Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's most recent film genre mashup, is a movie about the medium, bowing deeply to film itself.

Tarantino deftly nods to the spaghetti western, pulp, noir, the 40's Hollywood drama, and surely a number of obscure movie genres only the most discerning film connoisseur would recognize. Whether she wants to be or not, the viewer is in a game of identifying clues, and if guessed correctly she wins a density to the story and characters, with layers of history and context of the genre it's pointing to.

At times, the backdrop of Nazi occupied France seems incidental compared to how thickly overlaid the genre is, such as the first time we see the American army's Jewish special missions team, the Inglourious Basterds, in action. This team, led by Appalachian-Mountain-bred Lt. Aldo Rein (acted with a pretty darn decent accent by Brad Pitt), has been sent to spread fear through the Nazi regime by not only killing Nazi warriors, but by scalping them and leaving mutilated survivors to tell the tale. The filmic staging of their first foray is lifted right out of a 70's Western, as the rowdy posse stands around Rein, nicknamed Aldo the Apache, wide-legged, whooping and hollering over their gory work. The Basterds waiver between the identities of both cowboys and Indians, offering complexity of comparison to the scene.

Beyond genre-play, one of the biggest players in the film is film itself as it rewrites the history of end of the Third Reich, with Film as hero - to go into detail here would be to spoil the winding plot. Nothing is left unexplored as the potential power of film, from its physical makeup, to its power as entertainment and as propaganda (and the similarity between them), to the notion that cinema ultimately has the last word.

Perhaps what's most obvious in watching Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's love and obsession for the medium; and for audiences who share the obsession, this movie is almost as much fun as it must have been to produce.

- Sarah Wylie A. VanMeter