I love your movie reviews, but your Tarantino commentaries always warm my heart.  My wife and I are probably the only movie fans in our circle that actually like his films, and we just don’t get the huge hater backlash among the movie geek crowd.  OK, maybe I understand it, but still, thanks for articulating things a lot better than I have in past conversations about QT!

Totally loved it. First thing I said to the BF as we were leaving was “I love his movies. The women always get to have so much fun.”

It’s sad that by fun I mean character development, backbone, and lines. But yes, genius, full stop.

I’ve been a huge fan since Pulp Fiction came out when I was 13. I love all his stuff. This one is up there with Pulp Fiction for me.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked the movie, but it was well put together.

And I absolutely loved how he showed that the typical movie idea of the guy who doesn’t take no for an answer and wins the woman over through persistence really is an asshole who doesn’t take no for an answer and thinks he’s owed that woman regardless of what she thinks.

Good movie.  Not enough Nazi killing, though.

Yes, yes, and yes. I’ve been waiting for the Bamboo Review, because I really liked this one.

I needed to see it a second time… my stomach was so tight through the entire first viewing that I couldn’t digest anything.

I came away from the second viewing with a strong anti-war vibe, too. It didn’t make sense to me the way the Shoshana plotline worked itself out entirely parallel to, and never touching, the Basterds plotline--even to the point where, in the final slaughter, the Basterds don’t look up or even acknowledge The Revenge of the Giant Face as they pursue their own soul-destroying bloodlust. Is he saying it would have worked itself out, regardless of her heroism, their heroism, or Landa’s betrayal? I think so. Turns out there was no single critical plot point, because of total redundancy.

The entire thing has a taste of the futility of our own recent military adventurism, though I do worry I’m overreaching. Still, Basterds reminded me a lot of (Altman’s) MASH--deeply unfunny subject matter with comedy frosting, produced well into a pointless war but referencing another war, without any overt anti-war message. I don’t think Tarantino could have, or would have, made this movie a decade ago. Or, more importantly, I don’t think I would have found it quite so moving.

Haven’t seen the movie, but I must say that David Bowie Has No Butt.

That’s a very cool song and a great performance, but He Has No Butt.

Great post!

I am wondering what you make of the absurdly meta climax, where the entire Nazi high command are shown laughing uproariously at a film showing the death of countless Allied soldiers, which is followed by a hilariously over-the-top, laugh-out-loud funny massacre of those same Nazis, which begins when the burning movie screen completely fills the frame of our movie screen.

At that moment, the friend I was with at the time turned and whispered in my ear, “I think Quentin Tarantio has a somewhat conflicted attitude towards his audience” which is pretty hilariously understated considering he’d just explicitly put us all in the place of the Nazis and intimated that he’d like to burn us all alive.

I’m generally a Tarantino fan, but thought “IB” was a perfect example of him upstaging three stand-out performances (Waltz, Laurent, Kruger) by being unable to resist publicly jerking off on his own product.

David Bowie needle drops in a film set in 1944. Need I say more?

I thought the climax was wonderful.  The whole movie within a movie thing was brilliant.  It adds a lot to Bridget’s motivations, too.  You begin to see how an intelligent German actress might really resent the Nazi takeover of the movie industry to make nothing but propaganda.

Honestly?  I didn’t think that QT was being contemptuous towards his audience.  I think, however, he was being contemptuous towards an audience that goes to WWII films and pats themselves on the backs for being the glorious Americans who saved Europe, and also for being the sort of deep people who believe they “get” war because they see movies that glorify America’s involvement, downplay the other actors involved (including the Resistance), and ignore inconvenient facts, such as the fact that Germans lost in no small part because we wore them down and they were resorting, in those last days, to fielding 14-year-olds as soldiers.  This movie set fire to the idea that WWII was the “good war”.  And so you have this movie onscreen that really shows how propagandistic war movies often are, particularly WWII movies. 

All of which explains why so many critics were annoyed by or even panned this movie.  He basically called them out for every wanking review where they imagined they really get the horrors of war because they saw a movie about it.  All the good intentions of the world don’t change the fact that movies like Saving Private Ryan reduce WWII to an action film centered around character development, and by doing so inadvertently minimize the realities of war.

Good review.  Most reviews I read of this movie (the NYT comes to mind - actually that’s exactly what I am talking about) were upset with the movie for portraying Hans Landa as charming - as if that was going to have people “let their guard down” about the evils of Nazism.  It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.  I actually thought the Nazi characters were well created.  They speak a language with no redeeming qualities because the only thing they can discuss is their power to destroy.  They are all necessarily sadists.  Landa and the Nazi suitor are fundamentally the same.

I haven’t seen all of Tarantino’s work.  But the fact that his female characters are clothed strikes me as a male fantasy for a timid mind.  They are all extremely sexy women and very powerful.  His men on the other hand are bumblers or misfits.  I think there is a dynamic there that men can identify with and is possibly designed for them, even though the bumblers and the women in the movie don’t really interact.

David Bowie needle drops in a film set in 1944. Need I say more?

Sorry, but I thought that was brilliant.  QT isn’t interested in historical accuracy.  He’s shoving your face in the fact that this movie is a fantasy.  And in a cool way, too.  Every scene moves the movie further away from the “realistic” conventions of war films towards the spiral of utter fantasy.  That song signaled that it was on.

As for brilliant performances---well, it’s obvious by now that Tarantino is an actor’s director.  He gets great performances out of mediocre actors, and earth-shattering ones out of great actors.  He deserves full credit for that.

I enjoyed it so much I’ve seen it twice:) I think this is Tarantino’s best since Pulp Fiction, because that one will always have a special place in my heart. I enjoyed Kill Bill but enjoyed this one so much more.

