify as a film critic can watch the opening of Inglorious Basterds and not recognize it as a spaghetti western set in Nazi occupied France is a bafflement to me.

I took Denby's comment to mean that this movie was entirely made out of references to other movies - that there was nothing original about it.

Oh. Okay. That makes so much more sense.

I disagree completely that there was nothing original about it, but that comment makes more sense to me.

My take was Jess' take on Denby's comment, but I am with Sean on disagreeing with it. For one thing, I've never seen a movie where not only the ability to speak another language, but to have an appropriate accent, and know all the cultural gestures, be a major plot point. Not that no other movie's done that, but I can't recall one off the top of my head. And that was just one strand.

Bon-JOR-no.

Air-reev-a-dear-chi!

I've never seen a movie where

Neither have I, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some really obscure flick that Tarantino was paying homage to with that scene.

Neither have I, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some really obscure flick that Tarantino was paying homage to with that scene.

From the interviews I've read, he said it was a reply to older movies like Where Eagles Dare where you just have to suspend disbelief and go along with the fact that Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood could freely mingle with Germans without giving themselves away verbally/culturally.

But that doesn't mean you're wrong either. QT is a cagey...basterd.

By the way, I always use the German-style hand gesture to indicate "three". I wonder if I'm going to be outed as a German spy anytime soon.