criterionforum.org

The film was announced today as the surprise closing feature of the Fantasia Film Festival here in Montreal, and will be presented by Eli Roth. If you're in the area, and have any interest in the film (or want to heckle Eli Roth), this is probably the most ideal audience to see the film with.

Antoine, I trust you'll be attending. Will you please let us know your thoughts on the film. I may be alone here, but I am anticipating this release.

The trailer for Nation's Pride, the film within the film, has arrived.

Nation's Pride was a great opportunity to do something both modern and period. why squander that entirely?

I just wish they had played up the old trailer aspect. That was what it would look like today, not in the 30s or 40s. There was still a laugh though.

Having seen the movie in Sydney on Monday, the extracts from 'Nation's Pride' were the worst part of the film. So many ways the footage could have been staged, but it's just a boring repetitive series of BLAM! soldier falls BLAM! soldier falls (extend to infinity). Even that could have been worthwhile if it was done with absurdity or a sense of excess, but no - it's just dead space. There's no sense of how being a specifically NAZI propaganda film (rather than a standard war-time exercise) would have affected the imagery or staging. My understanding though is that Eli Roth shot the 'Nation's Pride' footage, so that kind of explains the missed opportunity aspect.

My thought on seeing it was that it was the Nazi version of Saving Private Ryan - didn't that have a sniper glorification sequence too?

Oh fuck, of course. Gaah, I didn't even make that connection until I read that. It still could have done more with the possibilities though.

I really can't believe this wasn't shot on black and white film in an effort to actually imitate the pictures that would have existed from the era. Eli Roth. . .

The stroller was handled terribliy [-( Why even evoke Battleship Potemkin? It was from 1925. Why not Triumph of the Will or other Nazi Propaganda films?

The strange thing about Nation's Pride is that in the movie it basically serves as the movie Inglourious Basterds is advertised as being. i.e.

Tom Hagen wrote:I get that this is Tarantino and everything, but Jesus Christ the average kid watching this trailer is going to come away thinking that war crimes are a fun and funny - if not morally justifiable - response to unconscionable evil.

With Hitler's reaction more or less being representative of the audience for Inglourious Basterds. Though I wonder if this was intentional.

I just flipped through the script to try and place where Maggie Cheung's character fits in. It did make sense cutting those scenes out - the story elements were summed up in a ten second montage. I hope they include the scenes on the DVD though.

To those who have seen the film I'm confused about one thing:

Is that trailer for 'Stolz Der Nation' that's online right now appear exactly like in the movie or is that trailer for 'Stolz Der Nation' specifically made to advetise the trailer in the movie? if anyone can understand that. I'm saying that if the trailer that's online is exactly the one that's in the movie it looks horribly out of place even given the recreating history aspect of the movie. The editing and CGI.... I thought it was way too cheesy in a very bad way.

Burn.

His remark about making old man films reminded me of that article he wrote a little bit ago. I forget the title or even where to look for it, but it's basically his argument against any film made by men after the age of 60... Does anyone happen to have a link to this article? Was this even an article? Am I cobbling together comments he's made over the last decade?

planetjake wrote:Am I cobbling together comments he's made over the last decade?

Well, he's been saying this same line ever since he returned to the public eye around the time of Kill Bill. The first time I remember hearing it was in his New Yorker profile. The pathetic irony is that he's self-aware enough to acknowledge the reality of artistic decline, but too self-absorbed to realize he's been in the throws of it for the entire decade.

Read about actual Jewish commandos connected to the British army during WWII--and their reaction to Tarantino's film.

Interesting article and interview with Tarantino by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic (a magazine I highly recommend you subscribe to).

“I hate that hand-wringing shit,” he said. He had a revelation in his early 20s, he recalled, when he saw Red Dawn, a Cold War revenge fantasy in which a group of American high-school students, the “Wolverines,” battle Soviet and Central American soldiers who invade Colorado. “The Wolverines capture a soldier, and there’s a little bit of back-and-forth—should we kill him or not—and C. Thomas Howell just blows him away with his shotgun,” Tarantino recalled. “Those are the kind of things you say, ‘That’s exactly what I would do.’ It’s what I want to see, and when I don’t see it, I become frustrated, and then it feels like a movie as opposed to real life.”

Is Tarantino really claiming that the "real life" version of people (high schoolers, even) dealing with captive prisoners is to blow them away rather than to think things through? Isn't it the other way around? Idealogically, this man gets more and more frightening - he seems somewhere between Paul Kersey and George W. Bush.

He went on, “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”

It would be interesting to see exactly what Quentin would "do" if it was 1943 and he was being herded into a boxcar while surrounded by Nazis with machine guns. Having had the misfortune to see and hear the idiot in action over the last 15 years, I would say the most likely scenario is that he would simply shit his pants.

I feel physically ill reading this stuff, and I say this as someone who spent the morning hacking through book four of Maldoror. The guy is a complete psychotic, as is Roth, and that he remains such a power player in film (and culture in general) is downright horrifying.

Quentin Tarantino wrote:Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.

I know eternity is still young, but it's hard to imagine a more vile statement ever being made by a respected filmmaker, re: the Holocaust

Short of denying it, no.

“Those are the kind of things you say, ‘That’s exactly what I would do.’

Is anyone else having trouble envisioning Couch Potarantino as a man of action?

If the equally talented Benigni can turn the Holocaust into Life Is Beautiful, surely QT can transform Hitler into something "fun"!

"The Hitler you knew ... the Hitler you loved ... the Hitler with a song in heart ..."

Any respect I had for the guy just got flushed down the toilet. What a madman.

Jeff Wells from Hollywood Elsewhere has seen the film twice and seems to concur with the consensus on Tarantino over the past page.

Jeff Wells wrote:Inglourious Basterds reeks of arrogance and sadism and indifference to the value of human life.

Cde. wrote:Jeff Wells from Hollywood Elsewhere has seen the film twice and seems to concur with the consensus on Tarantino over the past page.

Jeff Wells wrote:Inglourious Basterds reeks of arrogance and sadism and indifference to the value of human life.

Really that review is almost the same as saying that Pulp Fiction is pro butt rape.