Possible spoilers below:

While I appreciated Shoshanna’s story I really wanted more of the basterds, especially Hugo Stiglitz. The scene in the basement is my favorite because it’s filled with so much “oh shit, something’s about to go wrong.” and just when you *think* they’re in the clear, one.little.thing. sets the shit off. Though I will say I appreciate Tarantino’s moxie to just kill off characters you have grown to like. Working in main stream Hollywood, that’s a no-no. And yeah, Fredrick Zoller got on my nerves and I love how he made the turn after he realized that she honestly didn’t want him and wasn’t going to swoon or kiss his ass like everybody else. It was played up that he was “humble” about his “success” but in reality, and when it came down to someone actually telling him “no” he really was a privileged asshole.

Though hands down, as far as acting goes, Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa deserves some kind of award. that man was utterly captivating and his arc from being proud of his “unofficial title” to loathing it by the end was awesome.

“Now you’re gonna show me here on this map where they are, or Donnie’s gonna come over here with his bat and beat your ass to death with it.”

I will say that a few critics, like Roger Ebert and Richard Cohen, got this movie.  But even they missed out on what I thought was obvious, which was that the Nazi soldier/movie star and Shoshanna do not have a flirtation or a budding romance, to use the words they used. Their only “date” is something he forces on her with armed military.  She hates him with every fiber of her being. She doesn’t find his faux humility charming. It’s fucking obnoxious.  He’s a Nazi.  Nazis killed her family. He personally killed hundreds of her countrymen.  She does everything she can to minimize contact with him, and even tells him that he needs to learn the meaning of the word no. 

In case it’s not clear enough, QT also establishes that she has a boyfriend who is a great guy, a real partner and an equal.  He has a romantic streak. Their scenes together were very touching.  But they worked to make it excruciatingly clear how different the Nazi’s overtures were.  There’s even a contrast in the gifts they give her.  The Nazi gives her what he wants, a premiere at her theater, and then is angry when she doesn’t like it.  Her boyfriend gives her his cooperation in an act of resistance, which is exactly what she wants. 

But these critics are so used to the conventions of “love” onscreen that they can’t see what a lie it is when it’s sent up brutally and contrasted directly with real love.

Saddest part?  Adam Sandler was supposed to play the Bear Jew, the guy that Eli Roth plays.  He couldn’t work it into his filming schedule, which is too bad, because seeing Sandler [SPOILER] come out of a cave and beat a Nazi to death with a baseball bat while yelling shit about Ted Williams would have been worth the entire rest of his career put together times a million.

Though this was one of the few times I didn’t think of Eli Roth as a douchbag. Leave it to Tarantino to make him tolerable.

Re: Amanda’s comment 13:  Yeah the fact that some reviewers were able to find the Nazis (esp. the ranked or otherwise non-grunt Nazis) in the film charming or romantic creeps me out.  Zoller/Goebbels had a car ordered to abduct her to his luncheon.  How lovely.

I thought Tarantino made them embody the spirit and menace of being occupiers quite well too.  These Nazis didn’t miss home - they wanted to gobble up more land and whatever else was in their way.  Esp. women.  “You just want a French girlfriend.” I think Goebbels’ relationship with his interpreter demonstrated what that really meant.

It’s interesting to think of the Nazis as occupiers in light of the fact that the U.S. is currently playing the role of occupiers.

Re Comment 17/Iraq.  Yep.  Like ha, I think there’s a strong anti-war vibe here.

I was like you Amanda really pleased to see a movie that goes beyond the tropes of WWII filmmaking.  I can watch pretty much any movie that does a new spin on that period.  Like the Night Porter - I think that movie is pretty fascinating.  Another movie that made reviewers flip the fack out.

Still I suppose we have to raise our men and women with your standard war film nonsense so that they believe war is noble and a place of valuable self-discovery.  That way we’ll always have soldiers.  And our economy can be stimulated by tiny gun-toting action figures.

This movie set fire to the idea that WWII was the “good war”.

In the sense that the Allies/Americans were 100% good and had pure motives, sure.

However, the way most WWII vets and others used the term...it was more in the sense that there was clear clarity that the Axis powers they were fighting whether the Nazis/Fascists in Europe or the seemingly less remembered Imperial Japanese militarists in Asia were committing horrific acts beyond the scale or the pale of even their most depraved imaginations.  A notion which has actually been strengthened with more post-war research. 

In cases such as the Unit 731 or Comfort Women, definitive research/documentation proving what many victims, their supporters and the perpetrators knew about were not publicized until the mid-1980s or even the early 1990s.

Well, no one’s saying that the Axis powers were good guys.  I’m just saying that there’s a point where the relentless obsession over WWII as vindicating the American character drifts from harmless self-righteousness to dangerous propaganda.  For instance, the myth of American moral superiority---as proven by WWII---was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.  Saddam is Hitler, remember?

Excellent review.  I loved the movie, as well, for the reasons you describe, and also because I like it when movies don’t talk down to us.  It seemed like half the dialog was unapologetically in a foreign language, which American audiences tend to hate.  (Of course, it helped that I understood all the German and 3/4 of the French.  Christoph Walz deserves an Oscar simply for being able to emote so convincingly in four languages.)

One amusing point nobody’s mentioned yet is the relentless awfulness of “Nation’s Pride”.  I’d say a good 30-40 minutes of the movie occur while “Nation’s Pride” is being screened, and every time we get a glimpse of it or hear the soundtrack it’s interminably “Zoller killing Americans from the bell tower”.  I have to say, I saw probably 15 Nazi-era films in a graduate course I took a while back, and none of them were *that* awful.  Maybe we saw only the good ones.

My housemate argued that Shoshanna couldn’t live through the movie, because the heroic Resistance fighter never does.  Which may be true, but the one point which really stuck in my throat was that the way she gets killed has nothing to do with being the heroic Resistance fighter.  She gets killed because she stands up to a would-be rapist.  (Or maybe she gets killed because she shows some compassion for her would-be rapist?)

I also think the Basterds would have been better off killing Landa.  Of course, the ending as-is is more true to life, except in real life the Nazis didn’t get swastikas carved into their foreheads.

