Spoilers ahoy. If you don't like, let your eyes glaze over it like most blocks of text.

Short of it-Flawed and too long. QT is like peter jackson in that he's such a glut for movie making that he won't take an editing knife proper. There is building tension and there is needing to move it along people.

Waltz is the best character in this movie. Really, the only character in this movie. The other characters as well written as they happen to be are just movie characters, vague pastiches and evocations of hard bitten southern war heroes or sultry temptresses in red dresses or whatever the movie needed. Clearly fabrications, meant to play the role they play, suffering the fate that their role demands. Waltz has a psychology rather than a part, he is the thread that ties the movie together and acts in ways that are both appropriate and unexpected.

The movie suffers from plot holes, or rather a notable disinterest with the minutia that I would find interesting. How do the basterds evade capture for so long? How did the jew girl get her own movie theater? Wouldn't the germans inspect the back of the screen for massive piles of film? The movie doesn't care. QT likes his movies to have a level of artifice, but it bothered me.

District 9 had its plot holes, but I didn't notice them because it pulled me into its world. Basterds was a little too much of a movie, a little too slow, a little too pointless. There are no emotional connections here, QT evokes suspense and fear and disgust of violence fine, but you never get the sense that the girl loved her family or that the Basterds had any feelings besides "we kill nazis without batting an eye" or anything. Theres never a war shown, and beyond the first scene there are no Jews killed, so its like everyone is killing nazis cause they're rats instead of squirrels. I shouldn't feel sympathetic to the iconic villians of the modern age, and I thrill when Indiana Jones or some other character puts them down as much as the next nerd, but for goodness sake they are the only ones with the semblance of human connection. Why is it just the genocidal racists who get the sons they'll never see or the affections that will never be reciprocated?

At least the farmer did. Those tears of realization, that the family he risked his life to harbor and the one he probably spent his entire life near, was found out and was going to die. Thats more than the animal wince of seeing a man's scalp removed.