Jacky Ido and Melanie Laurent contemplate where the axe ought to fall in Basterds
I can’t think of a single contemporary filmmaker who brings out the scolding third-grade teacher in so many cinephiles more than Quentin Tarantino. Get thee to just about any film-enthusiast message board, or any comments thread to a post about Tarantino on any film blog, and you’ll see any number of what we might call “Work Habits And Character” complaints, which all boil down to something like “While Quentin is a bright, clever, and sometimes resourceful student, he needs to focus more on the ‘real world’ and less on his own personal obsessions if he ever hopes to amount to something.” Put another way: Quentin Tarantino could be a genuinely great filmmaker if only he could get over his puerile, annoying insistence on making Quentin Tarantino movies.
And so. Inglourious Basterds, which is a loud, proud, unabashed Quentin Tarantino movie that will not satisfy the scolders in any way, shape, or form. And which I found one of the most balls-out insane, and insanely exhilarating, films that I’ve seen in many a year, and cannot wait to see again, maybe three or four more times before it hits DVD.
More than multi-leveled pop-culture references and cross-hierarchical cinephilic fervor, the Tarantino project has always been, at heart, about wish-fulfillment, largely of a fairly adolescent variety. Note one of the central hooks of Tarantino’s screenplay True Romance, filmed by Tony Scott in 1993: that a guy who works in a comic-book store can win the unconditional love and fierce devotion of a smoking-hot hooker in just one night. (Tarantino’s former associate Roger Avary took that highly improbably notion and ran even further with it for his 1994 picture Killing Zoe.) The other pictures Tarantino’s directed have almost all been about, among other things, different construction of cool, and all the completely cool shit that his cool people can do because he’s pulling their strings. Even his most putatively mature film, 1997’s Jackie Brown, is largely about Quentin Tarantino getting to do some really cool fantasy shit—he’s adapting a novel by Elmore Leonard, and casting not only Pam Grier and Robert Forster but also Robert Fucking DeNiro in it, and how many movie geeks have ever conjured up the mojo to do something like that, punk?
With Basterds we have Tarantino doing wish-fulfillment on a world-historical stage—rewriting the end of World War II. This takes the kind of chutzpah, both conceptual and logistical, that only a past master of grindhouse cinema could muster. In almost anybody else’s hands the outrageousness of the various scenarios enacted in this epic would be an insult to history, but here they’re not, because although the stage of this film might be world historical, Inglourious Basterds is finally not about history, or reality, or any such thing but about movies, which is all that any of Tarantino’s movies have ever been about.
And it is, for all that, or maybe because of all that, a picture that is sometimes genuinely and breathtakingly moving. The care with which Tarantino sets up his imagined world, a world fraught with pain and excruciating tension but dotted with edenic moments—I was particularly taken with a single shot of Melanie Laurent sitting in a bistro, wearing a very chic beret, elegantly smoking a cigarette and reading a French translation of Leslie Charteris’ The Saint In New York—gives off a burnished glow in every frame. And throughout,Tarantino revels in his major inheritance from Godard, which is, simply, an audacious freedom. The freedom to do twenty-minute set pieces in which characters sit at a barroom table and appear to do pretty much nothing to advance the plot, but in reality up the ante of tension and empathy with every line and exchanged glance. The freedom to toggle, within seconds, between searing, indignant pulp earnestness, and barn-door-broad burlesque schtick that might even have given Airplane!-era Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker pause, and keep doing it over and over, as he does in the film’s final “chapter.” The freedom to concoct a story wherein cinema’s existence …and destruction…save civilization. And more.
The film is not perfect. While I’m not an Eli Roth hater in principle, I do remain perplexed at Tarantino’s conviction that the young filmmaker is somehow a compelling screen presence. However, any complaints anybody has aired about Brad Pitt’s performance ought not be taken at all seriously—he’s a scream. Christoph Waltz, as Pitt’s opposite number, IS all that and a bag of chips, but really, the whole damn cast is pretty awe-inspiring—yeah, even Mike Fucking Myers. And even Diane Kruger. But Mélanie Laurent made the biggest impression on me, for reasons we can discuss after a few more of you see the film. Which I obviously recommend you do.
Oh, glory be…
Just fucking get released already!!
Okay, I was on the fence about this movie, but now I just have to see it.
Looks like a ton of fun. Great review, sir.
whoa, whoa, whoa wait a second here–what would jeffrey wells think!?
in almost anybody else’s hands the outrageousness of the various scenarios enacted in this epic would be an insult to history, but here they’re not, because although the stage of this film might be world historical, Inglourious Basterds is finally not about history, or reality, or any such thing but about movies, which is all that any of Tarantino’s movies have ever been about.
Glen, let me be clear on this. If a cinephilic German auteur of QT’s age and equivalent talent, say, restaged the battle of Stalingrad only this time with the German side winning, and causing a coup d’état in Russia deposing Stalin, and did it with corresponding film-historical emphasis that would NOT be an insult to history as well?
Whoa! This completely counteracts the mixed/negative buzz coming out of Cannes in my estimation. I’m now full-on excited about this business. Next weekend can’t arrive fast enough, although I do have a week’s worth of goodies to see – Thirst, District 9, Lorna’s Silence, and maybe Ponyo. But damn, my head will be elsewhere…
@ Larry Gross: Assuming I accept your hypothesis, I’d have to answer, “It depends on how good the movie is,” and then be glad that German cinema has yet to produce a tyro with commensurate talent and audacity to Tarantino’s.
BUT—I don’t accept your hypothesis, because, for one thing, Tarantino’s film does not rewrite history that radically. As in real life, the Allies still win here. (Is that a spoiler?) They just win differently. SO I would say that your proposal doesn’t hold quite enough water to float what I presume to be your indignation.
Which isn’t to say that your argument is entirely untenable, or that more refined arguments against the film’s take on history wouldn’t be more persuasive. I’m interested in hearing them, honestly; as much as I enjoyed the film, I do think there’s a position from which to argue that Tarantino’s liberty-taking is excessive.
One interesting thing about the film’s titular “Basterds” is how removed they are from anything like an “Allied” or even American mission. They come off very much as renegades, at a remove from the usual U.S. forces portrayed in WWII films, which aren’t even portrayed in this picture. They truly are a band apart, as they say!
Just for the record Glen–in my German alternative to Inglorious Basterds I didn’t say Germany won the war as the result of winning Stalingrad. Your point about the ‘renegade’ non-institutionalized status of the basterds goes in the direction of the film’s ambition to take place in some privileged ‘non-historical’ space. I guess my question is, at what point is being outside of history (for whatever aesthetic reasons) a way of denying it. Killing Hitler in ’42 implies the non-occurrence of the Holocaust as we historically know it to have occurred,(1944 was the most murderous year of the war in terms of Nazi war crimes) and actually makes my Germans-winning-Stalingrad analogy rather tame by comparison. None of this would matter as much quite, if Tarantino didn’t obstinately insist that his film is a critique of “Jewish passivity” as depicted in other World War II films, an attitude he reproaches consistently for not being realistic enough. That indeed is the height of chutzpah.
@Larry
I don’t know if you’re rewriting history it matters when you start, but FYI the film’s Hitler makes it all the way to June of ’44.
I’ve noticed the Tomatometer ticking upwards after a very mixed early response from Cannes, which gives the impression that the QT haters (not a judgment call, he’s just an artist of the love-him-or-hate-him variety, and most people drew their lines in the sand ages ago) are just engaging in familiar rituals, with this film becoming an easy target due to its faux-“historical” elements.
Truth be told, QT can sometimes drive me up the wall in interviews, being overtly immature and egocentric, and yet somehow I feel that some form of (filmmaking, if not thematic) maturity slips in through the cracks in most of his films. He has a way of drawing out, or subverting, scenes in creative ways, and I’d have to say that amongst current filmmakers engaged in a degree of arrested adolescence, his films tend to be amongst the most eminently watchable. Yeah, I greatly preferred spending time with the slinky first group of women in Death Proof (which I don’t really consider anything more than a lark in his ouevre) over the car-obsessed tomboys that occupied the film’s second half (Zoe Bell’s awesome stunt work notwithstanding), but I have a pretty strong feeling that there’s a great deal more variety of tone and subject matter in IB. It’s the last wide-release flick of the summer I’ve been looking forward to, though I’m a little apprehensive about sitting in a theater inevitably filled with those expecting a slam-bang action flick (thanks to the misleading ads), as opposed to another of QT’s gabfests. But I’ll just tune them out, and soak up the film’s atmosphere and unique, stylized dialogue, as I have with previous Tarantino movies.
