About Inglorious Bastards, for instance, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis is in one sense quite right to say that “complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is about as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence: these are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of dialogue.” But what she appears to mean by this quite unnecessary observation is that, because it is deliberately vulgar and tasteless, the movie must somehow be supposed to have disarmed criticism. Sophisticated critics are allowed only to animadvert upon inadvertent tastelessness.
