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Hollywood gets a lot of bad press for hocking 'dumb product' into American multiplexes, and sometimes it's not hard to disagree with that sentiment (especially when it comes to sitting through things like All About Steve or Transformers 2). Yet with epics like Inglourious Basterds (I ignore you, spell check!), it's possible to fall in love with the bigger-than-life grandeur of Hollywood all over again. I'm not exactly saying that Basterds is an old-fashioned film - it has more than its fair share of throwback storytelling techniques, but it's a postmodern, cusp-of-the-cultural-moment film through and through - but this is a movie that The Weinstein Company and Universal put upwards of $70 million into that was not a braindead exercise in brain-numbing CGI tomfoolery: Inglourious Basterds is the best art film of the year.

Told in the fashion of a cine-novel, if you will, Basterds unfolds in chapters, with characters and situations coming and going all over the place and details being planted and paying themselves off with staccato frequency. And each of the five chapters of the film cover various emotional and narrative territory. Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France is a harrowing, slowly-percolated sequence featuring a simple farmer in wartime Europe who is both hiding Jews in his cellar and being investigated by the SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz); Inglourious Basterds introduces us to Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), whose hungry passion for vengeance has him establishing a group of kinda-renegade soldiers who are told to not only kill 100 Nazis, but bring their scalps back to Landa as keepsakes.

This scenario on its own could fill up a 2+ hour running time, but Tarantino uses the establishment of the Basterds and their cause as bait - where he really puts the sell on is in German Nights in Paris, where we meet Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) - the only survivor of Landa's assault on the farmer's home in the film's first chapter - who is not only a cinema owner and operator, but a distinct Nazi-loather who concocts a plan to bring high-level Nazis into her theatre, lock them inside and burn it to the ground. Turns out this is similar to what American forces intend on setting up in Operation Kino, and in the final segment, Revenge of the Giant Face, the you-know-what hits the fan.

Pulp Fiction fans who find that Tarantino's recent work is too talky, too metafilmic may like and not love Inglourious Basterds, but this writer has been wowed by ol' Quentin from the get-go, and Inglourious Basterds had me floored from frame one. One of my favorite accolades to give a film is that I have no idea where it's going, and that sentiment is plastered all over the walls of Inglourious Basterds. Watching the film in a multiplex in Reno, NV, I had the distinct impression that Tarantino was pulling me around like a marionette, and I loved it - say what you will about QT's movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie tendencies, but the way this guy tells a story is stunningly original, fiery and unexpected.

Inglourious Basterds is an unlikely box-office smash, a movie that has more smarts and narrative savvy than most multiplex poo-pooers could ever possibly imagine. And the film is a hard sell - at least 30% of it is not in English, so not only is Basterds the most aesthetically daring mainstream film of 2009, it's arguably the most popular foreign language film of the year (sorta).

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