Based on your reaction to say, Kill Bill Vol. 2, I was actually expecting that you’d like IB, Glenn, but I’m pleased to hear just how enthusiastic you are about it.
Thanks, Glenn. I’ve been waiting for this movie since I was a Tarantino-worshipping senior in high school. And, Larry, honestly, who gives a fuck? Don’t be a scold. It’s high time for the Third Reich to fall at the hands of cinephiles. Why the hell not? Oh, and JC, I dig “Death Proof” much, and Zoe Bell is one sexy woman. I cannot wait to see this movie.
JC, you seem to have the exact same take and approach to Tarantino as I do, including your luke-warm reaction to DEATH PROOF. But I say to my wife over and over, whenever we see Tarantino making an ass of himself on TV, that no one who behaves like that in public should be able to make movies as good as some of his are. And not just good, but great – and not just GREAT, but great in the specific ways in which his best films are. I’m thinking of JACKIE BROWN and KILL BILL 2. The patience he shows in telling his stories is just one of the things I love and appreciate most about his work.
Glenn,
Did you see Ebert’s blog posting about Armond White in which he essentially concludes that he is a “troll?” Just curious to hear your thoughts.
Nathan: I save all my White material for my Auteurs’ column, which goes up later today. All I’m gonna say here is that it takes a man of real courage to rock the camouflage pants A.W. was sporting at the “Basterds” screening yesterday.
I never can miss a Tarantino film, and after reading your review I feel even more compelled.
“All I’m gonna say here is that it takes a man of real courage to rock the camouflage pants A.W. was sporting at the “Basterds” screening yesterday.”
That’s funny- I almost spilled my coffee thanks to that little quip. Can’t wait to see “Inglourious Basterds.” Glad to see you liked it. The word out of Cannes was sort of meh but, then again, a lot of the critics who griped about it had similar gripes with other QT movies that I loved. I’m hoping the same goes for “Taking Woodstock,” which got a mediocre response at Cannes, but is also by a filmmaker I admire.
Jeffrey Wells’ freakout over this movie is EPIC.
I heard after Sight and Sound panned Death Proof QT cornred the editor at a screening and bellowed, “I’m a scholar of cinema!” Which, yeah, I’ve read a LOT of comic books and graphic novels, as many as QT’s seen movies, Does that make me a Scholar Of Sequential Art? Well, given the extraordinarily low standards of comics criticism, yes, but that’s beside the point.
I agree with most of your points, Glenn. I really liked this.
But I’m not sure I trust my own judgment, cuz as a Jewish film critic this movie was pretty much custom-built for me.
@Dan Coyle
The man’s got an enormous ego, no question. Then again, he’s earned it. He hasn’t made a shit film yet.
People hate Tarantino because he’s talented, and, let’s be honest here, instead of expanding that talent into acceptable areas, the guy’s still making genre movies. He was supposed to follow the arc of “beloved brilliant artist” and give that shit up in favor of period dramas.
Which I guess in a way he did. Kind of.
The Other Dan: yeah, you’ve got a point there. He’s doing whatever the fuck he wants. I don’t think he’s going to make a film as good as Resevoir Dogs or Jackie Brown again, but we ain’t the boss of him.
And I’d argue Kill Bill is pretty shit, but my reasons for disliking it are too complicated to express in a mere blog post. However, I can’t deny both films’ raw power, and how it sticks with you.
I can’t wait for IGB- good or ill, I’ll get my damn money’s worth.
@Dan Coyle -
“And I’d argue Kill Bill is pretty shit, but my reasons for disliking it are too complicated to express in a mere blog post.”
Nevertheless, I’d be extremely interested to see you give it a shot, if you felt like it. I personally think that KILL BILL as a whole, though particularly the second half, is the best thing he’s ever done.
Kill Bill 1 is my least favorite of his films, but I absolutely love the second film. The reason, I think, must be my own interest in QT’s influences. The entire thing is a brilliant riff on The Count of Monte Cristo, right down to the way that the narrative omits the hero’s name until the very end, but my knowledge of martial-arts cinema is paltry, so the first half just seemed like what everyone always accuses QT of making: a film that resonates more with its cinematic influences than with the real world. Of course, when I’m down with the influences, as in Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction, or KB 2, this resonance seems far more soulful, intelligent, and moving. And when he acknowledges the wide gulf between movie coolness and the grind of everyday life, as he did throughout JB, the pathos is almost unbearable. I’m thinking of that scene where Jackson shoots De Niro, says “your ass used to be cool once” (or something), and then steps out into the empty, industrial-LA streets, looking more like a pathetic 70s anachronism than the bad ass he once was.
Here’s one reason I didn’t like Kill Bill 2, at the end you realize Bill is a boring nothing character and all he has to say is unpersuasive analogues concerning fish and supermen. We barely see him for most of the movie and we’re waiting for that final showdown, and then the movie ends with philosophy department cafeteria show down. It seems like the pay-off was based on something as uninteresting as the “Like a Virgin” speech at the beginning Reservoir Dogs. Let’s change the narrative of Dogs and have Orange ask White just before he kills him “Why are you killing me? I thought you liked me”. And then White will do the whole Madonna monologue and explain it “I’m just like that whore, and your big dick made me feel like a virgin”. BANG The End
I don’t get most of the references in KB1. That’s because they’re insanely obscure; Tarantino drops a music cue from “Master of the Flying Guillotine”, for Christ’s sake. I think watching a Tarantino movie and trying to get the references is rather foolish in the end. They’re obscure, and honestly it’s unrewarding, because you sat through a bunch of bad movies. Tarantino digs out the gems and strings them on a chain so you don’t have to.
KB1 is a kung-fu movie. A well-shot kung-fu movie with a couple of emotionally jolting moments (remember when the Bride first wakes up; Tarantino just lets the camera sit there as this woman realizes she’s lost her child), possibly one of the greatest kung-fu movies ever made, but it’s ultimately a kung-fu movie.
“a film that resonates more with its cinematic influences than with the real world.”
Statements like this always interest me.
I disagree, obviously. All filmmaking is somehow disconnected from the real world. ESPECIALLY the films concerned with realism. There’s no such thing as a “real” film, just a “real-seeming” one. Even documentaries elide, embellish, omit. Fiction film? Forget it. You’re making something up.
So to make up for that gap, there’s the layering on of artistic pretense. Maybe handheld camerawork. Maybe “non-actors”. Maybe location shooting in slums.
But it’s pretense, in the end. I wish more filmmakers were aware of that. I certainly wish we’d stop privileging some forms of make-believe over others.
Dan: I should have been clearer, since I actually agree with you. When someone with Tarantino’s deep love for cinema interrogates that love in his own films, there really is no distinction between cinema and the real world, performance and authenticity–that relationship, in fact, is the source of pretty much all that is funny, moving, or deep in his films. Most great artists are, to some degree, self conscious about genre in particular, if not about their medium in general. But when I don’t get the references, as in KB1, then I’m cut off from whatever personal connection to cinema that QT is expressing through his film. With Godard, few people had that problem, because the Cahiers crowd revered and play with the tropes of a B‑movie cinema that their audience all knew. Grindhouse and kung-fu cinema are more marginal. I still think Tarantino’s at his best when he’s writing between the lines of a genre rather than just re-creating that genre.
If the Americans aren’t even going to watch “Inglourious Basterds”, then why should anyone else? The Americans don’t even know what a jew or a nazi is for crying out loud, how are we to believe that they’ve just “become” jewish? For the purpose of a movie? By magic? By some alien American technology? You’ve got to be joking.
Uggggghhhh… You’re almost making me want to see this. But not quite. Ultimately, I just don’t believe QT’s “It’s all a movie” line; movies are watched by people in the real world, without which there are no movies. And given that a movie exists in the real world, I just can’t stomach what looks to be “24” for the smart set, i.e. “we hate these baddies, so we’re gonna torture ’em, and that’s gonna be awesome.” I mean, maybe the movie has levels I’m not seeing in the trailer, but everything I’ve seen so far makes the whole thing look like a court-jester jerkoff fantasia for Lydie England.
Also… I find the comparisons between Tarantino and Godard’s movie-ness to be weirdly disconnected from what Godard did. I mean, yes, Godard sees the movies as part of the world. But Godard also pretty clearly thinks the peasantry, the bourgeois, the holocaust, the communards, Mao, and so on, are real too. He doesn’t think they’re inherently more important than The Searchers, but that is, for him, a source of much torment—his whole turn away from filmmaking in the 70s is wrapped up in his ambivalence towards film in the face of social change.
