4
Nov
Amazon.com
Although Quentin Tarantino has cherished Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 “macaroni” war flick The Inglorious Bastards for most of his film-geek life, his own Inglourious Basterds is no remake. Instead, as hinted by the Tarantino-esque … More >>
$19.99
Inglourious Basterds
<
3:20 pm on November 4th, 2009
The blood-thirsty, revenge-laden, vicious, right-wing premise of “Inglourious Basterds” ignores the reality of wars, armies, and the real lives of soldiers. No soldier in any army should be scalped or dismembered merely because he is a member of any opposing army. For in a vast majority of cases he had no choice in entering that army or of wearing any particular uniform.
Therefore even American thugs, bullies, and mindless killers don’t have any right to commit atrocities just because they’re on the “right” side of any war, or in the “right” army. To picture our own boys and men in uniform during WWII as the monsters in this film is shameful.
The Axis side of WWII was fought by draftees into the German Army from many European countries and ethnic groups. In every country that Hitler’s war machine invaded, boys and men of partly-German parentage were drafted. They had no choice of whether they would serve as German soldiers. They little choice of which service or unit in which they would serve.
Therefore, “Germans” and “Nazis”, as this filmmaker uses them, were not interchangeable terms. As our war propaganda, they were understandable; but not as terms of reference in popular entertainment more than sixty years later.
Any German boy, living in Germany from 1933 to 1945, who dared to say “I’m not a Nazi, I’m a Christian-Democrat”, so I shouldn’t be drafted, he could be sent to prison or to a concentration camp. After the 1938 Anschluss into Vienna, if a Swiss-resident, partly-German, partly-Jewish foreign student, on being called up for military service by the German war machine, dared to say that he was both a Christian Democrat like his father, and partly Jewish, he’d have ended up in a concentration camp in Poland.
However, the German Army of WWII had a Code of Military Justice so strong that even the Nazis couldn’t weaken them. It had been designed to protect German soldiers from heavy-handed abuse by non-coms and officers. That is one of the reasons why the SS was formed; to get around those rules.
Generals like Erwin Rommel were loved by their soldiers because he was strong enough to require of Hitler that the Geneva Convention, not the SS, would govern the way that his men would fight the war, at least in North Africa. Toward the end of WWII, when Hitler was losing the war, and after General Rommel had been executed, some tank and infantry units of the German Army were transferred to the SS, without the consent of their officers, non-coms, or soldiers.
So even men assigned to the SS in 1944 to 1945 weren’t necessarily “free game” for Allied manhunters. To say otherwise in a modern film is a gross distortion of history.
I had a friend, a Swiss-resident German-Jewish friend drafted in 1938 after the Nazis invaded Vienna, where he was an art student. He hid in plain sight in the German Army for six years until he was liberated in 1944 by Canadians from Quebec.
His name was William. H. “Lucky” Dingler, a multi-lingual German Army Signal Corpsman. For 21 months he was attached to the original Afrika Korps, and worked for Erwin Rommel as a proud member of the DAK. He was brilliant; a human computer. What he saw he could draw perfectly. What he learned, what he heard, he never forgot. He kept the younger men for whom he was responsible fed and alive as much as he could.
He told me how he survived. He memorized the German Army’s Military Code of Justice in boot camp. Then he accumulated medals for excellent military skills while serving with several units. A pre-war sophisticated man-about-town, during the war he consistently played the rarely-neat, partly out-of uniform, private soldier, and thus avoided any promotion to a rank higher than Staff Corporal, so that his Jewish heritage wouldn’t be discovered in a background check.
When he was pressured to go to Officer’s Candidate School, he deliberately committed a courts martial offense. He survived a trial in which he could have gotten the death penalty, coming out of it with three weeks of detention, delayed, because he knew the Code of Military Justice. He had made himself too good to push around and too incorrigible to promote. (Acting this way, he won the German Iron Cross twice, the Italian Croce de Guerra, and a chest-full of campaign badges.)
He estimated that 10% of the army were snitches for the Gestapo. So to survive, and because replacements so often quickly died, he made very few friends.
In the post-war de-Nazification process carried out by the Allies, he was “held harmless”; not guilty of any blame for the war, even though he was a skillful and decorated soldier in the wrong, German army.
9,000,000 German soldiers didn’t survive. Most of them were draftees, just like my friend.
Rating: 1 / 5
4:41 pm on November 4th, 2009
Quentin Tarantino is a great filmmaker. Just ask him.
And he calls this movie his “masterpiece.” “Some of my best writing ever.” The accolades were pouring in…from Quentin.
But it’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed any of his films. The last time I remember liking anything he did was JACKIE BROWN. He had an incredible cast and that film showed a new maturity in him. Everything since has been his worst indulgences. The KILL BILL movies were all over the place. DEATH PROOF was worse than any of the drive-in chase movies that ripped up the screens in the 70s.
So now we have INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Is it possible that Quentin is trying to make his misspellings a part of his schtick to diffuse Jane Hamsher’s book where she reprints a handwritten note from Quentin complimenting her beautiful “leggs”? Or does the guy really just not know how to use spell check? That’s not a slam: I’m genuinely curious.
