If Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" has a point I suppose it's this: the triumph of principle over opportunism. Then again maybe it's this: that principle and opportunism are strange but frequent bedfellows. Or, maybe it's this: we won the war, we'll (re)write it any damn way we want.
And rewrite it he does, blithely creating an entirely new ending for the war, tossing out the biographies of the war's major players and carving along the way a special niche for himself in the pantheon of WWII-related media right up there next to "Hogan's Heroes". And that, to be sure, is the closest parallel available though to Hogan's Heroes' credit they never made the mistake of venturing into holocaust history to get their flat screen jollies. With Inglorious Basterds Tarantino does just that and the results are cringe worthy.
I've heard that you have to give old Quentin a pass because what he's creating here is not a WWII story but another in whats beginning to seem like an endless series of homages to cinema past and present, foreign and domestic. That the way to approach Inglorious Basterds is not to examine its story and/or construction but to keep a note pad handy to jot down all the wonderful cinematic allusions. I'm sorry but this isn't "Kill Bill" so the story and the way it's told do matter. With Kill Bill I was willing to give him a pass and simply enjoy the technical wow of it all, because he made it explicit up front that that movie was nothing but an exercise in filming various revenge scenarios.
Inglorious Basterds though was supposed to be the film where Tarantino spread his wings a bit and showed that he was more than a one-trick pony. Well, if that's the case he fails miserably and he fails using material you shouldn't fail with. Irreverence and disrespect co-habitate in this film in a way that tastes an awful lot more like the latter than the former. I also have a nagging suspiscion that when viewing rushes during production the word "cool" was probably heard regularly around the theater emenating enthusiastically from QTs oversized lips.
Tarantino doesn't tell you what to think or feel. I'll give him that. Problem is he doesn't tell you much of anything else either. He goes to great lengths to set up a ficticious covert operation that requires introducing a number of new characters (including an appallingly bad cameo by one Mike Myers) and then kills everyone involved off in a shootout only a third grader didn't see coming in a scene that takes nearly a half hour to get to the point. And what exactly is the point? Is he telling me that war is hell? Well I kinda already knew that. Is he telling me some kind of parable; "the best laid plans of mice and men..."? It's tempting to think so, but I'm not buying it.
As Goebells and his lapdog Leni Riefenstahl knew images are power. Turning the holocaust, which so many have struggled so long to make sure we remember, into raw material for a cinematic romp seems, lets be kind and say "ill-advised". Believe it or not there are young people out there (a lot of them actually) who don't know much about the apocalypse that was WWII or the holocaust that was its most egregious element. Spin em a yarn about a Tennessee hick scalping nazi's and blowing away the entire German high command in one fell swoop and some of them are gonna swallow it hook line and sinker. From there its not too far to the top of that slipperiest of slopes: forgetting. After all, if there's no consensus about what really happened, why bother believing it happened at all? How would this film have been received if it had been made by a German or an Iranian? I guarantee you it would not have received the blind accolades it did, and rightfully so. Unfettered by their love for Tarantino critics would have been able to see the danger here.
I'm not saying "don't watch the film" because that's your decision. What I am asking is that, if you do watch it, try and forget that it's a Quentin Tarantino film and then see how you feel about it.
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