It’s being reported that the initial cut of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds runs two hours and forty minutes. There have been terrific long war movies before, like The Great Escape, but seriously, Mr. Tarantino, not every movie you work on needs to be this epic length. Even the unedited longplay version of his Grindhouse contribution Death Proof (which I’m apparently fairly rare in liking quite a bit, at least in the original configeration) ran nearly two hours.
I’d like to be proved wrong here, and to go see this and just be blown out of my chair by it. And to be fair, the original The Dirty Dozen, the film Basterds is clearly based upon, itself ran two and a half hours. Still, Taratino may find it a wise investment of his time to for somebody whose job it is is to occassionally tell him ‘no.’
