I finally saw Quentin Tarantino’s new epic Inglourious Basterds. I really admire three of Tarantino’s films. That is, the first three: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown. I hated Kill Bill and sort of enjoyed his contribution to Grind House.

 I didn’t love Inglourious Basterds. It’s okay. It’s very long and talky, and even though Tarantino does talky very well, that doesn’t mean he should indulge himself beyond what makes the movie better.

Like everyone else who’s seen the movie, I admired the impressive performance by Christoph Waltz, the quadrilingual Nazi villain.

 But for me the big pleasant surprise of the movie was the performance of Michael Fassbender as Lt. Archie Hicox. Hicox goes behind enemy lines posing as a German in order to help set up an ambitious ambush.

Hicox is only in a couple of scenes, but his last one is quite long. I’ve only seen Fassbender in one other film, 300, in which I admired his abs, but that movie wasn’t really about acting. And the abs were probably CGI, anyway.

Fassbender recently starred as the ill-fated Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands in a movie called Hunger. He was also in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which I tried to watch but had to give up because it was so boring.

Fassbender himself is Irish and German, and his fluent German came in handy for his role in Inglourious Basterds. In the movie Fassbender displays an uncommon degree of charisma and intensity. The fairly sleepy movie really woke up when he walked on screen.

Fassbender has several new films in the works, and I look forward to seeing him do other things.