A delectable treat:
I've seen Inglorious Basterds twice now. I knew it would be better the second time. This is because Quinton Tarantino makes layered movies that are incredibly rich and satisfying. He strikes me as the kind of man who devours cinema and I think he aims to present something so tasty that it requires a second helping.
As I sat in the theater (both times) I was very aware of the audience behind me and was paying attention to their participation. This movie is as much about what's on screen as it is who's watching it in a Michael Haneke kind of way. We've all seen representations of people sitting in theaters on film. There is also the iconic representation of wide eyed faces lit with flickering light and the warmth of the cinema. This is how this movie made me feel. I could have been Michael Pitt in the Dreamers, Austin O'brien in Last Action Hero, or Audrey Tautou in Amelie. All these fine actors played characters whose eyes devoured the movies they watched. This is an analogy that I'm sure is not lost on the director. There were several scenes in the film which revolved around our main antagonist devouring sumptuous foods (creme and milk). The shots in this movie seem to savor the performances of the actors. Slow push-ins emphatically draw tension even when the scene is happening outside the frame. The scene where Landa devours his strudel, just before we expect him to lay into Shosanna, is a perfect example of this. During the conversation immediately preceding that scene, Zoller introduces Landa to Shosanna in German. The conversation takes place outside the frame and all we see is Shosann's face. She, of course does not speak German, so she is silent but we understand her predicament by the expression on her face. I can attest, one viewing doesn't cut it. It cinema made for cinema lovers.

Christopher Waltz performance as Col. Hans Landa stole the show.

I was expecting a completely different crowd after seeing the trailer, which can be very misleading. I was expecting a bunch of raucous Nazi haters booing and hissing with the ferocity of Hitler himself. It wasn't like that at all. The crowd was calm and actually cringed at the brutality in the film. Which surprised me. I thought for sure that Tarintino's goal was to coax that blood-lust out of his audience only to reveal it as an obvious parallel to the Nazi audience watching the propagandistic hero film. I was expecting my audience to be cheering for brutality against the "evil" Nazis while the Nazi audience cheered for the downfall of American soldiers in their little movie. This would have been the perfect parallel for me to elaborate on for paragraphs, but alas, it didn't happen. The crowd was quit civil. Which makes me wonder if Tarintino, as well as myself, underestimated the movie's audience. Or maybe I had really docile crowds. Either way, this revelation didn't really detract from the movie. It only added another layer to the cake.
If the trailer was truthful about anything it was Tarintino's use of hyperbolic characters that were so "colorful" that they couldn't be seen as anything other than the most broadly painted stereotypes. Aldo Raine's Tennessee accent, the frenchman's dairy farm, Hitler's villianesque cape are all supreme examples of this. But that's what made this movie so lush. It's not a history lesson, it's a re-imagining of the past painted in colors so vivid that it couldn't possibly be boring.

We already know that the director is more than capable of making an awesome revenge flick or two, but is this what we would normally consider a revenge movie? It seems to me that this is the kind of propagandistic retelling of history we would be used to from the opposing side. But why? I guess I'm still a little confused about this one. Is it to blur the distinction between them and us? Evil and good? Was it that deep? I suspect Tarantino didn't want any one to cut that deep into his elaborately structured supremely sweet cake (obviousness aside). I suspect, and I'm guessing he'd say the same, he just wanted to make a kick ass movie. Which it is, and damned tasty too.

P.S. I hope that Shane will chime in in the comments section.