Tarantino feels no such ambivalence, because he’s California-eager to simply ignore anything that makes him uncomfortable, and thinking always makes him uncomfortable. He can’t grapple with historical ironies, because he can’t think about history, only about the dumbest movie narratives, which always wrap everything up contradiction-free (and it’s worth noting just how different the two directors approach to narrative is—Godard is interrogating and subverting it, Tarantino shuffles the deck a little to make it more fun, but never, ever undermines it in any way).
I mean, I can’t imagine Godard making a movie with this much torture and not making some reference to Guantanamo somewhere. But for Tarantino, Guantanamo is just such a drag, so he just pretends that torturing enemies in wartime is something that movies invented, and therefore, totally groovy.
@TFB: I’ll try and not take over-exasperated umbrage at your presumptions about “Basterds” and say that I kind of think that Lynndie England, as you imagine her, would be bored shitless with this film. And I will also say that when I compare Tarantino and Godard, I’m not doing so in every particular. Certainly Tarantino’s work has never had the intellectual aspirations of Godard’s work, and Tarantino has very little interest in actual history or philosophy. AS I WROTE, the correspondence I see is in terms of cinematic freedom, and if I may elaborate, has more to do with what Godard went for in the likes of “Une Femme Est Une Femme” and “Pierrot Le Fou” than with “Numero Deux” or “Notre Musique.”
I was talking about this the other day with a friend and I said, “You know, when Tarantino called his second movie ‘Pulp Fiction,’ he wasn’t being ironic. It’s what he does.” American soldiers scalping Nazis is essentially a pulp concept, not one gleaned from Guantanamo. And one is of course absolutely free to take it or leave it, but sputtering moral indignation at Tarantino because you perceive him as giving aid and comfort to the likes of England and her superiors strikes me as…well, rather off-target.
Even if QT probably thinks Adorno is a minor Stan Lee character he can’t quite place – the one who outwitted villains by redecorating their apartments, maybe? – he isn’t as tone-deaf to the zeitgeist as all that. My hunch is that European audiences will have no trouble making the Gitmo connection even without one-plus-one signposts, since all the American characters in IB are sent up as blundering yahoos whose cowboy bloodlust and know-nothing primitivism regularly mystifies and appalls their Old World colleagues on the Allied side. The fact that American moviegoers probably won’t register this adds even more tang, in a STARSHIP TROOPERS kind of way.
And before the “torture” meme becomes common currency even on SCR, let me point out that there really aren’t any torture scenes. Plenty of grisly, exuberant butchery, yes – but torture as Dick Cheney advocates it, no. That may seem like splitting hairs in a movie that features scalpings, but I don’t think it’s irrelevant.
Wait, first you say that I.B. can’t possibly be an Abu Gihrab mash note because it’s too arty for Lynndie England to enjoy, then you says it’s all pulp fiction (an inherently populist form) so don’t be uncool ’cause it’s just a movie maaaaan? That seems… contradictory. But to phrase my response in the form of a question: If we posit that 24 is evil and fascist for its deliberate whipping up of pro-torture sentiment at a time when such is being hotly debated, then what makes I.B. not subject to the same charge? Because Q.T. seems to do it accidentally, rather than deliberately?
As for Godard: Yes, I know you’re not saying that Tarantino often includes quotations from Continental philosophers. And I would debate your point about cinematic freedom—one of the exasperating things about Tarantino is that for all his court-jester toying with narrative, he always ties up all the threads in a tidy, unthreatening little bow by the end (which is why Pulp Fiction’s techniques were instantly adapted to television, and Alphaville remains gloriously undigestible). But my point is this: In Godard, there’s a hyperconsciousness of the movieness of movies, which is often exploited for comic or jarring effect, like in the final section of Pierrot. But said comic and jarring effect is only possible if there’s some understanding that movies and life are different. What’s missing in Tarantino is an awareness that there is something in life that isn’t included in Shaw brothers movies, something with relevance to those watching, and making, movies.
It is indisputably hilarious when Marvin gets his brains blown out in Pulp Fiction, and much has been said about Tarantino’s transgressive wit in that scene, and his filmmaking skill at making us laugh at the sight of an innocent person getting shot dead. But the difference between a cinematic wit and a drooling moron is an understanding that there’s a difference between actors pretending to kill someone, and an actual person being killed. But Tarantino seems not to perceive that gap (or at least, unable to make that gap a conscious part of his films), and thus ends up firmly on the drooling moron side of the ledger.
Mostly, this doesn’t bother me too terribly much—he makes dumbass action flicks for people who think they’re better than Michael Bay movies but whatever, to each his own. But to have a movie about how cool it is to torture wartime enemies come out in the middle of a very big, public debate about the morality of torturing enemies, well, that moves us away from The Blue Light and into Triumph of the Will.
And @ tc: Yeah, I imagine the Europeans will notice that. That the Americans are torturing yahoos, horrifying to the Europeans, and that said yahoos succeed in ending the war and (as I’ve heard) killing Hitler earlier than those stupid liberal FDRniks in real life. That is, that torturing yahoos are apparently, in Tarantino’s mind, completely teh aw3z0me.
@TFB: And what did you not understand about me saying that there really aren’t any “torture” scenes? If you want to keep using that word after seeing the movie, be my guest. But I gather you haven’t.
“Pulp fiction” might be an “inherently populist form,” but I’m not talking about what it is inherently, I’m referring to the actual stuff. Pulp. Fiction. Depraved stuff on cheap paper. EC Comics. That kind of shit. That’s where a large part of Tarantino’s imagination springs from. But you’re right. I have no idea what Lyndie England’s into, or not into. But as unattractive as she might be, she was also a stooge, for what it’s worth.
But yeah, tc’s right: to call it a movie about “how cool it is to torture wartime enemies” is a pretty definite indication that you haven’t seen it. But it’s clearly an idea you want to cherish, so be my guest.
No, I haven’t seen it. I’m just basing my impression on the trailer, which centers around a big speech about how super-cool it is to spread fear and terror through the enemies, and what I’ve read from those who have seen it. I suppose you could say that carving swastikas on an enemy’s forehead, or tying them up at gleefully watching them sweat as a dude with a bat advances on them, is not the same thing at all as what went on at Abu Gihrab. But I can’t say that seems like a particularly substantial difference.
And no, I don’t know either what England likes in movies. But I’d bet you dollars to donuts that Charles Granier will think this movie is totally sweet.
@ TFB: Okay, man, you got me. I’m busted. I blog here under the name “Glenn Kenny” but on my birth certificate you’ll see the name David Addington. And you might know “tc” better as John Yoo. Happy?
WOLVERINES!!!!!!!
In this case, I can guarantee that watching the trailer makes you an expert on the movie at about the same level that watching the filming of a scene from Can-Can made Nikita Khruschev an expert on Hollywood. But no matter.
In the scene you refer to – incidentally the worst one in the movie, even though Harvey Weinstein hopes we’ll think otherwise – the German soldier who refuses to give information isn’t told that he’ll suffer until he gives over. He’s told he’ll be killed, as he promptly (and gaudily) is. As for the carved swastikas, without spoiling the climax, they set up one of Tarantino’s most startling and politically incorrect jokes – the implication that Nazism is and should be an eternal stigma, no matter how someone tried to hedge later. I can’t wait to see how they react in Deutschland.
I sometimes get the feeling that if, someday, the Earth were to tilt off its axis, somehow causing the majority of artists to drift from the Left to the Right, most liberals would not be able to handle it. Conservatives know that the vast majority of actors and directors are liberals, but I assure you that we go to the movies anyway. But the second someone gets a whiff (often misleading) that a filmmaker might not be as big a lefty as everyone had assumed, the conversation takes on this “What should be done about this?” flavor. Look at the nonsense with Apatow. Apatow! Not even, I don’t know, Scorsese.
Tarantino is one of the least political major filmmakers I can think of, but the hand-wringing over what “Inglourious Basterds” says about his political consciousness is already starting. How completely boring.
God, some people really take in art for all the wrong reasons.
Lest my meaning be understandably misconstrued, while reading my previous comment, you should mentally replace “all the wrong reasons” with “the lamest reasons.” Thanks.
Bill, while I disagree that “most” liberals would not be able to take such a seismic shift– after all, I think more liberals went to see Apatow’s latest film than complained about any perceived politics, just as I think most conservatives aren’t dumb-fucks like Ann Coulter– I will agree that that sentiment, the “is it safe for me to like x” approach, is awfully tiresome.
