Inglourious Basterds

[Napier]

Great post Mr. Finch, It's was like a breath of fresh air. This IB discussion turned into the Tarantino bashing thread some pages back. I'm actually really looking forward to seeing this over the weekend.

[accatone]

By not showing his death and "tastefully" panning away when Goering shoots himself, Downfall defers to, and contributes to the myth of the very thing that it presumably meant to humanise.

?

Not to derail the thread, but since Downfall was supposed to be nominally from Trudl Jung's point of view, the portrayel of Hitler's death from outside the room with simply the shots heard and then the bodies carried out--ie. as she witnessed it--didn't bother me in the slightest.

These two films are almost always brought up in the german discussion about IB. From left to right they praise Tarantinos balls to show "everything" and somehow destroy (some of) myth that others were afraid off...its strange.

[Finch]

Mr Sausage: I think a break in perspective (I don't recall the film being particularly consistent in sticking to Junge's view anyway but my memory may fail me; I've only seen it once) wouldn't have hurt the film at all. I've mentioned it in the Downfall thread already but will briefly repeat it here: the film doesn't hesitate to show an ordinary German soldier graphically blowing his brains out but when Hitler and company commit suicide it happens off-screen. In the context of the gore elsewhere in the film, I find the sudden restraint in those key scenes ironic and inappropriate. This is what I meant when I said that Downfall is deferential. It treats the architects of the crime differently and it bothers me, whether it's consistent with the protagonist's POV or not. I find Hirschbiegel hypocritical and Tarantino refreshingly honest in contrast.

[Finch]

These two films are almost always brought up in the german discussion about IB. From left to right they praise Tarantinos balls to show "everything" and somehow destroy (some of) myth that others were afraid off...its strange.

I don't think it's a case of the film's defenders getting high on the violence (which, incidentally, is not any worse than in QT's other films) but a recognition that the film's wish fulfilment of

Spoiler

seeing Hitler getting killed

feels liberating and that this scene especially makes perfect sense within the film's fairytale construct.

[accatone]

thats what i was trying to say with "show everything".

[Finch]

Do you consider "showing everything" a bad thing? If so, why, and if you do, do you disapprove of it in general or only in certain contexts?

I wonder if in some quarters people still consider it inconceivable to show Hitler getting his comeuppance. I think Tarantino is quite rightly asking, Why not? Why are we treating this as a taboo still? I don't think it trivialises history and/or the heroic acts of anyone who died fighting fascism to ponder what an alternative history would have been like where Hitler doesn't die by his own hands, especially if the film makes it abundantly clear that it is a fantasy and never pretends otherwise. It indulges in a fantasy, our fantasy, and in making this liberating gesture, it may well be a turning point in cinematic representations of Hitler as a person and the Third Reich at large.

[accatone]

NoNoNo-not a bad thing at all and i can see and understand yours and the german critics reaction! i am just curious that (the german press) is so fixed on this point / and i have not seen the film yet so please dont get me wrong..

[Finch]

No worries accatone. I just wondered if you had a specific take on what can/cannot/should/should not be shown in any film on the Nazis/WWII/the Holocaust, whether it's serious, realistic or a flight of imagination like Tarantino's (or, to go further back, like Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, a film that didn't impress me at all). I'd love to hear what others who have already seen the film or are going to, make of it.

Re the Guardian review: I like Peter Bradshaw a lot, one of our best critics, but he's not infallible either as his recent 3 stars for Year One shows.

[Caged Horse]

Three stars for Year One? Hell, 'Armond' Bradshaw gave The Love Guru three stars and he thinks The Butterfly Effect is an unfairly-criticised classic...

(Still avoiding the Tarantino, though.)

[kaujot]

Ebert loves it.

[Mr Sausage]

Mr Sausage: I think a break in perspective (I don't recall the film being particularly consistent in sticking to Junge's view anyway but my memory may fail me; I've only seen it once) wouldn't have hurt the film at all. I've mentioned it in the Downfall thread already but will briefly repeat it here: the film doesn't hesitate to show an ordinary German soldier graphically blowing his brains out but when Hitler and company commit suicide it happens off-screen. In the context of the gore elsewhere in the film, I find the sudden restraint in those key scenes ironic and inappropriate. This is what I meant when I said that Downfall is deferential. It treats the architects of the crime differently and it bothers me, whether it's consistent with the protagonist's POV or not. I find Hirschbiegel hypocritical and Tarantino refreshingly honest in contrast.

Well, I said "nominally" from her point of view, since of course there are breaks (novels sometimes do this, switch in and out of the first and third person perspective, ie. Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcisus and Nabokov's The Gift). But the film chose to take her point of view--as it did of much else, and really should considering she is meant to be a major eye-witness and our introduction into the movie--for Hitler's death in order to depict it accurately and historically as opposed to speculating. Since the movie does it by reverting to its primary point of view rather than creating a new one just for that moment, I don't feel there is any reticence involved beyond strict adherance to fact. Plus, if I remember correct, Hitler is the overarching figure of Downfall, but he is not its main character, in the sense that we are never given the private Hitler or aligned with his point of view, so watching his final moments with his wife would violate that aesthetic, especially because it requires that the scene be invented. The movie, at least to me, was about the Hitler that people actually saw, rather than a Hitler people might not have seen.

[Narshty]

Ebert loves it.

