Inglorious Basterds

Let me say straight off that I'm gonna spoil the fuck out of this movie.

There's a scene where the German actress double agent Bridget von Hammersmark, fresh from a shoot out at the site of her disastrous rendez-vous with the Basterds which left three of them dead, a bullet in her leg, and obvious evidence of her presence at said rendez-vous (a shoe) and thus her involvement with said Basterds, has reached her objective, a film premiere, despite this collosal fuck up.
She has been taken aside by old flame and devious antagonist Col. Hans Landa to an isolated room, the previous scene involving Landa fairly openly mocking her paper thin explanation of the cast on her leg and the atrocious Italian of the Basterds that have been forced to accompany her, their only German speaking allies having been the ones that were shot.
So here we are: we know that Landa knows, and we know that, unless von Hammersmark is a complete fool, she also knows and now we are supposed to watch and see what happens.

Landa asks von Hammersmark to put her foot on her lap. She hesitates but he's insistent and she does it. He takes her shoe off. He asks her to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out the object inside it. If there was any doubt before, now she definitely knows what's up. It's written on her face. She pulls out her shoe (Hey look! It's that shoe!) and just to hammer the point all the way home, Landa takes it and puts in on her foot. Slowly. Then he strangles her.

They take their time, the two of them, doing this dance. They take their time because they both know what's going to happen. The problem is, so do we. For me, watching this, my experience wasn't "What's going to happen?" it was "When the fuck is this going to happen already, since I already know exactly what's going to happen?"

The only surprise in this scene was that Aldo Raine was actually too stupid to think that Landa's knowledge of Italian just might have broken their cover as Italians and that he never bothered to check up on von Hammersmark in the course of this ten minute conversation with the man known as The Jew Hunter. No, he just stands there like a smokey mountain post until he gets taken down like a bitch.

So here's my point: when Tarantino does shit like this he bores me. Now there's two types of boring though, there is slow boring and there is expectant boring. I'm a big fan of slow boring. Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Tarr, Antonioni, those guys are masters of this. This is the use of time as a medium.
Tarantino's movies have become more and more about building up tension and, more and more, he does it artificially by filling long scenes with tedious dialog. When it works it works, and though I have problems with it, Deathproof is a brilliant success. You wait and you wait, and then eventually you get to that sweet ass chase scene at the end, Kurt Russel gets his skull crushed and it is so worth it.
Here's the difference between the two: the first is not dependent on the payoff as you are not meant to be waiting for something to happen. You are inhabiting a space, and the film is not promising anything except for the perpetuation of that space. It's not about what will come later, it's about now.

The latter, however, and Tarantino's ouvre especially, is entirely dependent on that payoff. If it doesn't deliver, it wasn't worth it.

This scene didn't deliver.
Inglorious Basterds was alright.