Cousin, bidness is a-boomin'.

Cautious praise for Inglourious Basterds. It worked for me structurally and stylistically. I'm still trying to decide where I land on Tarantino's distance from history — am I with the New Yorker's David Denby, who called the movie “a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously”? Or do I put this aside in favor of sharp and interesting critical readings?

Clearly, there's a few high-order issues to clear up before I can settle on a valuation for Basterds. History, evil, violence, entertainment, irony, escape: it all swirls around in Tarantino's latest opus, and there's a lot I could try to sort out. Of course, a southerner's got to work these things out anyway, and it's a process. So the best verdict I can give right now is a kind of deferral that affirms Basterds as a movie worth coming back to once I've made some progress.