Did he just call it the best film of the year?

[Finch]

David Cox comments on the film in the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog ... ge-history" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[tavernier]

ARMOND!

[domino harvey]

Other than calling out hipsters for the thousandth time, that's a surprisingly coherent review. Broken clock, &c

[swo17]

Coherent I guess, in that I can kind of discern his argument for once...except I think he misses the point, faulting the film for failing to live up to Nazi depictions in, you guessed it, Schindler's List and Indiana Jones. This film has looked nothing but terrible to me so far, but I have to say, Ebert and Kenny's reviews make it sound a little more interesting than I had thought possible, whereas Armond, once again, appears to balk at the idea of the movie more than the movie itself. I still say he wrote most of that review before having watched the film.

[domino harvey]

Glenn Kinney liked the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie, so I'm not sure he has any more critical cachet than White. And to be fair, "Jewish revenge porn" (and White is not the first to note this) is objectionable enough to reject outright, as several critics and posters on this board already have. I won't know for sure until I see it myself, but Tarantino's offensive commentary mixed with what I'm hearing even from the good reviews make me question this film's very existence. Also, props to White on managing to fit in an Indiana Jones quote that no one else would even have remembered. He must have like just watched it the night before and thought "What the hell"

[kaujot]

Well, I'm fairly certain he watches a Spielberg movie most every night.

[knives]

How is Emil Jannings obscure?
Otherwise I have to say White kind of made sense. =D> The nerds at RT must be shitting themselves.

[colinr0380]

Glenn Kinney liked the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie, so I'm not sure he has any more critical cachet than White. And to be fair, "Jewish revenge porn" (and White is not the first to note this) is objectionable enough to reject outright, as several critics and posters on this board already have. I won't know for sure until I see it myself, but Tarantino's offensive commentary mixed with what I'm hearing even from the good reviews make me question this film's very existence. Also, props to White on managing to fit in an Indiana Jones quote that no one else would even have remembered. He must have like just watched it the night before and thought "What the hell"

Interestingly though he doesn't comment on Speilberg 'atoning' for making Nazis cartoonish villains in the earlier films through his period dramas and updating to the Cold War for the fourth film's villains. Not that I want to put ideas into White's head, but believing in cartoony rewriting of history to provide catharsis for a contemporary audience is something Spielberg moved past (and into a much more morally difficult area of putting 'history' on film with a straight face, but with just as much showmanship), and that might have been a good stick to bash Tarantino's film with.

Sadly though I don't think Armond was particularly upset about "Jewish revenge porn" because revenge is an ugly and degrading concept in itself, but more just because it may devalue what he sees as 'justified' revenge fantasies by association (as exemplified on film by, of course, the reference to Munich)

[aox]

And to be fair, "Jewish revenge porn" (and White is not the first to note this) is objectionable enough to reject outright, as several critics and posters on this board already have.

I suppose this is a fairly new subgenre? Besides Zwick's awful Defiance and this, what else counts as "Jewish Revenge Porn"?

[HarryLong]

How is Emil Jannings obscure?

Heck wid dat.
How is STAGEDOOR CANTEEN a masterful movie?

[Fiery Angel]

Hoberman raves, although he sounds like he's trying to convince himself that it's some kind of anti-Spielbergian masterpiece.

And the genius himself speaks, giving raves to Observe and Report and Anything Else, of all things.

[Finch]

Walter Chaw chimes in with another rave: http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/screenr ... sterds.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"this is Tarantino no longer making something new and strange out of his obsessive movie-love, but something dangerous and risky about the ethics of vengeance and the shifting ground beneath moral quagmires we thought we'd put to bed. What better conflict than the last popular war to stage a conversation about whether or not the only reason the winners weren't held accountable for their atrocities is that they were the winners. (...) It comes complete with a feeling that no one gets out of war completely alive, that the deals we made with the devil at the end of WWII are no better or worse than the ones we strike with our devils on a daily basis. (...) unlike any number of modern, feted wartime melodramas (particularly Spielberg's WWII trilogy of Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan), there is no epilogue where righteous lines are redrawn once the fog of war has lifted. There's no post-mortem to the events of this picture, just the film's most intimate and graphic moment of bloodletting, perpetrated against the character we hate the most--and yet it makes us cringe."

[Finch]

Interestingly though he doesn't comment on Speilberg 'atoning' for making Nazis cartoonish villains in the earlier films through his period dramas and updating to the Cold War for the fourth film's villains. Not that I want to put ideas into White's head, but believing in cartoony rewriting of history to provide catharsis for a contemporary audience is something Spielberg moved past (and into a much more morally difficult area of putting 'history' on film with a straight face, but with just as much showmanship), and that might have been a good stick to bash Tarantino's film with.

Sadly though I don't think Armond was particularly upset about "Jewish revenge porn" because revenge is an ugly and degrading concept in itself, but more just because it may devalue what he sees as 'justified' revenge fantasies by association (as exemplified on film by, of course, the reference to Munich)

I'm glad someone pointed it out because White exposes himself yet again as a hypocrite. So his implication is it's acceptable to give Spielberg a free pass for roasting Nazis in the finale of Raiders (I don't hear anyone complaining about "offensive revenge fantasies" in that film?) but when Tarantino does it, it's pornographic?

I look forward to reading your own thoughts on the film, Colin.