Or, to say that all more succinctly, you have a point, sir, and you made it well.
Bill, I’m fairly certain most “liberal” artists are aware that John Ford, Hawks and some dude named Eastwood hold conservative points of view. They haven’t been assigned to film re-education camps yet.
@bill: speaking as an Eastwood and John Wayne fan who’d pick She Wore A Yellow Ribbon as the last movie I’d watch if I had two hours to live, I do think you’re fond of generalizing about “liberals” with too broad a brush. That said, I’ll agree with you if you want to say that the pot doesn’t have much to teach the kettle on that count. But the “Is this movie good for Our Side?” gatekeepers are tiresome no matter which end of the spectrum they’re guarding. I had some hopes for Big Hollywood, since I’d love to read brainy film criticism grounded in a conservative POV. But every time I’ve swung by, it’s overloaded with shrieks about Hollywood’s (actually very timorous) Liberal Agenda – all about creating bogeymen, as opposed to evaluating the work. If you know of a better site besides your own blog, please direct me to it.
@Tom – You’re right, of course. I exaggerated. But I stand by the sentiment.
@Christian – True, but Ford and Hawks aren’t around to weigh in on current issues, and everybody’s had a good three or four decades to get used to Eastwood’s politics. Besides that, he rarely makes overtly political movies. Besides THAT, I’ve heard some liberals attempt to make arguments that Eastwood is less conservative than he claims to be, generally citing “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters to Iwo Jima” as exhibits A and B, as though no true conservative could have ever made such films.
@tc – As I said, I exaggerated my initial point, but I did so in order to make the points. That’s how points are often made. I do agree that the Conservative equivelant of this argument is no less exasperating. I can’t agree that the Hollywood Liberal Agenda, when it goes into effect, isn’t all that timorous – I probably think it goes into effect less often than the Big Hollywood people, though.
The tendency to look at all art through a political prism is unspeakably dull (and more often than not weakly reasoned, to boot), but I don’t know of very many sites where the host makes a point of stating their politics that doesn’t do that very thing. If you have visited my site, then you know I make a much bigger deal about my conservatism HERE than I do THERE (and I’m sorry about that, Glenn). But the number of left-leaning film sites outnumber the right-leaning ones by about, oh, I don’t know, 10 to 1, and I can only name a small handful of ostensibly liberal sites that don’t strain the work through their own political sieve. The right-leaning sites that make a big deal of their conservatism are trying to make it clear that there’s an alternative. I’m not terribly keen on how they go about doing that, but why they should be kicked around more than their liberal counterparts, I don’t know.
@Bill: naturally, I don’t know what you’re talking about, since I have NEVER (Tennessee Williams intonation here) exaggerated a point in order to help make it stick in readers’ minds. Uh-uh, not even once. And so much for that joke.
Yes, I know you don’t assert your politics on “The Kind of Face You Hate” the way you occasionally – far from always, may I say – do on SCR. But your comments here are what turned me into a fan of your posts there, so I can’t help seeing your site as a smart conservative’s take on this thing we call film.
I wish there were more blogs like yours, but isn’t one reason liberal-oriented movie sites predominate on Ye Web simply that latte-slurping rootless cosmopolitans like us are more comfortable getting into aesthetic arguments about topics like The Greatness of Cinema? You’ve got to admit that most right-wing spokespeople these days don’t exactly encourage people to pay attention to art unless it’s a useful source of someone to demonize. We ain’t gonna get OReilly’s thoughts on Lars von Trier unless he decides Antichrist is a symptom of the secular-humanist conspiracy – which, to anyone who’s seen the damn thing, will be a better joke than the movie itself ever coughs up.
As for calling Hollywood’s liberal agenda “timorous,” I stand my ground. I assume we’re both equally disgusted by Sean Penn sucking up to Hugo Chavez in real life, but that doesn’t mean Sean’s next film will be a Chavez biopic. He’s an idiot, but his agent isn’t a fool.
“I’ve heard some liberals attempt to make arguments that Eastwood is less conservative than he claims to be, generally citing “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters to Iwo Jima” as exhibits A and B, as though no true conservative could have ever made such films.”
I think that’s because both sides tend to exaggerate and, to a degree, vilify the other. And while I’m naturally more inclined to take umbrage when the left is attacked as being, I don’t know, America-hating terrorist hippies who want to force trees to have abortions or something, I will admit that the right tends to get painted with a somewhat broader brush, that you’re right that they’re kicked around more than their liberal counterparts. In the minds of many on the left, being conservative is synonymous with the gay-bashing, racist, reactionary, anti-intellectual fringe. It’s a bit scarier, and bit more unflattering, than being ineffectual namby-pambies, and I feel for you, Bill.
I’m frankly hoping that in this time of crisis for the party, the GOP jettisons the loonies and returns to the tenets of conservatism as first expressed by Pup Buckley. Now, I may personally disagree completely with those tenets– I’m not the sort to stand athwart to history– but I think I can disagree with them amicably and vice-versa.
Oh, and for another obvious example re: the ways conservatives can be slighted/tarred, there’s John Ford. People assume that because he was a Republican, a supporter of the Viet Nam war, and a friend to John Wayne, that he, like Wayne, was a supporter of McCarthyism.
Well, that’s not quite true; we’re all familiar with “I’m John Ford. I make Westerns.” But there’s more to the story than that, much more; Cecil B. DeMille was trying to introduce a mandatory loyalty oath to the Director’s Guild and another director, whose name escapes me at the moment (someone else help me out here?), was being accused of communist sympathies.
And Ford stood up, said who he was and what he did, and then proceeded to lambast DeMille and asked for a vote of confidence for the other director.
(If someone with a better memory than I wants to shore up some of these details/correct any distortions of fact, please do so.)
I bring this up not to “claim” Ford as a liberal or even say “he wasn’t really that conservative”– only that “conservative” is assumed to mean a lot of things that it doesn’t actually mean.
The “other director” was Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
“KB1 is a kung-fu movie. A well-shot kung-fu movie with a couple of emotionally jolting moments (remember when the Bride first wakes up; Tarantino just lets the camera sit there as this woman realizes she’s lost her child), possibly one of the greatest kung-fu movies ever made, but it’s ultimately a kung-fu movie.”
You say this like it means something. Great, you pointed out the movie’s genre. That doesn’t really clarify anyone’s understanding of it besides what category of the video store you think it deserves to be in.
Good discussion. TC, if you want intelligent film commentary from a conservative viewpoint, I have several suggestions. Unfortunately my limited posting time makes it hard for me to post links, but these are all on my blogroll. They mostly do old movies (what can I say) but write well about them:
The Shelf
10 Grand in Checking
Laura’s Misc. Musings
Another Old Movie Blog
Seraphic Secret (Robert Avrech does excellent posts about silents)
Some of them also have a number of political posts but those are easy enough to skip if you prefer.
Another filmmaker who is seldom mentioned as a conservative, although he most assuredly was, is Preston Sturges. Just a footnote.
To get back to QT – he always reminds me of a remark someone made about Fellini, that he shows dangerous signs of being a highly gifted filmmaker with nothing to say. I do NOT agree with the sentiment about Fellini, but so far that is how I have perceived QT, without having seen his most recent films I admit. I approach QT with an open mind always, because his directing skills are undeniable, but I always feel those skills are used in the service of blowing my mind with all the coolness, and not much else. I hope Inglourious Basterds (can someone PLEASE enlighten me as to the reason for the typo-infested title?) will change my verdict.
@tc – First, thank you for the kind words. Second:
“You’ve got to admit that most right-wing spokespeople these days don’t exactly encourage people to pay attention to art unless it’s a useful source of someone to demonize.”
I will admit that this is the case with the O’Reillys and the Coulters, but they’re the media-appointed spokespeople. They’re not actual people, any more than Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann are actual people. In the wide world of movie fans, I don’t think conservatives who love art for being art are as rare as you think.
“I assume we’re both equally disgusted by Sean Penn sucking up to Hugo Chavez in real life, but that doesn’t mean Sean’s next film will be a Chavez biopic. He’s an idiot, but his agent isn’t a fool.”
I’m less convinced of this possibility than you are. I’d love to bring up CHE to bolster my argument, but since I still haven’t seen the movie, I can’t, in good conscience, do so. But you give Penn a good script on Chavez, and I don’t doubt he’d bite.