Ironically, this movie is probably the most adamant film I’ve ever seen about the moral responsibility of those complicit on any level with the Nazis.  After all, in the climax, a roomful of not just soldiers, but citizens who applaud the Third Reich are both set on fire and subject to a machine gunning massacre.  And you can’t really care, because after all, it’s the culmination of a revenge scenario where a group of Jews just leashes the fury on a bunch of Nazis.

Saddest part?  Adam Sandler was supposed to play the Bear Jew, the guy that Eli Roth plays. 

I know! Sandler has his good and bad moments, but there’s no question that scene was written for Sandler in full Happy Gilmore mode.

It’s interesting to think of the Nazis as occupiers in light of the fact that the U.S. is currently playing the role of occupiers.

I thought that was the whole point of the Basterds subplot (and it was a subplot—this was Shoshanna’s movie, and Landa’s). There’s really no getting around that the Basterds are irregulars who use unconventional tactics to kill Nah-zis, including, in the person of the Bear Jew, a good deal of terror. Tarrantino gets us cheering for the terrorists and resistance fighters.

I’m glad you noticed the big Fuck You to Nice Guys(tm). One other thing I noticed was that Tarrantino went out of his way to point out that America wasn’t exactly a land of freedom and tolerance—once when Goebbels explains to Zoller that “It’s only the offspring of slaves that allows America to be competitive athletically. American Olympic gold can be measured in Negro sweat.”

The next is when Dieter Hellstrom is playing twenty questions with Hicox, Stiglitz et. al.. Working on guessing “King Kong,” Hellstrom narrows it down—the character was born in the jungle, visited America, went by boat, went against his will, and arrived in America in chains. He asks, “Am I the story of the negro in America?” Getting “no” as an answer, he guesses King Kong.

I thought this, combined with the fact that Marcel, a Frenchman, was black, but there were no African Americans in the Basterds or indeed, anywhere else in the American group as far as we see, was another bit of Tarrantino giving the middle finger to people who see WWII as a battle of pure good versus pure evil. The Nazis were evil, to be sure. But Americans? We weren’t exactly good.

er, unleashes.

jox, I took the way Shoshanna dies as a dark commentary on how sexists exploit women’s basic human compassion to use and abuse them.  But before that when she unloads into Zoller?  Fucking I love how cathartic that was.  QT really delivers on the kill-the-rapist stuff.

Tarrantino gets us cheering for the terrorists and resistance fighters.

Hell, Lander even calls them terrorists.  It’s a shocking moment, because he spits the word out as if it were the height of criminal behavior---as if hunting the countryside for innocent people and shooting them is just business, but pushing back against an invasion is the height of criminality.

seeing Sandler [SPOILER] come out of a cave and beat a Nazi to death with a baseball bat while yelling shit about Ted Williams would have been worth the entire rest of his career put together times a million.

Word.

Another thing that only struck me about the movie in retrospect—the Basterds and Operation Kino were not only superfluous (as Shosanna’s plot alone would have wiped out the high command), it’s because of them that Landa leaves the theatre before the fire starts, and because of them that Landa is able to make his deal with the Americans. But he only has leverage to make that deal because nobody knows about Shosanna’s parallel plot. [This is assuming Landa wanted to let his cat-and-mouse game with Shosanna play out a bit longer, but that does seem to be his inclination.]

I took the way Shoshanna dies as a dark commentary on how sexists exploit women’s basic human compassion to use and abuse them.

That, and the fact that Shoshanna is actually a decent human being, while Zoller is a creep. Shoshanna doesn’t love Zoller—she doesn’t even like him—but she still feels some sympathy for him as he dies. Zoller professes to love Shoshanna in all his pursuit of her—but rather than let her live, he lashes out at her. In the end, Zoller doesn’t love her. He doesn’t even like her. And he isn’t even sympathetic to her. Through it all, Shoshanna was honest about her feelings. And he was lying about his. Nice Guy(tm), times a billion.

Point taken, DJA.  Also, if it had only been Shoshanna, then the lives of 5 Basterds wouldn’t have been lost.  That said, since they didn’t know about the plot, they aren’t in any way to blame for their redundancy or what comes of it. The navel of a mystery, though, is why the two in the theater, when they realize that someone else is burning the place down, don’t seem to be surprised.

After all, in the climax, a roomful of not just soldiers, but citizens who applaud the Third Reich are both set on fire and subject to a machine gunning massacre.

Zoller has a line about how moving the movie to a smaller theatre means that it will be a more exclusive (and 100% German) audience. I think the implication is that the theatre is filled exclusively with the Nazi High Command and VIPs of the Nazi propaganda film world.

But your essential point is of course correct—cf. Aldo’s speech about how he can’t abide the thought of Nazis going home and taking off their uniform after the war, etc.

The navel of a mystery, though, is why the two in the theater, when they realize that someone else is burning the place down, don’t seem to be surprised.

I think they were having too much fun killing Hitler to notice.

“ Most reviews I read of this movie (the NYT comes to mind - actually that’s exactly what I am talking about) were upset with the movie for portraying Hans Landa as charming - as if that was going to have people “let their guard down” about the evils of Nazism.”

How absurd. Half the villains in movie history have had some level of charm. Have these reviewers never seen a James Bond movie?

And I think the movie was trying to make that point with the forehead carving sequences: not all Nazis were like Hitler. Guys like Landa or Zoeller could take their uniforms off.

I think they were having too much fun killing Hitler to notice.

This seems likely, since they were having too much fun to remember that they’d planted time bombs on the balcony they were using as a firing platform.

Oh, wait, that was Landa’s doing, wasn’t it?  My bad.

David Bowie needle drops in a film set in 1944. Need I say more?

It’s not like it’s coming out of a radio onscreen. It’s not source music, it’s part of the score. And it’s no more anachronistic than, say, Johnny Greenwood’s music for There Will Be Blood.

