Many people, including Sun Media readers sending strident e-mails, seem obsessed with the deliberately misspelled title of Inglourious Basterds.

I find this strange, but interesting, as if revising the title to the "proper" Inglorious Bastards would change how audiences approach Quentin Tarantino's outrageous Second World War film. For the record, Tarantino refuses to explain his title, not now as the film plays, not in May when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

"It's not a typo!" Tarantino insisted at Cannes. "Here's the thing: I'm never going to explain that. You do an artistic flourish like that, and to describe it, to explain it, would just take the piss out of it and invalidate the whole stroke in the first place. Basquiat (the genius American artist, now dead) takes a letter 'L' from a hotel room door and sticks it on his painting. If he describes why he did it, he might as well not have done it at all. That's my answer!"

I did not bother to bring it up again when Tarantino arrived for Canadian interviews last week, including with Sun Media. It seemed pointless. And I personally like the tease, the mystery.

It also differentiates Tarantino's film from Italian Enzo G. Castellari's schlock action picture, The Inglorious Bastards (1978). Tarantino adores Castellari and gave him a cameo. But Basterds has nothing in common with Castellari's original, which brags that it is dirtier than The Dirty Dozen.

Tarantino's film, in contrast, is complex. It is also, as I said in Cannes, "funny, cruel, ridiculous, violent, transgressive, gory, profane, stylish, clever, poetic, cartoon-like and just hellishly brilliant."

Seeing the revised edit for the theatrical release did not change my reaction. Contrary to unfounded rumours, Tarantino did not cut Inglourious Basterds, nor did Harvey Weinstein ask him to. Weinstein is a bombastic mogul who often clashes with filmmakers. But Tarantino told me he is unafraid, that they have a healthy working relationship, and that he would not acquiesce to such demands even if they were made. There is proof: with a running time of 2 hours, 32 minutes, Inglourious Basterds is now one minute longer than at Cannes.

That means, Tarantino says, Inglourious Basterds is exactly the film he wanted to make. This is his vision, his director's cut, his film. It is the culmination of a decade of rumination and script revisions. I remember talking to Tarantino about Basterds during interviews for Kill Bill, his martial-arts epic.

Inglourious Basterds morphed over the years since then. Subplots changed. Casting evolved. At one point, Leonardo DiCaprio campaigned to play S.S. Colonel Landa, a role which finally went to an unknown German, Christoph Waltz, who now dominates the film.

Brad Pitt spent a night drinking with Tarantino and woke up to find himself in a key support role as a Tennessee hillbilly with First Nations heritage. He is the bloodthirsty leader of the Basterds, a platoon of Jewish-Americans who kill Nazis behind enemy lines in occupied France.

As Basterds evolved, it became more of a classic Quentin Tarantino opus. Intrigued by genres of all kinds (but especially martial arts) and educated by art films (he knows more about more films than anyone I know), this former video store clerk has now written and directed five great films in 17 years.

They are: his feature directorial debut Reservoir Dogs (1992), his masterpiece Pulp Fiction (1994), his underrated Jackie Brown (1997), his savagely beautiful two-parter Kill Bill (2003-04) and now Inglourious Basterds (2009). That ignores his work on Four Rooms (mediocre), Sin City (guest director only) and Death Proof (his contribution to Grindhouse, a great idea gone wrong).

Overall, this is a stunning record. A misspelled title seems so irrelevant.

More Artists