@Tom – “In the minds of many on the left, being conservative is synonymous with the gay-bashing, racist, reactionary, anti-intellectual fringe. It’s a bit scarier, and bit more unflattering, than being ineffectual namby-pambies, and I feel for you, Bill.”
Thank you. That’s a point that I’d given up trying to make, so I appreciate you making it, especially coming from the “other side” as you do. See, this is why I’m comfortable getting into politics here. I know things will remain civil and reasonable. I really appreciate talking to people like you and tc. See, everybody else in the country? Things don’t have to suck so bad.
@The Siren – When you say you haven’t seen recent Tarantino films, does that include KILL BILL? Because I’d be curious to know what you think of those, particularly part two.
@Siren (I wish you hadn’t given up on calling yourself Campaspe, but that’s life): thanks very much for taking the time to point me to those blogs. As for IB’s title, Tarantino has been so maddeningly – what else is new? – smug about refusing to explain the misspellings that you’d think he’d just cooked up Finnegans Wake. But my best guess is that he distorted the title to help signal the movie’s distortions of history.
Without getting into what he has to “say” – an iffy yardstick anyhow, since Rod Lurie has plenty to say but I often wish he’d either shut up or find another medium to abuse – I can think of several qualities that might help put QT on your good side. First, he genuinely loves actors and thrives on letting them shine in unlikely ways. Second, his dialogue is full of nutso new contributions to the rangy American idiom whose screen demise you recently lamented in your Budd Schulberg post. And third, as Inglourious Basterds (believe it or not) makes clearer than ever, he adores women like no director this side of Pedro Almodovar, something so rare in American movies that even people who don’t like his work otherwise should bless him for it.
@bill: Granting that you haven’t seen it, I’m not sure CHE is such a good refutation of my joke about the unlikelihood of Penn playing Hurricane Hugo, since it was set up mostly with foreign financing and Benicio del Toro, god love him, is nobody’s idea of a huge movie star. Despite the appalling omission of Che’s post-revolutionary crimes, it also doesn’t make much of a case either for or against his politics – which, given the subject, is pretty perverse, but hardly conventional left-wing agit-prop either. It’s really just one more of Soderbergh’s formal exercises, a choice GK admires more than I do.
I also don’t doubt that there are plenty of conservative aesthetes out there. I only meant that the subject doesn’t get much prominence in right-wing venues except polemically, as opposed to the often purring way that NPR listeners or New Yorker readers, say, are encouraged to admire their own well-rounded sensibility every time they flip from an anti-Bush polemic to a movie review.
Bill,
Chiming in with a response to a few thought-provoking things that you bring up:
‑Eastwood is definitely conservative, but as I’ve heard many other conservatives I respect (like Joe Scarbourough… and yourself) assert, he doesn’t exactly fall in line with the Right Wing Conspiracy described in the media. Big surprise! The right is not monolithic (thank God). At last year’s NYFF, Eastwood was asked if he backed McCain (to put into context: if memory serves, it was after the controversial comments from anti-Obama hecklers at his rallies first started being aired on TV). Eastwood responded by saying he thought of himself as more of a libertarian these days, than a Republican or Democrat.
‑Kill Bill: Part two is definitely stronger. My problem with both parts as a whole is that he originally envisioned it as one epic movie, and (I speculate…) was encouraged by the Weinsteins to release the movie in two parts. I suspect this may have been for many reasons: Two movies means more money than one movie for the ailing Weinstein Company especially if they’re by QT; that makes it even more profitable on DVD, as you can release each movie separately, then the inevitable (and rumor has it, upcoming) behemoth… the epic 4 hour Kill Bill saga in one omnibus edition for the fanboys; and finally, QT’s propensity for partying, self-promoting, and anything but actually making movies leading the Weinsteins to wring out an extra movie from him (make their investment pay off, so to speak).
I think the split of KB into two movies is to the detriment of both films (but especially the first one). Now, you have two bloated overlong movies (again, mostly the first one), instead of one maybe longish, leaner, meaner movie that could avoid any qualifiers of being “flawed.”
‑Che: I’d like to hear what you think of the film, after you see it. In this case, the two parts are essential to understanding Soderbergh’s vision of Guevara. Full disclosure: I’m Cuban, and had my knife sharpened when I went to see this film. Fortunately, I was forced to watch it “in toto.” If I would have seen the first part alone, I would have thought that he was glorifying Guevara for his part in the Cuban Revolution. He is presented heroically, for sure. But Soderbergh goes on to subvert the heroic icon he portrays in the second part, presenting instead a delusional loner who stubbornly fights a lost and corrupt cause by stubbornly holding onto his victory in the Cuban Revolution as a model for effective change in Bolivia, despite all indications that the victory in Cuba was a fluke.
Re: the misspelled title of QT’s latest–
I’m under the impression (though I’m not sure where it came from) that the Weinsteins anticipated problems with the MPAA if the word “Bastards” was prominently displayed on marketing materials. So the second word in the title gets a, um, bastardized spelling. If that’s true, I would assume that the “inglourious” part is just Tarantino playing along.
@Matt– That certainly sounds plausible, though I remember reading in one of those trashy tell-alls that Tarantino is just a really, really bad speller.
Holy shnikes, Rosenbaum lays the smackdown: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=16514
But I still want to see this. A.) You managed to entice me Glenn and B.) Well, there’s not a whole lot interesting stuff playing at the big movie theaters these days. Though I would like to hear your thoughts about this. I wonder if Rosenbaum is being intentionally provocative here like with his review of No Country for Old Men and his NY Times (I think) article on Ingmar Bergman’s career.
@ jake: I don’t think Rosenbaum’s being intentionally provocative—his complaint is entirely sincere. But the fact that he brings Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice” into the argument indicates just how out of touch he is with this film’s pulse. You’d think the co-author of “Midnight Movies” would know just slightly better, but that’s life.
“I sometimes get the feeling that if, someday, the Earth were to tilt off its axis, somehow causing the majority of artists to drift from the Left to the Right, most liberals would not be able to handle it.”
I think it depends on how subtle an artist’s politics are. Hollywood is, inherently, conservative because it wants to bring in Americans, and America is, by world standards, a conservative country.
There’s also the matter of how we’re defining “conservative” here. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are fairly far to the right, but they’re not propagandists or morons by any yardstick. “Team America” has a lot to say about limousine liberals, and it comes out in favor of an American interventionist military policy (well, to a point, I doubt phrasing it in the terms of “pussies, dicks and assholes” was chosen just to be scatological) but it’s also slamming mindless patriotism, ignorance of other cultures, and using military force without thinking.
So, yeah, I don’t necessarily agree with their political stance. But I can respect how they got there, because they obviously thought about it.
Just got back from seeing this about fifty minutes ago. I’m kinda speechless. Minus one or two quibbles, I do think “Inglourious Basterds” is every bit as amazing as Glenn says it is, and I feel like the Rosenbaums and Wellses (well, of course) are not only unbelievably out to lunch, but also seem to be trying to embody the concept of “bleeding heart” as a kind of Andy Kaufman-esque parody.
It’s a head-spinning film. Magnificent filmmaking, and entertaining to an absurd degree. AND I even liked Eli Roth.
Oh Bill, I was with you until “AND I even liked Eli Roth.”
I liked the film too, but I’ll confidenly second Manohla Dargis’s quick parenthetical: “a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew (the director Eli Roth, dreadful).”
I don’t really care about this eager beaver’s movies–I’ve only seen CABIN FEVER, which was about as mediocre as I expected it to be–but Roth is–I want to say “for me,” but it feels pretty close to objective–the worst performer in Inglourious Basterds. Overdoing every frame he’s in, completely out of synch with every other performer, and oddly juvenile. With that guy, I’m sorry, it’s amateur hour.
What Tarantino sees in him, I haven’t a clue. Maybe it’s like with Spielberg and Michael Bay–the comfort of surrounding yourself with inferiors.
Sorry to chime in yet again, since I’ve had my say on IB and then some. But any of you who remember my contretemps with That Fuzzy Bastard several days ago on this thread – in which I voiced my hunch that “European audiences will have no trouble making the Gitmo connection even without one-plus-one signposts” – might be as tickled as I was to come across Jean-Luc Douin’s review in Le Monde via Richard Brody’s NY’er blog. Said review includes Douin’s observation that the Basterds’ behavior raises “the specter of Guantanamo.” Yeah, it’s gratifying.
IIRC, the role of the Bear Jew was written with Adam Sandler in mind, or QT had hopes of casting him when he was first working on it.