Yeah, his movies are all homages to exploitation flicks, and that’s going to mean pretty inevitably that violence against women---including the fear of sexual assault---will be a feature.  But every character in most of his movies is in imminent danger of being shot, beaten to death, or otherwise violently assaulted.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to read this. I mentioned how refreshing it was to see men have to deal with sexual violence in a movie (not women, not children, but men) to a classmate in high school after I saw Pulp Fiction. I thought this showed Tarantino had a feminist bent. I thought the classmate help me tease it out since he was a movie geek too. But he dismissed me saying I was “over thinking it.” Yeah, a movie geek said that to me. And I believed him.
Now I definitely want to see this movie. I was conflicted before. I didn’t want to see Tarantino’s version of Saving Private Ryan. Or any of the other kiss-ass WWII movies.

And I think the movie was trying to make that point with the forehead carving sequences: not all Nazis were like Hitler. Guys like Landa or Zoeller could take their uniforms off.

I thought it was a sly commentary on the Werner von Brauns of the world, the Nazis who were welcomed with open arms by America and the Soviet Union alike after the end of the war. They could give us something, so we were happy to ignore that they’d been working for the Third Reich but a few years before.

On some level, it was defensible in real life. But it still grates, over half a century later. As IB was a revenge fantasy at heart, I thought this was Tarrantino’s way of imagining a world where Nazi muckety-mucks would be forced to wear a scarlet swastika forever, to have their complicity in the death of six million innocents known to all until the day they died.

Incidentally, someone upthread noted that Landa had an arc from liking the “Jew Hunter” nickname to hating it. I disagree. I thought Landa was a sociopath, one who enjoyed the intellectual pursuit of hiding Jews as one might enjoy a crossword puzzle. His heel face turn wasn’t about his waking up and realizing he hated Hitler. It was, as he said, about avoiding the gallows when the war was over, and Germany had lost. Landa’s comment to Aldo and Utvich was, I thought, meant to underline that a whole lot of Nazis changed their brown shirts to white or red after the war, not because they stopped being Nazis, but because they wanted to save their own skin.

Thanks for this review, Amanda.  I too was a little put off by the trailers, but a review in my local newspaper that called the movie “talky” convinced me to go see it on opening night.  And I was riveted.  It was great.  I can’t believe that anyone who had seen the movie would think that what happened between Shoshanna and the Nazi was a “budding romance”.  Every word she said to him was seething with contempt.  Their “date” began with her being forced into a car for no apparent reason, and ended with her crying in terror and rage.  At no point did she ever, once, act as though she wanted him around.

When I went to see the movie some men sat near me.  During the scene with the baseball bat, they all were hooting and laughing and yelling that Quentin Tarantino was the finest filmmaker in the world.  By the end of the movie, one of them had walked out of the theatre and the rest were complaining that it was soooooo boring.  You’ve got to wonder, is Kill Bill, vol 1 the only QT film these cavemen ever saw?  The thing that sticks out in my mind the most about QT films is his dialogue and his ability to, as you say, build tension through long scenes.

I’m just saying that there’s a point where the relentless obsession over WWII as vindicating the American character drifts from harmless self-righteousness to dangerous propaganda.  For instance, the myth of American moral superiority---as proven by WWII---was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.  Saddam is Hitler, remember?

What’s interesting was that most people I knew who fought/grew up during WWII felt that comparison was BS and that people who bought into that comparison had no understanding of what actually happened during that war.  Heck, even some older conservative relatives were more apt to make comparisons between the US invasion of Iraq and Imperial Japan’s invasion of China*....both in the sense of using pretenses to initiate as well as how they turned into quagmires for the respective invaders. 

* Many sources have said that around 25% of Imperial Japan’s military strength of around 5 million men were tied down in China due to resistance activities from formal military units as well as from various resistance groups.

>>>Sorry, but I thought that was brilliant.  QT isn’t interested in historical accuracy.  He’s shoving your face in the fact that this movie is a fantasy.  And in a cool way, too.  Every scene moves the movie further away from the “realistic” conventions of war films towards the spiral of utter fantasy.  That song signaled that it was on.

Amanda, what you’re missing here is that in QT’s past films, the genres he’s used (e.g. Asian action, film noir, crime capers) implicitly lend themselves to fantasy. WWII genre films (by design) don’t apply to this same schism, yet Tarantino just mindlessly plowed thru anyway.

I’m not saying that “IB” didn’t have good things to offer, just that those things were too often sabotaged by Tarantino’s lack of self-control. As such, as in the film’s climax, QT ironically ended up burning his own house down with all his characters locked within.

IMO, next to the painfully talky “Jackie Brown,” “IB” is the most disappointing film he’s ever produced.

Jackie Brown is, of course, brilliant—Tarantino’s most human and most consistent film, definitely his best movie before Inglourious Basterds. And I seriously, seriously do not get anyone complaining about a QT movie being “talky.” Dialogue is the whole goddamn point of a Tarantino movie. They put bits of dialogue on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, fercrissakes. Dialogue is his most outstanding strength as a filmmaker, and its absence is what made Part 1 of Kill Bill so dreary.

If you’re not interested in movies that are as much about being movies as about their own subject matter, you’ll probably find his films baffling.

Not so much baffling as annoying. To someone who enjoys a good movie as entertainment, all of the references and in-jokes can be incredibly annoying, like Tarantino is spending the whole film (use of the word “film” instead of “movie” is part of the entrance fee into motion-picture snobbery, isn’t it?) shouting “LOOK AT HOW MANY MOVIES I’VE SEEN!” It’s kind of frustrating, because I do appreciate good cinematography, good writing, good acting, some relatively subtle elements that go into making a movie good, and QT definitely delivers those things. I guess I just need to accept that his movies aren’t really aimed at me; much as I like movies, I’m not really a film buff and never will be. So the post-modern ‘fullness’ that makes his movies so enjoyable for someone like Amanda can be distracting for someone like me. I just spend the whole time knowing that I’m missing half the joke.

Maybe part of my problem is that I’m still annoyed at QT for his, admittedly extremely minor, contribution to Sin City, which was an absolutely horrible, self-indulgent disaster of a film that really pissed me off at the time (though again, this could be my fault, not being familiar with the source material and all).

