But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into “sickening” perpetrators? I’m not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of “revenge” for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future. Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino’s new film evokes are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that “again” will happen.

As far as “what Jews have being doing since World War II ended” and “the possibility that ‘again’ will happen”, I don’t think anyone’s put it better than Jenji Kohan’s Weeds:

It’s also worth pointing out that the Basterds’ gory vengeance–goods delivered, makeup and prosthetics people–takes up only slightly more time in the film than it does in the trailer. The story belongs to Shoshana Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the hunted and the hunter. The Basterds, amusingly, aren’t even particularly central to the film. In fact, (spoilers after the jump)…

…there’s nothing to suggest that their mission, their capture by Hans Landa, and the final twist in which Landa allows their attack to go forward is at all critical to Shoshana’s sealing and burning of the movie theatre. The Basterds’ bombs and guns make it more satisfying cinematically, but the plotted consumption by fire of the German High Command is never detected.

As for this bit of fussiness:

A group of unsuspecting people is tricked into entering a large building; the doors of the building are locked and bolted from the outside; then the building is set on fire. The twist here is not that Tarantino, a director with a notorious penchant for explicit violence, shows you in loving detail what happens inside the burning building—the desperate banging on the doors, the bodies alight, the screams, confusion, the flames. The twist is that this time the people inside the building are Nazis and the people who are killing them are Jews.

Perhaps Mendelsohn should take it up with Kurt Vonnegut, who also had the temerity to make art about non-Jews being burnt alive in WWII.

Adorno may or not be right, but surely his infamous dictum shouldn’t be amended to “all inappropriate poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric.” Interpret, review, compare away to the historical record. Mendelsohn’s at his most interesting when he draws comparisons between the Basterds carving swastikas on Nazis’ foreheads with Nazis, historically, carving stars of David over the hearts of rabbis — a chilling detail, worth remembering, that Jonathan Rosenbaum added to the pile of offenses. But please, end the policing of Holocaust art. Is the current state of affairs, in which the Holocaust comes with instructions on packaging for respectable middlebrow entertainment, that much better? Take it away, Kate Winslet:

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Impressively, IB features dialogue in multiple languages, instead of what Matthew Yglesias called “Hollywood’s more conventional ‘Nazis speaking to each other in German-accented English.’” Main characters speak English, French, and German; Nazi officer Hans Landa rotates effortlessly between all three and even dips into Italian in one scene.

The first “chapter” of the movie is one long scene, close to twenty minutes, almost entirely given over to conversation. Landa visits the home of a French farmer; his purpose, which he presents as mere formality, is to make sure that his predecessor didn’t overlook any details pertaining to the Jews who used to live in the district.

For the first three pages (in the draft hosted at cineobscure, the scene runs 17 pp; I’ll use the screenwriter shorthand of 1 page=1 minute of screentime), Landa converses in French, subtitled. Then abruptly, he says:

In the audience I sat in, we all laughed. No one wants to see a whole subtitled movie, so make use of a clunky pretext and be more “inclusive” to the audience.

However… (ahead there be spoilers)

…over the next eight pages of the scene, Landa slowly draws the truth out of the farmer: he’s hiding the Dreyfus family beneath his floorboards.

The movie’s first blast of gunfire follows as Landa’s men kill the family beneath the floorboards. The language trick, which felt like a cheap but fun joke about the devices of communication and inclusion in movies set in foreign lands, turns out not to function for our inclusion, but for the exclusion of the Jews whose presence Landa suspects. The mirror-image of the filmmaker’s gambit is the murderer’s. We’re in on the joke. The Jews are not.

Tarantino makes movies about movies, sure. Inglourious Basterds is no different. And yet.

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Kill Bill as Parable of Redemption in Zen Buddhism Kill Bill was developed by QT in partnership with his muse Uma Thurman. Thurman’s father Robert is one of the foremost exponents of Zen Buddhism in the West. Und so weiter.

I made the strategic decision to wait until I could see both Kill Bills on the same day. We rented the DVD of Part 1, and as the credits rolled we dashed to the Vista to make the late matinee. If you don’t think you can handle a marathon, I recommend Kill Bill Parts 1 & 2 in One Minute in One Take.

(There’s no sense in discussing them as two separate movies. They are not separable. If you’re constitutionally unable to take the oceans of blood in Part 1, you could still enjoy Part 2, but you’re coming in in the middle.)

Also at The House Next Door, Keith Uhlich (pro) and Matt Soller Zeitz (anti) debate My Tarantino Problem–And Yours. MSZ discusses his unease with Tarantino’s violence:

That’s what bothered me even the first time I saw Pulp Fiction, although at the time I discounted those misgivings, and I shouldn’t have. When Marvin gets shot in the car, by accident, it’s very much like the rest of Pulp Fiction, and the rest of Tarantino’s work, in that it’s comical, and the sense of humor is superficially very Scorsesean. It’s bloody, savage violence, and the callousness with which characters address — or just as often don’t address — the violence is the source of tension and excitement in the movie. [...] But Tarantino’s missing something about Scorsese [...].

Marvin’s shooting is the sourest note for me in Tarantino’s entire body of work, and it led to an informal rule: I won’t call any movie an all-time favorite in which someone is shot in the head for comic effect. Sorry, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, though you too have considerable charms.

It’s possible to explain away the violence in Tarantino’s work by saying “It’s not about violence, it’s about movies”. That’s true enough, but it only gets you so far down the path towards understanding his work. I think of Tarantino as both a humanist and a film pastichist. He’s working without a net in a number of modes at once, and they aren’t always possible to reconcile.

I think Death Proof may go the furthest towards doing so. There’s a way in which movie-ness solves problems in Tarantino’s work. The scene in which Uma Thurman’s gangster moll asks John Travolta’s thug to the dance floor was the first time I noticed this–was really the first time I thought about metafictional conceits in film at all (so it’s kinda 101, aight?). She goads him to get up there; he’s not eager. She takes her shoes off (revealing the feet that got Antwone thrown into a glass house). He slowly takes his shoes off, taking his time, delaying the beginning. Can he do it? Can he dance? … Of course he can. He’s John Travolta.

Death Proof doesn’t take the everything-and-more approach of Robert Rodriguez’s companion Grindhouse piece Planet Terror. Instead, it’s relatively serious-looking and slow, alternating between talky longeurs that introduce us to and weight the characters, and action sequences. It’s divided into two mirror parts. In one, a group of confident, seemingly intelligent attractive women are annihilated by Kurt Russell’s stunt driver. In the second, a group of confident, seemingly intelligent attractive women who are also stunt drivers give him a taste of his own medicine. It’s a vengeance flick, in which the avenged and avengers have no knowledge of one another, and the secret weapon against the badguy is matching him on his terrain of movieness.

As for Inglorious Basterds, I’ll say this in advance. Two different, both wildly point-missing takes on the Holocaust might be, first, a movie in which none of the Jewish characters die (that’s an excerpt, here’s a pdf of the whole thing), and second, a movie in which the Jews do the killing. I’m kinda into the second.

CONFIDENTIAL TO J.M.: Yes, Tears of the Black Tiger was very good. I’m glad I saw it. Doesn’t change my mind.

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