Well, I saw it. And while I lean on the good side, I’m not really sure what I thought of it. I have no idea which cut of the film Wells saw, because the violence was so ineptly edited as to be almost cartoonish. I think I get where he’s coming from, but you’ve gotta separate these things. There were one or two scenes that turned my stomach in ways I think that Wells’ stomach was turned, but it was no more inflammatory than, say, Saving Private Ryan.
There are things that just don’t quite work. The scene in the basement goes on and on and on and on, and the payoff just isn’t worth it, the most ineptly edited climactic fight I’ve seen since Revenge of the Sith. The repellent scene where Aldo jams his finger into something I can’t spoil. The sudden idiot ball carrying of certain characters. At times I felt like I was watching Alex Cox direct a Frank Miller script, as insane as that sounds. I never thought I’d see anything that reminded me of Cox at his most infuriatingly mischevious in a Quentin Tarantino film, but when that poodle entered the frame…
But there are so many good things in the movie that make it impossible to hate. The amazing performances from the cast. Even Eli Roth was far more tolerable than I’d been led to believe. Well, Mike Myers was awful. Is there anything we can do to get that man to stop appearing in films? Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger were amazing. Brad Pitt provided just the right bit of levity when it was needed. And what can be said about Christoph Waltz that hasn’t already been said?
Is Inglorious Basterds a GOOD film? I’m not quite sure. Is it a worthwhile experience? You bet your ass it is.
All of the mainstream media discussions of “Jewish revenge porn” are totally missing the point of the film, which seems to be that everyone commits atrocities during war, but the winners are the ones who get to write the histories, and more importantly, make the movies about what war is like. This is probably lost on audience members who clap when the baddies finally get massacred in this particular film, but somebody out there needs to point out that this “victory” happens right after a scene in which the Nazis cheer the massacre of Allied soldiers in a film they’re watching in the same theater. Add to this that QT plays Bowie’s “Putting Out Fire” (with gasoline) over the whole sequence, and you think someone might realize that he’s got more up his sleeve than trying to “rewrite history.” The indignation that Daniel Mendelsohn and David Denby have expressed regarding the film make me wonder what might have happend if they had wasted less energy trying to find reasons to be outraged and paid more attention to the film’s own narrative logic and formal arguments.
The “happy ending” of the film is hollow as hell, and there is plenty there to argue that QT is telling us that the revenge fantasy we’ve all been hoping to fulfull is another form of atrocity.
I understand that many critics and filmgoers have issues with Tarantino that no film he ever makes will ever be able to change. Sometimes I wish he would be more like Thomas Pynchon and just let his work speak for him. Nonetheless, Inglourious Basterds feels to me like the best essay on the complicity of the spectator and the consequences of violence since Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” – which needed about ten years to simmer. We’ll see what happens with this one.
@MS: Great points. I also felt that Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” with its bifurcated structure featuring repellent misogynist sadism in the climactic crash of the first half and childishly feel-good “payback” in the second half, had similar concerns about both audience complicity and filmmaker…fucked-upness. Mendelsohn and Denby can’t grant legitimacy to Tarantino’s observations because they’re couched in the tropes of not just “entertainment,” but of more-disreputable-than-usual-“entertainment,” that is, grindhouse and B‑movie fare. But Tarantino’s game is far more complex and ambivalent than the cheapjack nihilism of a “Nazi Love Camp Number 7” or some such. In any case, I find this sort of critique far more interesting and engaging and finally disturbing than the rub-your-hated-audience’s-nose-in-it acrobatics of an Ulrich Seidl.
Also, something about this film reminds me of the weird, unsettling flirtation with Nazi imagery deployed by the (substantially Jewish) likes of the Blue Oyster Cult and The Ramones. tc, or somebody, help me out with this!?!?!!!
MS, I think I’m with you, but how was EYES WIDE SHUT about the consequences of violence? Did I miss something there?
Agree completely re: Mendelsohn, Denby, and Rosenbaum. Denby’s review, in particular, has almost nothing interesting to add to the debate, just lots and lots of exasperation and outrage. I found it appropriate that the review was coupled with his gush over JULIE AND JULIA, one of the “gentlest American comedies of the past decade.” Ick.
Richard Brody’s input at his New Yorker blog is really interesting, however. In a nutshell, he disagrees with Rosenbaum and Mendelsohn, but thinks Tarantino brings up a lot more questions than he can possibly answer. And that, ultimately, he doesn’t dig very deep–he’s just in way over his head. (He also thinks the movie’s overlong and poorly paced.)
And, ahem, I for one thought Mike Myers was great.
Just got back from seeing the film, and my impression was that it was truly, madly, awesome.
It’s QT’s best film, hands down, since Jackie Brown.
The critical debate is fascinating and rich – in many cases, even the worst pans have got to function as some kind of backhanded compliment to Q for getting people’s dander up in (mostly) intelligent ways.
Brody’s critique is indeed perceptive, and I’m with him that Q opens a can of worms and doesn’t close it, but he’s totally off the wall when he calls the film “mechanical and dull.” IB has to be one of the most thrilling works of cinematic storytelling to come out in many a moon – I can’t remember the last time I was that far out on the edge of my seat with suspense over what was going to happen next.
Yes, Tarantino is in over his head when it comes to the thematic issues and questions raised, BUT it’s nothing short of virtuosic movie making – editing, shooting, writing, and superb direction of a very talented cast.
Glenn, I’m enormously flattered that you’d ask me for backup in your equivalent of either Mowgli’s “We be of one blood, you and I” or else “Samwise, come protect the Master.” But since you’ve already brought up the Ramones, these lyrics strike me as apposite (emphasis added):
Hey, ho, let’s go –
SHOOT ‘EM IN THE BACK NOW –
What they want, I don’t know.
They’re all revved up and ready to go.
John M: Re: Eyes Wide Shut. Fair question, and the short version of my answer is that “violence” probably means something very different in Kubrick’s film than in a Tarantino thread, so this is probably not the place, but I read both films as essays on the dangerous consequences of a certain kind of presumptuous spectatorship.
Mendelsohn, Denby, and Wells’ pearl clutching is so generally unconvincing I still think they saw a different cut of the film than I did.
There’s something to be said about Tarantino’s screenplay going hard and fast for the swerve. Nearly every plot twist seems calculated to “go the other way!” whether it makes sense or not, but I don’t want to get into spoilers just yet.
Oh, and Armond White’s review talked about Spielberg’s “Complex” portrayal of WWII in the Indiana Jones movies. Now I will say that Raiders is a better film than IGB, though they’re really in two different categories, but complex portrayal? in a Spielberg/Lucas movie? Fuck you, Armond, you fucking liar. Go suck Spielberg’s dick on your own time.
@MS – “All of the mainstream media discussions of “Jewish revenge porn” are totally missing the point of the film, which seems to be that everyone commits atrocities during war, but the winners are the ones who get to write the histories, and more importantly, make the movies about what war is like. This is probably lost on audience members who clap when the baddies finally get massacred in this particular film, but somebody out there needs to point out that this “victory” happens right after a scene in which the Nazis cheer the massacre of Allied soldiers in a film they’re watching in the same theater.”
First of all, that old “the winners right the histories” line is a provably false cliché’, because, for instance, the Germans have written their share of histories abour WWII, and, regarding Nazis at least, they seem to be pretty much in agreement with the victors. On the other side of the equation, I would say that the vast majority of the most widely known histories of the Vietnam War were written by the losers, and American histories of that war don’t tend to pump up America.
As for “Inglourious Basterds” itself, the fact that the massacre at the end comes after Hitler and Goebbels are laughing at a film depicting a massacre might be lost on some people because IT’S HITLER. And it’s not supposed to NOT be Hitler, if you see what I’m saying. Tarantino is pretty gleeful in his depiction of Jews killing Nazis, and I believe it’s a function of the desire for vicarious catharsis when dealing with Hitler and Nazi atrocities. You say the ending is hollow, and that it’s another kind of atrocity, but let me ask you this: when Tarantino gives us the set up – that two groups of largely Jewish characters were seeking to burn and/or blow up a movie theater that contained the entire Nazi high command, including Hitler – were you hoping, in reaction to the film purely as a story, hoping that Shosanna and the Basterds would fail?
Goddamn…sorry about all the typos It’s very late.
@Bill: “were you hoping, in reaction to the film purely as a story, hoping that Shosanna and the Basterds would fail?”