Thanks for the review.  Some really good comments, everyone here.  I came away thinking it was a really smart and effective critique of American memory and the ways we use World War Two in particular to affect our own national innocence.

In this telling, World War Two is a fairy tale (it begins “Once upon a time in occupied France”), the way we wish the history actually went.  Americans become avengers of the crime of the Holocaust, Hitler and his henchmen get their just desserts in a hail of gunfire and flames.  That last scene made the movie.  Watching this anti-history we are forced to think about the actual circumstances of US involvement in World War Two. We know the US didn’t enter the war to stop the Holocaust and we know that the war ended only after hundreds of millions of people (not just the German top brass and a few brave martyrs) died.  Knowing that, the violence that we witness that would otherwise be redeeming just seems more senseless. It’s how we’d love to tell it and how we imagine all of our foreign policy crusades since the war, but know that reality is different. 

Then there’s all the ways he interwove American cultural tropes into German contexts--too many and too spot on to be accidental.  Goebells fashioning himself as a studio-era mogul? Germans explicitly identifying themselves as American characters – yeah, the “I am the Negro in America” part but also just a bit earlier when the drunk German soldiers reference Karl May and the German version of noble savagism - “I am Winetou, Chief of the Apaches.” It subtly plays with the American fascination with “playing Indian.” If that was too subtle, Tarantino made his main character “Aldo the Apache” reinforcing the point that Americans have had a habit of attributing savagery to enemies in order to act savage themselves. Then he puts the German high command in a movie theater gleefully cackling at American GIs getting blown away.  (A point I think was lost on the guys next to me who gleefully cackled their own way through all the nazi torture.) And then Hitler gets killed by two guys who are basically suicide bombers. 

You were not supposed to see Americans as Nazis. This was not some half-assed moral equivalency.  You were never supposed to wonder who the bad guys were (and Landa is fucking creepy as hell throughout.) But I’m pretty sure you were supposed to be thinking about and be disturbed by the parallels to a nation that affected its own victimhood as the basis of its foreign policy.

I have a love/hate thing with Tarantino. Oddly both the love and the hate come from the place, his films are so meta. They’re all films about films. Being a film geek means I have a lot of fun at his movies, but it’s like candy in that it’s not especially satisfying.

Oh hey Amanda, I’ve been waiting for a District Nine review from you. Did you do one and I missed it?

There isn’t much nudity in Tarantino’s movies because he’s a foot fetishist. And for some odd reason, foot fetishists (or feet fetishists?) prefer sexy women to be clothed. But as expected BAM! money shot of Hammersmark’s foot. It’s weird, but they’re nice people and good clients, so I’m not gonna complain.

Oddly both the love and the hate come from the place, his films are so meta. They’re all films about films.

I get that.

But one day, QT’s going to have to move onto other story vehicles if he doesn’t want to turn into Night Shyamalan.

Even if you’re squeamish, the violence in Tarantino movies can be...different. When Shosanna was shot, the fake Tarantino “blood spray” effect was such that it looked like she had been full of roses.

I only had a couple problems with the movie:

1. I wasn’t feeling Tarantino’s connection to the material. What I liked so much about Kill Bill and even Death Proof is that his love of Kung Fu / 70’s midnight cinema was was right there. I could really sense how much he loved what he was working with. With Inglorious Basterds, not so much. Maybe it’s because WW2 has just been done to death, but I just wasn’t feeling his connection to the genre. And yes, I realize that he wasn’t trying to make a “normal” film about war. Maybe it’s my own personal “whatever, dood” when it comes to WW2 films.

2. I actually think it could have been longer—broken up into 2 parts, like Kill Bill. The characters were all so rich, I just wanted to know more about them. Yeah, I know, sometimes it’s what you don’t know that makes a character or a movie great, but in this case, I think the story was there, and I think knowing more would have made for an even better movie. I really wanted to know more about Shosanna and Marcel.

Re: sirkowski’s comment.  Interesting.  And oh I just remembered when Aldo tries to get information from Bridget by poking his finger up and down in her bullet wound.  That was gross but it was also the closest we got to a sex scene.  And it was intentionally sexually violent I believe…

I seem to be in the minority who think that Sandler would have been terrible in this movie.  It was bad enough having Mike Myers disguised as an English general.

I have not seen Sandler in anything that has convinced me he could do anything other than light comedy very well.  The contrast between Zohan and the Bear Jew is just too stark. 

Very few actors can do both comedy and serious heavy roles effectively.  John Lithgow is one.  Many others (like Malkovich, DeNiro, Walken) established their heavy credentials first, and then their comedy comes from riffing off their heavy roles.  Many comedians who try to go in the opposite direction fail miserably (Robin Williams comes to mind, as does Jim Carrey).  They are so busy restraining their normal exuberance that they fail completely to realize that “serious” is not the same as “tepid”. 

About the “romance” - really, I have to wonder what planet people live on who think that Shoshanna had anything other than complete contempt for Zoller.  She went to the restaurant with him because he used his power to force her too.  He is so narcissistic that he cannot even entertain the idea that she will not fall for his charms. 

Something people have not touched upon very much is how the tone of the film changes as it progresses.  In the first chapter, the film seems like a serious, sober treatment of the plight of Jews in occupied France.  The first chapter seems very grounded in realism.  But once the Basterds are introduced, the film verges off into pulp. 

Indeed, everything involving Shoshanna felt fairly grounded and realistic.  Everything involving the Basterds felt a bit beyond real (surreal?  I’m not sure if that words fits, but I’m trying to find the right word here.  Absurd?  Perhaps, but that word has existentialist overtones that I’m not aiming for) Only Hans Landa participates in both converging threads of the story.  When interacting with Shoshanna, he is very precise and careful.  When interacting with Aldo, he becomes ludicrous, hopping around the theater lobby in hysterics in response to Bridget von Hammersmark’s ludicrous explanation of her foot injury.

