I don't like picking one movie and calling it "the best of..." anything. Movie critics get paid to do it. Me, I do it because, in this particular case, I loved one movie a whole helluva lot more than any other movie I saw in 2009 and that movie is Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
Basterds runs about 153 minutes. From the second the movie starts until the final credit rolls it is absolute perfection. There is not a second that went by that I honestly felt anything other than pure cinematic joy.
Two sequences I want to write about. First, the opening fifteen minutes or so. I cannot overstate how absolutely amazing and perfect Waltz is. He is the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing here but he is SUCH a charasmatic and charming little fucking wolf. The look on his face as he watches Shosanna run away and Tarantino's slow zoom coupled with that perfect choice of music is just so exciting! The entire opening reminds me of Leone's McBain massacre scene from Once Upon A Time In The West but in Tarantino's world he has Henry Fonda (Waltz) come into the house first and having a long, drawn out conversation with McBain before blowing everybody away.
Tarantino builds up the tension using only dialogue and one particularly effective De Palma-like tracking shot. Both scenes pulse with a raw energy you don't see in alot of movies nowadays, which seem comatose in comparison.
Sequence two is a little more expansive. The entire third act or so, Revenge of the Giant Face if I'm not mistaken. At this point we're watching several stories within the movie collide head on. Shosanna at some point films a "movie" with her boyfriend. The entire reason WHY and HOW she does this is explained in such simple detail. I think most directors would've probably cut this whole thing out entirely. Quentin leaves it in. He doesn't want that "giant face" to be just another generic "surprise" like most movies would have. No. By showing you the minutiae of these events he's showing you how absolutely driven these characters are. When that "big head" finally reveals itself it is the catharsis of the entire movie being played out to the sights and sounds of Nazi massacre and it's absolutely electric.
