Anyone who drinks outside the privacy of their own home knows the peril of stumbling across the dreaded barroom bore. You know the type: a casual question ("Is that The Japan Times you're reading?") followed by a quick unsolicited opinion ("I've always thought Fazio was a bit of a prat."), which somehow leads, twistingly and tortuously, to a 20-minute-plus monologue on the history of cats in Catholicism, or why Hootie and the Blowfish's "Looking for Lucky" is an unrecognized work of genius, or how global warming is a plot by freedom-hating socialists to take your guns and abort your children.

Judging from "Inglourious Basterds," I'm not sure I'd care to meet Quentin Tarantino on a barstool. His films have always been amusingly chatty, from the opening "Like a Virgin" scene of "Reservoir Dogs" to the road-tripping stuntwomen in "Death Proof," but with his latest, he seems to have hit the four-pints-and-ready-to-bloviate stage. "Inglourious Basterds" may be Tarantino's homage to gritty World War II movies like "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), but it can sure talk the talk more than it can walk the walk.

The film starts with the caption "Once upon a time in occupied France," which clues you into both Quentin's love of Sergio Leone, and the fact that this is an imaginary World War II, one about as close to reality as, say, "Hogan's Heroes," with its zany Nazi concentration camp. Tarantino breaks the film into chapters, and each one is a self-contained sequence of sorts, most of them based around, well, someone giving a real gasbag of a monologue.