But one day, QT’s going to have to move onto other story vehicles if he doesn’t want to turn into Night Shyamalan.

That’s just ridiculous.  I get that it’s not your taste, but the argument that he’s a hack is fundamentally unsound.  He’s going to be our generation’s Hitchcock or Kubrick.

@46

QT is in no danger of turning into Shyamalan. 

@42

Germans tend both to 1) think of Americans as hypocrites who ignore their own history of slavery and 2) to obsess about the cowboy-and-indian history.  At the time, a good proportion of American films were Westerns, and that colored German (and more broadly, European) perspective on Americans.  I didn’t see the bits you mentioned as pointed comments by QT, but rather as accurate depictions of how Germans view Americans.

The thing that sticks out in my mind the most about QT films is his dialogue and his ability to, as you say, build tension through long scenes.

Death Proof is perhaps the best example of that: a whole long sequence composed of nothing but characters talking to each other, and then everyone dies.  Followed by a another fairly long sequence of characters talking...and one hell of a car chase.

shouting “LOOK AT HOW MANY MOVIES I’VE SEEN!”

*shrug* Post-modernism always puts a lot of people off, but I love allusion-heavy stuff.  He doesn’t make in impenetrable.  I realized a lot of allusions flew past my head, but the movie made perfect sense without them.  Understanding the allusions just adds depth.  It’s a perfect balance.  I fail to see why it’s supposed to be a virtue to avoid heavy references, especially when done with style and a strong sense of humor.  First of all, most of the people who adhere to that aesthetic are full of shit---their movies reference other movies as much as Tarantino’s, they just aren’t honest about it.

For instance, Saving Private Ryan, which was just as heavily laden with the history of filmmaking about WWII, but was boring, unimaginative, and fucking syrupy.  Spielberg’s allusions aren’t as fun and veer into rip-off territory, because he doesn’t think about them any deeper than, “These things are effective at manipulating your audience.” QT may go for shock value, but I dare say he’s not manipulative.  He ropes his fans into playing along, and is fearless about offending people who aren’t willing.

yet Tarantino just mindlessly plowed thru anyway.

If you think it’s mindless, then I’m sorry.  There’s not much we can work with here.  It’s obviously mindful.  He’s making a point that a lot of people don’t want to hear, which is that the WWII genre is also a fantasy, but a dishonest one, because it pretends to be something it’s not.

Look, they’ve made a video game about WWII. Instead of shooting zombies or whatever, you can shoot Nazis.  It just took Tarantino to puncture our self-serving illusions about this.

I don’t know, I’m a bad person, cause I’m probably the only person in my generation who never liked his movies, though I’m sure I’ll get dragged to Inglorious Bastards sometime soon by one of my friends. I get that they’re meta and I understand what he is trying to do, but to me it’s always seemed so sloppy meta, where he basically painstakingly recreated a reimagining of a thousand scenes from the genre in question and then hit blend and vomited it up with a bunch of curse words and a weird hybrid feminism/sexism thing that often seemed to miss the plot where it was earnest and hit it when it was celebrating the exploitation.

But then, it’s gotta be me, cause everyone else loves it even if it’s apparently become trendy to slag on him. I dunno, maybe it’s the fact that he’s the only one who’s American and doing anything remotely new with cinematography with how tricky it is to do postmodernism right or maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten so much of a fill of bad postmodernism in college that I now have prohibitive personal standards for it (cause I still do like Grant Morisson and Andy Kaufman).

54-

I’m actually legitimately interested in that aspect of the movie. The WWII safe card has been in play way too long and has allowed naked propaganda about our role in that conflict to completely dominate everything else to the point where as long as the enemy can be made out to be as bad as the nazis, then you should be allowed to do anything to them. This has been especially costly in the abortion debate.

So I’m looking forward to that at least when I’m eventually dragged.

Also WWII the video game has been going on almost thrice as long as the real world war two. There are closed series of games set in world war II that have surpassed the actual war. It’s the de facto place to go for guiltless killing and bullshit about honor.

Though I do have to begrudgingly give respect to the Call of Duty series for at least attempting to paint the horrors and lack of honor and glory of real war while doing their kill nazis yay tour. Same as I have to give Saving Private Ryan props for its opening scene’s dismantling of the war is pretty war movie trope even if the rest of the movie proceeded to fellate every other trope on the planet.

as long as the enemy can be made out to be as bad as the nazis, then you should be allowed to do anything to them

This was basically the movie’s entire selling point (based on the trailers). Obviously, the movie is very different from what was advertised, but there’s no question he wants you to feel the visceral thrill of torturing, terrorizing, killing, and scalping Nazis. It’s problematized, sure, but the movie doesn’t work if you don’t feel that bloodlust inside you. Which, of course, you do, because they’re fucking Nazis.

Shyamalan is the definition of the one-trick pony.  When you get parodied on Robot Chicken, always saying “What a twist!”, you’ve pretty much got yourself in a rut.

On the other hand, the only shtick that Tarantino gets labeled with is his dialogue and use of movie cliche, usually taking the standard and proceeding to quite wonderfully fold, spindle and mutilate it with obvious glee.  Want a slasher film?  He gives you that, only ending with the killer being the one pleading for mercy as the ones who by all the conventions should have been the victims, mercilessly hunting him.  A kung-fu fight extravaganza that has its big fights at the beginning with the ultimate showdown a long talky bit with a quiet ending.  A crime drama that defined his career, then another one that has defined Samuel L. Jackson’s career since and revived John Travolta’s (for good or evil, I leave to the reader), the controlled crash of a caper film and a blaxploitation film that revived Pam Grier’s career, doing the screenplay for one of the more influential vampire films in the last few decades…

Saving Private Ryan isn’t a bad movie if you chop off the ridiculous last 15 minutes. “Tell me I’m a good man!” Fucking christ.

It’s one thing to spoon feed a “message” your audience, it’s another thing all together to beat them all over the fucking head with it.