As interesting and stylistically well done as this movie is, it still doesn’t help the viewer navigate its story. Was anyone squeamish about seeing American soldiers brutalizing Nazis and even scalping them with stomach-churning sound effects? With our soldiers in two war fronts in the world right now, do we really need this characterization as entertainment playing throughout the world? I wonder how this film plays to a young generation woefully ignorant of the true heroism of the American soldier in WWII.
I nearly fell asleep during Chapter Four so I’m not sure just how long that conversation went before something happened. And, when it did, I felt like I’d already seen this scene’s climax in RESEVOIR DOGS. “Brevity is the soul of wit,”
Quentin. If you’d stop watching crappy grindhouse movies (and blowing your career on rehashing them) and pick up a book once in a while, you’d know where that came from…and what it means.
The characters are shallow and don’t really come across as anyone you’d root for, let alone like. There is no emotional pay-off in any of the closing scenes. Tarantino is as dispassionate about these people as he is true to history. I don’t mind that he veered so far away from actual history…but couldn’t it at least been more fun?
Bottom line: Tarantino is too enamored with himself and only indulgences a frustrating immaturity. He knows how to shoot scenes and always succeeds in making a visual experience…but his writing and thinking haven’t developed past a teenage gamer spitting sound effects while jerking his joystick.
Rating: 2 / 5
5:07 pm on November 4th, 2009
Dear God I’m disappointed with this film . I’m not going to spoil it , but the film is NOT the master peace some reviewers say it is …. it’s more of a peace of ****.
The movie opens up with the introduction of the “Jew Hunter” and the sequence seems good and is like any other Quintin Tarantino film with two (or more)people just sitting there talking (Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction , Death Proof , …. you get the idea) and the cinematics are great , there’s a good look and feel to the film , and then we’re introduced to “The Bastards” after the “Hunter scene , and then it’s all down hill from there .
To some it up as simply as possible , after the first 15 min. of the film , you’ll be board to tears till the ending when the assassinations start . The worst and most pointless scene is in the basement bar with that completely pointless German S.S. officer going on and on about the “British spy’s” bad German ascent. Yes we know the Germans are on the look out for spies , and yes we know they’re paranoid , but it just keeps going on and on and on and on and it won’t end . However , when it does end , there’s a good payoff that should have come sooner . The pacing of the film is horrible and if your looking for a action film , this won’t satisfy you .
The end was good , but it wasn’t worth sitting and waiting for 2 1/2 hours for.
Just my opinion.
Rating: 1 / 5
7:35 pm on November 4th, 2009
This is such an incredibly stupid and obscene war porn movie that I literally couldn’t watch it – I had to get up and stand by the side of the theater, where the walkway blocked the screen.
At heart, the movie is some sort of a Jewish revenge fantasy (and I am not being either anti-Semitic or very original in saying so – that term has already appeared in published critical reviews of this movie). Not only did nothing of the sort of violence against German soldiers depicted in this movie happen in World War II, but it is a disgrace to the servicemen of the U.S. Army to suggest, even in a highly fanciful Hollywood movie, that such brutal treatment of POW’s was condoned and even encouraged by the U.S. Army.
And yes, I am aware that German POW’s were shot by US soldiers on a number of occasions in WWII, but large scale scalping and using their heads for target practice with baseball bats was not, and the movie denigrates the memory of all American soldiers with its gory depictions of such actions.
So tell me, Quentin Tarantino, just what is the difference between this movie you just made and the Abu Ghraib photos? Do they not both depict American soldiers violating the Geneva Convention in a way that we hope our enemies would not, and do they not both cast disrepute on the U.S. Army? The difference of course is that your movie is just a fantasy, and a really bad one at that.
Hitler wearing a cape? Raging at a lowly foot soldier? Like some sort of an evil crusader comic book villain. So not historically correct either.
And those long-winded trademarked Tarantino monologues – whenever one of them was firing off, it reminded me of that line from the movie “The Incredibles”: HE’S MONOLOGUING AGAIN! YADA YADA… Nobody talks like that in real life.
Are we, the non-Jewish audience of the world, supposed to be impressed that Jewish American soldiers were able to get their revenge for Hitler’s Final Solution against these evil German soldiers? Well, unfortunately, as the movie itself makes clear, the German soldiers who took the brunt of the brutality of Brad Pitt’s troops had nothing to do with the Final Solution or the concentration camps. They were just soldiers.
And the truth was that the U.S. of World War II did nothing to help the Jews of Europe – the U.S. was entirely dumb and deaf on the issue of the extermination of Jews in Europe until the concentration camps were physically liberated. Efforts to help European Jews immigrate to the U.S. were resisted.
So now that AIPAC rules the halls of Congress and mauls any American politician who dares criticize Israel, and now that Israel has the atomic bomb, is it Hollywood’s intention to re-write history and depict the Jews of WWII in a more manly and heroic fashion with this revenge fantasy of a movie about a team of Jewish soldiers scalping and smashing in the skulls of German soldiers during WWII?
How totally unheroic and unmanly… This movie is just war porn, pure and simple.
Rating: 1 / 5
9:14 pm on November 4th, 2009
I spent money to see this in the theater, instead of following my first impulse to wait for the video release. At least on DVD I could have fallen asleep at home in my favorite chair. As it is, I found it terribly dragging and walked out before it was half over. If I ever bother to see the whole thing it will be free on cable TV.
Rating: 2 / 5