Of course not, but I think we can agree that there is such a thing, in both language and film, as multiple levels of narrative coding, and that a skilled filmmaker might be able to profitably exploit a tension between these levels, not only to entertain, but to make other points about audience expectations and desires. Much of the discussion of the film that I’ve seen revolves mainly around the question of whether or not Tarantino is this kind of filmmaker. That’s fine, and some minds cannot be changed, but I stand by my earlier point that Tarantino’s FILM goes way beyond savant fandom to address the war movie genre, its claims to historical representation, and our position within the whole mess – not the “histories” you reference that I can buy from Amazon, but the group of codes and conventions that constitute the depiction of war in narrative film.
Saw “Inglourious Basterds” twice over the weekend and thought it was great. I’d say it is, without a doubt, the most structurally inventive American film of the year so far. I love the fact that its two biggest “set pieces,” aside from the finale, are 20- and 30-minute sequences set at tables. I love the fact that IB is a summer movie, of sorts, but that is 2/3‑subtitled and its star (Pitt) is only in 1/3 of the film. Hell, I find it amazing that a studio summer film references Pabst not once or twice, but three times and even throws in a nod to Clouzot. QT has a lot of chutzpah and it pays off here. I’m glad to see other people are liking it.
@GK: In case my first response seemed a mite gnomic, here’s a more considered one. First off, when we talk about Jewish rockers appropriating Nazi imagery, it ought to be understood that imagery isn’t the same as substance. That is, nobody believes or should believe that the Ramones, Blue Oyster Cult – or the Dictators, whom you left out – were advocating their own extermination, which is what endorsing Hitler’s ideology would amount to in their cases. Or anyway, it’d risk leaving their bandmates muttering“I guess we need a new bassist,” to quote George Harrison’s one and only great joke.
The whole ploy is really more a kind of defiant insolence that turns the tables on Nazism by refusing to be cowed by it – in playground terms, “I am not going to let this scary stuff be the boss of me. I am going to be the boss of it.’ It’s not so very different from the way Mel Brooks thumbed his nose at Hitler by reducing him to a Borscht Belt patsy. In other words, a form of Jewish revenge, to bring us back to QT territory. What complicates things is that Quentin is a goy gleefully projecting this fantasy on Jewish people’s behalf, which they may or may not object to as artistic trespassing.
Given the ages of those bands, their Jewish members would have grown up hearing the Final Solution invoked so relentlessly that they may have understandably balked at the idea of Hitler dominating their lives from beyond the grave for the rest of the century. In the Ramones’ case, an extra dimension is that Dee Dee grew up as a U.S. Army brat in Germany. Casting himself as a mock Nazi for American audiences was a suitably cartoonish, surreptitiously painful way of expressing the dislocation and alienation of that kind of upbringing.
The Ramones lyric I quoted, though, was meant to tie two topics together by reflecting another emerging debate on SCR. Namely, the one about whether QT is messing with the audience – shooting ’em in the back now, get it? – by equating their glee at seeing Nazis massacred in *his* movie with Hitler’s own callous delight at the slaughter in Nation’s Pride. I think it’s unmistakable that this is not only an element in the climax but an undercurrent throughout the film, since the Basterds’ righteous cruelty has a disturbing side from the get-go and their enemies aren’t always simple gargoyles. For instance, the German sergeant who gets clobbered by the Bear Jew isn’t a fink we’d love to see getting his brains splattered to kingdom come – a reaction QT could easily have manipulated the character to induce – but a more or less valiant, intelligent soldier who knows his duty and accepts the consequences, complicating our reaction.
And Bill, since I know you love this movie as much as I do, I’m a little mystified by your insistence that a simple-minded reading of the climax is superior to one that incorporates ambiguities. If we’re nudged to see something troubling in the kinship between Hitler’s responses and our own, that doesn’t mean we want the Basterds (much less Shoshanna) to “fail.” Just that we should be alert to Niezsche’s good old warning about “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” which funnily enough is where IB and Spielberg’s Munich end up sharing a bit of common ground.
And not to commit the intentional fallacy, but we have Tarantino’s own word for it that he meant to do just that. This is from a Q & A after a screening of IB at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – a venue, incidentally, that I give him full props for balls in appearing at, since the audience included Holocaust survivors and their families: “I fucked with the climax… At some point those Nazi uniforms went away and they were people being burned alive. I think that’s part of the thing that fucks with the catharsis. And that’s a good thing.”
Interesting, no?
@ bill: “As for “Inglourious Basterds” itself, the fact that the massacre at the end comes after Hitler and Goebbels are laughing at a film depicting a massacre might be lost on some people because IT’S HITLER. And it’s not supposed to NOT be Hitler, if you see what I’m saying. Tarantino is pretty gleeful in his depiction of Jews killing Nazis, and I believe it’s a function of the desire for vicarious catharsis when dealing with Hitler and Nazi atrocities”
i saw an odd parallel between the audience i saw the film with laughing at the carnage the basterds created and hitler laughing at the equally exploitative nation’s pride. i’m still not entirely sure how i feel about this. is it quentin gone haneke? and if not are we to despise hitler for laughing at dying jews, but rejoice and laugh ourselves as the nazi’s are exterminated? i feel like i need another viewing to clear things up.
Look, the ending had a bit of an Italian horror film chill to the catharsis, but the Nazi uniforms never went away for me. Had it been a platoon of German soldier, that might have been a different story, but we’re dealing specifically with Hitler and Goebbels and the rest. They were human beings only in a technical sense. Regard this reaction as a character flaw if you must, and maybe it is, but at not time while watching that scene did the words “Poor Goebbels” cross my mind.
@ bill: I don’t think anybody expects you, or anybody else, to think “Poor Goebbels.” But part of what makes this picture so interesting to talk about is its curveball split. The climax is both rousing AND unsettling, for reasons MS and tc cite. Over at another website, a commenter discusses whether Shoshonna is actually moved by Zoller’s exploits in “Nation’s Pride,” another interesting can of worms given the outcome of those characters’ final confrontation. This kind of ambivalence is hard to do without being either a wuss or a finger-wagger. I think Robert Aldrich really was a master of it—I’m not thinking so much of the obvious antecedent “The Dirty Dozen” but of “Emperor of the North,” “KIss Me Deadly,” and even “The Grissom Gang.”
Just discovered this relevant comment Tarantino made at a screening of IB at the Jewish Museum earlier this month. Don’t want to beat this to death (pun intended), but I’m not ready to give up on my argument that the film is not just cathartic “revenge porn.”
QT on the film’s climax:
“In this movie I jerked you off and I f***ed with the climax… At some point those Nazi uniforms went away and they were people being burned alive. I think that’s part of the thing that f***s with the catharsis. And that’s a good thing.”
Now I look like an idiot because someone posted that earlier this morning. Apologies.
Still worth repeating, though. Can’t go into it in half the depth I’d like to, as I’m in the middle of cooking for a group, but I’d agree. One doesn’t have to go the whole distance of feeling for the other person who’s committed atrocities as a person, one certainly can’t allow them to continue said actions, if they’re able to stop them. But a huge part of Hitler’s rationale for believing he could do whatever he wanted to the Jews was that they were only human in a technical sense, and were responsible for all the evil in the world. And the moment one steps onto that seeming A=A path, things start getting fucked up.
I can’t type much because I have to use an effin’ phone, but I think Alan just called me a Nazi. Very clever. If you really think my comment about Hitler is akin to Hitler’s comment about Jews, then I don’t know what to say, other than you’re too literal.
But I asked my wife if the Nazi uniforms went away for a moment for her during that scene and she said yes. And to be honest, there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment for me, too, in a shot of what appear to be just a bunch of people in evening dress getting machine-gunned. However, despite Tarantino’s intentions, my catharsis remains largely unfucked. This film, among many other things, is a revenge fantasy, with the emphasis on “fantasy”. None of these things happened, but the more you know about what nightmarish serial killers were, the more you (I) kind of wish it had, or it least something primal and lizard-brained is tapped into when I watch it played out on screen,
And Glenn, yes, I got that Shosanna was beginning to feel an element of pity for Zoller at the end, but I also took note of the fact that it didn’t serve her too well.
I am surprised that one aspect of this movie that seems really pertinent hasn’t been mentioned more often: the fact that the Inglorious Basterds pattern themselves after members of the Apache nation. When considering how Tarantino’s film (and Hollywood itself) deals with genocide, it may be worth remembering that the Germans weren’t the only nation in history to attempt the crime.