Whispers, I see what you’re saying, but I think that the role of the Bear Jew was a comic role.  Darkly comic, sure.  But Sandler’s schtick is best when there’s this boiling rage under it, and it would have been explosive in this part.  There’s a lot of comedy in this movie.  My favorite was Brad Pitt playing Aldo Raine trying to be Italian.

so i don’t go on and on for hours, i’ve leave it thusly: i’ve seen it twice (and i rarely watch movies at all), and i need a poster of shoshanna, stat. bridget was also pretty fucking rad.

and the italian scene, omfg that was great. even just omar with the hand gestures.

58-

Yeah, I think it’s that aspect that most puts me off about his movies. There’s always this weird middle-ground where he’s commenting on how fucked up some movie tropes are (say sexism), but he also needs the male audience coming in and going fuck yeah and there’s that earnest love of those fuck yeah tropes and it often leaves me feeling put off.

I guess I like my deconstructionism a little more deconstructy.

This movie was fantastic. I can’t wait to see it again. We took our 70 year old neighbour with us to see it...a bit worried about possible extreme Tarantino violence, but even she said “meh - not so bad” at the end. I agree with everyone before - the trailers are very misleading - this movie is about Shoshana and Landa - the Basterds are comic (sic) relief.

Btw I think I put off quite a few people by letting them know that 60% of the movie was not in English.

Classic scene - Pitt “Baaahnjuuurno”

Deserves an Oscar but won’t get it - sinister nazi guy who acted in four languages and freaked me the crap out.

What’s so refreshing about this movie is that it’s a big raspberry blown to self-important WWII flicks, particularly Saving Private Ryan, which trotted out every cliche from WWII movies that I can think of without even a hint of self-awareness.

Too right Amanda.

I LOVED the “last word” in this movie. LOVED IT.
I mean you’re sad but at the same time it’s so fitting. Esp. the ghostly laughter.

He’s making a point that a lot of people don’t want to hear, which is that the WWII genre is also a fantasy, but a dishonest one, because it pretends to be something it’s not.

Again, I get that. In fact, QT beat me over the head with this message throughout the entire film, and I understood it the first time he shouted it at me.

He’s going to be our generation’s Hitchcock or Kubrick.

At this point, QT’s got more in common with George Lucas than Hitchcock or Kubrick in that he’s bought into his own fanboy-driven hype machine, and relentlessly borrows what others had forged thru mere originality (e.g. “Reservoir Dogs” vs. “City on Fire,” “Kill Bill” vs. “Shogun Assassin").

agreed also, the david bowie song was PERFECT for her. for her character. who cares about whether it would have been playing on the radio in shoshanna’s office? it’s a movie. real life doesn’t have a soundtrack, but she definitely deserves one in the movie!

“Stupid to fight in basements” = obvious Fight Club joke/reference?

Deserves an Oscar but won’t get it - sinister nazi guy who acted in four languages and freaked me the crap out.

Amen. Christoph Walz was unreal in that role. He’s in my pantheon of all-time great villains, up there with Darth Vader (pre-prequels) and HAL. He was the personification of the Nazi regime—ruthess, evil, efficient, and emotionally detached. One can envision thousands of Landas toiling away, sending Jews and homosexuals and the Roma to their death in their own way, never bothering to worry about it until the second things turned sour. It takes a rare talent to take that kind of evil and make it not just believable, but all too real. Walz won best actor at Cannes; he should win best actor at the Oscars.

At this point, QT’s got more in common with George Lucas than Hitchcock or Kubrick in that he’s bought into his own fanboy-driven hype machine, and relentlessly borrows what others had forged thru mere originality

Bullshit. Lucas is very good at plot—really, he is—but he can’t write dialog to save his life, and he can’t get actors to emote. Ever. (Seriously, what wrecks SWIII for me is not Darth’s “Nooooooo!”, but Obi-Wan looking at archival footage of Anakin killing kids and saying in the tone one might use to order lunch, “Turn it off I can’t watch.")

Tarrantino’s films are derivative, as all works of art are. But they’re gloriously derivative. They wallow in it. While Lucas used the shot from Triumph of Will to frame the awards ceremony in SWIV, he did so apologetically. Tarrantino, contrawise, makes a spaghetti western-slash-World War II revenge flick-slash-metacommentary on war movies-slash-this-slash-that, and opens with music from spaghetti westerns. He’s up front about his influences; that’s part of what he’s talking about.

But then he takes those influences and stands them on their heads. He gives us a caper movie in which the hero lays out the intricate, thirty-two step plan, and then the plan falls apart right away and doesn’t matter anyhow, because it still works. He gives us the lovelorn pursuer/stalker who always gets the girl, except he doesn’t, he kills the girl after she mortally wounds him. He gives us a long introduction—complete with Winston Fucking Churchill—of the British spy who’s going undercover to win the war, only to kill him off two scenes later (though what scenes!). And all along, he gives us characters who are not simply props being moved through the scenery by a director going through his paces, but who are living, breathing, flawed, human characters, who also happen to be the most sparkling conversationalists outside the Algonquin Round Table.

Lucas? Hell, Tarrantino’s a better director than Spielberg. He doesn’t mollycoddle his audience, nor does he manipulate them just for the sake of manipulating them. Fifty years from now, they’ll be studying his films. And generations of directors will show his films the same sort of reverence he shows directors past.

I rate this as Tarantino’s best movie to date.

Friedrich was an amazingly good exploration of the Nice Guy” phenomenon, and gave me a good chance to talk about the concept with the friend I saw the movie with on the drive home.

Also, I love how Landa doesn’t change throughout the movie - he only changes which mask he puts on to get what he wants out of whomever he’s dealing with.

Would go on at greater length, my sinuses are trying to kill me, and that’s about as much coherent thought as I can manage in one sitting.

Amanda, great review of a great film. My heart belongs to Pulp Fiction, but IB is really the better film. The tension in the opening scene was absolutely unbearable and from then on it got only better.

Two points. One, I love his post-modernism as well. I’m not a movie buff, although I love movies, and so I don’t get all of his allusions and references. But his work is good enough to stand on its own merit. And it’s playful and funny, which is what good po-mo is all about. I think a lot of folks who don’t like his work because of how referential it is are missing the humor of it. He’s not just reconstructing a scene from a different film, he’s de-constructing it, turning it inside out, showing the ridiculousness of movie tropes and cliches it employs (e.g. Kill Bill, the scene with Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu walking out of the club to fight and all of a sudden it’s a perfect idyllic Japanese scene with two inches of unstained, pure snow).

I think he was a little more serious with some of his po-mo leanings this time around - the scene of fire and Shoshanna’s face filling the screen in her theater then our screen is haunting and beautiful and it also implicates the audience. I’m Jewish and Russian; my grandmother survived the siege of St. Petersburg and my grandfather fought in the Battle of Stalingrad (all two years of it - the Soviet victory in that battle, by the way, was the turning point in the war, so Americans’ belief that “we saved Europe” is a bit of a laugh). He would never talk about that. So WWII was something I grew up with as permeating the culture and the family I grew up in. There were moments in this film that were pretty emotional for me, whereas something like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List leave me absolutely cold. This kind of emotional power is not something most people would expect from a post-modern film, so it seems to me that QT has also grown a lot with this film. He was always a director with a lot to say, but I think now he has become someone who has a lot of powerful things to say.

And my final point. Brad Pitt faking Italian was absolutely hilarious. When he said “Arivederci” with that over-the-top Italian accent layered with his over-the-top Southern accent, I just about died laughing and finally accepted that Brad Pitt is a great actor after all!

Another final point - QT is such an obvious foot fetishist; it’s unbelievable how many don’t notice! He really went over-the-top with it here - I mean, the cast with a high heel built in? Seriously?! Love it!

He’s up front about his influences; that’s part of what he’s talking about.

Jeff, QT’s influences are all he can talk about because everything he fucking does on-screen is borrowed from someone else.

As others have pointed out, it’s as if every frame of “IB” features Tarantino in an unspoken commentary track with him playing “Guess The Reference!”

As for my comparison to Lucas, re-read it. I never claimed that Lucas could write dialogue to save his life; I said that, like Lucas, QT has begun buying into his own hype and his work is suffering for it.

But for the record, although it needed to be cut in several places, QT did a good job for creating dialogue for “IB” even though I quickly grew tired of scene after scene of Nazis grilling other people for their “odd” accents or when they got their leg set in a cast.

Also, is there a fucking movie of his where Tarantino hasn’t used a goddamn Mexican standoff?

I completely agree with you.  I saw it on Saturday afternoon and will be seeing it again this weekend with my mom.  She’s very excited.  I also saw Pulp Fiction with her.  I was just shy of 17 and couldn’t get in alone.  She loved it.

(My favorite? Pitt’s character’s alias as he pretends to be Italian in one scene is Enzo Castellari---if I remember correctly---and that’s the director of the original Italian movie titled The Inglorious Bastards.)

Having seen it tonight, I note the credits have Enzo Castellari - as himself…

I’ve had two comments whisked off into the aether...is this thing working?

Tarantino himself has copped to this, coyly admitting that he doesn’t really want to write for men, that he thinks women are more interesting.

That sounds a lot, however, like saying men are the unmarked state. Women are more interesting if you divide the world into people and women.

I mean, I haven’t seen many interviews with or profiles of Tarantino, that may not be the angle he’s coming from, but if it is, it’s another form of sexism.

Tarantino uses the vehicle of a war movie to dismantle the rom com trope of the persistent Nice Guy® suitor who wears down a woman’s resistance by not going away.  In most movies, we’re supposed to see the annoying guy who hangs around and does you favors as adorable, and cheer when the heroine warms to him.  In this movie, the guy who won’t take no for an answer is a Nazi, a violent prick, and a rape threat.

I think a lot of men who buy into the Nice Guy® thing would watch this and say “there, see, he’s a nice guy, and she;s a bitch.” Particularly when you know going in (and certainly by the time he becomes aggressive) that this really isn’t a movie with obvious good guys and bad guys, insofar as a movie about Nazis can avoid having obvious good guys and bad guys.

In that regard Denise’s comment (37) is actually heartening: those guys may have recognized themselves at their worst.

Hey - I just noticed.  Due to the parallel plotlines, it didn’t pass the Bechdel Test.  The only time two named female characters were speaking, one of them was literally just repeating a male’s comments.

8-)

“Also, is there a fucking movie of his where Tarantino hasn’t used a goddamn Mexican standoff?”

Death Proof, obviously.

There was a Mexican Standoff in Kill Bill?  I don’t remember one.

I also don’t remember one in Jackie Brown.

CHV, I think you’re missing that point that we DO like these things about his movies. I went to film school and in every class there are plenty of people who hate on each major director. The QT haters always want to show you a clip of something he borrowed from. Great, he borrowed something, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t change it.

I love 70s midnight cinema. Love it. But I always have a hard time reconciling how enjoyable the movies are with how prevalent and normalized rape is in those films. When QT made Death Proof he took that stuff, added his style, and I end up getting to watch a movie that has all the things I love from that genre, except the women aren’t just victims, they’re also tough. That’s a win for me.

If you don’t enjoy it much, that’s cool. But you keep mentioning this stuff like we don’t get he is doing it. We know, We like it. His movies aren’t “Family Guy,” where a reference is random and thrown in but they don’t actually make anything happen. QT’s references are also a way to develop the characters and move story along.

As Salvador Dali said: “Those who don’t want to imitate anything produce nothing.”

That said, there isn’t a moment of this film I would change. This is the best review I have read of it as well. The Nice Guy thing was so dead on, the boyfriend and I were talking about that on the ride home.

Hey - I just noticed.  Due to the parallel plotlines, it didn’t pass the Bechdel Test.  The only time two named female characters were speaking, one of them was literally just repeating a male’s comments.

Wrong. At one point Shoshanna and Francesca discuss movies, albeit briefly.