Great point – and recall, the Swastik was used by Hopi Indians as well…
Whether this is a good movie or not, you can’t deny that the debates surrounding this film, and the discourse on both is morality and its relationship to cinema (both historically and aesthetically) is the most energetic, exciting, and deep film conversation that has gone through the culture in a long, long time.
How’s that for a run-on sentence?
Anyway, I am excited to see it tonight. And as someone who is not typically a fan of Tarantino’s work, that itself has me double excited.
I found it to be a blast, myself. The pacing was a bit off, I felt like we could have sped things up slightly in one or two sequences.
But any movie that shoots the French countryside to evoke Leone and Ford, and takes jabs at the whole “everybody speaks English” trope, is going to be rock-solid anyway.
No, definitely not calling you a Nazi…Nazis weren’t the only ones who had such thoughts in the course of their lives. We all have.
Which is why I don’t trust my lizard brain any farther than I can throw it, why unironic primal revenge scenes in movies feel mostly hollow to me (and even more disturbing than ones that are meant to make you feel disturbed), and why I haven’t enjoyed indulging said lizard brain since that “flirting-with-nihilism” phase a fair number of people go through in their early-20s. But that’s just me…no judgment intended, honestly.
Lastly…I’ve nat zeen the movie yet (har har) – I’m going tomorrow – but I did rewatch “Death Proof” the other day, and a lot of it snapped into place for me…I’d concur with most of your thoughts above, Glenn.
@bill: I don’t want to make you feel ganged up on, but do you know the wonderful Russian WW2 movie COME AND SEE? At the end, the young hero – having witnessed all sorts of unspeakable actrocities committed by the Nazis – takes his revenge on an abandoned portrait of Hitler by firing at it over and over, an image that may even have influenced Tarantino’s finale.
Anyhow, as he shoots, the portrait gives way to a montage of still images of Hitler and the Nazis’ rise that race steadily backward in time. The final photo is the famously unsettling one of the future Führer as a baby, and at that moment the firing stops. Even the vengeful hero can’t bring himself to “kill” that version of Hitler; he’s face to face with the mystery that even this monster was (or once had been, anyhow) a fellow human being.
Especially coming from a nation that had more reason to hate him than any other – exempting Israel only on the grounds that it didn’t yet exist – it’s one of the most moving declarations I’ve ever seen that even the most justified hatred can only go so far before it dehumanizes us right along with its object. And because that kind of perception isn’t what we expect from Tarantino, it’s fascinating to see him complicate IB’s otherwise exultant climax with his own (lurid, needless to say) articulation of the same idea.
Allen – if I misunderstood you, then okay, though I do think you’re still taking my statement too literally.
As for the lizard-brain, mine does get fed at the movies on occasion, and while Tarantino may want to fuck with the catharsis, he doesn’t want to ruin it completely. I mean, if we can all acknowledge that the climax of this film is something that, had it occurred in reality, could be broadly described as a good thing, then why not acknowledge the operatic charge one might get out of seeing the fiction? I don’t mind at all Tarantino wanting the scene to jolt you in the opposite direction as well, but I’m pulled up short when people claim it’ “just another atrocity”, because it’s not.
God I hate writing this stuff in a car on a phone. Which I only offer as an aside.
TC – I don’t feel ganged up on, so don’t worry about that. And in COME AND SEE, I would argue that part of what stops the boy – along with the points you cite, which are absolutely correct – is impotence. His hatred can achieve nothing. In INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, the heroes are not just exacting vengeance, but their hatred is being channeled, against those who’ve earned it, into a form of vengeance that will also bring about an international good. And so it’s hard for me to think that Shosanna and Marcel and the Basterds are sinking to a level of inhumanity that is anywhere within shooting distance of the same moral realm inhabited by the Nazis.
Haven’t the Basterds already sunk to that level? As Newsweek pointed out, most of what they do to their enemies was in reality done by nazis to Jews.
I couldn’t enjoy the film because it seemed to be inviting me to participate in something horrible, and the complicating factors seemed like afterthoughts, so they did not make it seem thought-provoking either. Like a repulsive entertainment was dreamed up, and then a few contradictions peppered over it to make it seem deep.
Have seen a couple of comments in various places saying that the Bowie song plays over the cinema inferno, but in the version I saw it only played when Shosanna was getting dolled up for the premier.
“While Tarantino may want to fuck with the catharsis, he doesn’t want to ruin it completely.” That’s absolutely true, and could reduce the whole thing to Quentin wanting to eat his cake and have it too. God, is there no end to fathoming what this movie is *really* about? But for GK’s sake, I hope I’m not alone in enjoying the multiple debates it’s provoked. Sue me for returning to this thread the way William S. Burroughs might keep coming back to a good source of heroin.
I’d say it has less to do with having his Kate and Edith too than it does with those quite clearly stated words that both you and MS quoted. Of course, I’m continuing to go on about this topic while still not having seen the film (tomorrow morning, 11am PST). I’d agree that there’s probably no end to the fathoming…he said back in the Pulp Fiction days that he definitely wants his movies to mean far more than one thing.
bill, as to acknowledging the possible operatic charge it might give some, just a quick scan of the comments seems to tell me you’re not exactly alone there…even Glenn says the ending is “ROUSING [my caps] AND unsettling.”
My personal disinclination to lizard-brain vengeance kinda stuff has, I’m sure a certain amount to do with two figures from my past…my dad, who had a hair-trigger temper and who nursed grudges like they were best friends. The war story character he most reminded me of was the fella in “Slaughterhouse Five” who was putting every slight on his list. Though he and I are more cordial these days, it’s still a very distant relationship. The other was an older guy who’d been WWII, came back with some hair-raising stories, and whose favorite quote was from that famed wuss and finger-wagger Ernest Hemingway: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” Not that he thought that he or any of the people he served with were criminals, more that it was a crime that it ever had to happen at all. And he got no kind of “manly” primal satisfaction out of what he did in the slightest. It’s some of this latter knowledge I’m in the midst of passing along to my own kid, if he wants it. He’ll be going into the Navy, very much by his own choice, at the end of the year.
Apologies for slight typos and word/punctuation omissions here and there in the above…it’s late. Also if it appears at all in the last sentence that I’m in conflict with my kid regarding his path…it wouldn’t be my path, and of course I’m concerned over what could happen to him, but I’m fully respectful of his choice.
As a Jew, I came into this move with mixed feelings. On the one hand, obviously, I love the idea of the Nazis getting their comeuppance. On the other, I do think there are some troubling images portrayed here. The Jews in the movie aren’t even characters – just unsympathetic, brutish, murderers. I actually found it anti-Jewish in some ways. Another friend forwarded this review – from a NAZI site –
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/inglourious-basterds/
that actually summarized what I had been feeling. It made me sick, but I think there’s something to it here – that Tarantino is making a joke out of things that should be serious.
One thing that I haven’t seen discussed much to date is IG’s role as a kind of “Last WWII Film” that deliberately strives to be a fed-up period at the end of a particular setence: the use of Nazis in pop entertainment. Amid all the revenge fantasy giddiness, I definitely detected a deeply cynical current in the film that questions the endurance of WWII, the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler specifically as disposable elements in fiction. [SPOILERS] When Donnie sprays Hitler with his machine gun, literally disintegrating the man in a hail of bullets, I felt as much contempt for Hitler-as-Symbol as Hitler-as-Man. QT seemed to be saying “Okay, I’ve destroyed Hitler. He’s been turned into bloody hamburger and burned to ashes. Can we please, please, please, please move on?”
Bill, I’m with you on this 100%. I enjoyed, nay, relished the massacre and indeed any action against the Nazis in the film, without scruples. In a film meant to be so cathartic and over-the-top, I find it ludicrous to harbor any ethical qualms. The film was fun, and my bleeding heart enjoyed every jest, and every bludgeoning, scalping, shooting and assorted atrocity thrown at the National Socialists. Especially Landa’s grand comeuppance. Those who would compare a film that clearly has more in common with spaghetti westerns than recorded history, those folks need to lighten up. Seriously. I was with Aldo, Donny and the Basterds the whole way. And, damn, is Fassbender cool. This film lived up to all the expectations I had over the last ten years, and then some. Move over, Chigurh, here comes Landa. Damn, what a movie. Cannot wait to see it again. Stiglitz is badass!
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I guess at this point That Fuzzy Bastard has “lost” the argument (imagine someone judging a movie by it’s trailer – shocking!), but for what it’s worth, I HAVE seen the movie and I think he’s dead on concerning the 2 scenes that make up most of the trailer. That’s not torture, guys? Oooookay.