![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Inglourious Basterds
Soooo I just saw Inglourious Basterds.
Idk. Idk. I mean, Tarantino, so the camera work was neat and inventive, and there were assholes and good guys and good guys being assholes and assholes saving the world, etc etc. There was also a lot of blood, although not as much as in some of his other films, and there were Nazis speaking impeccable German in an American movie, which usually never happens. I guess Tarantino probably figured that if he's got a character who will be speaking German for most of the time, why not simply get a German actor. Thank you, Tarantino, for having that pretty obvious but sadly quite uncommon thought. (Can you tell that movie "Germans" who can't pronounce the umlaut in Führer annoy the fuck out of me?)
But getting back to the idk part. I really don't know what he wanted with this movie. I can't figure it out. Now, I'm the last person to say that every movie needs a moral message, but this was a movie set in WWII. A fictional movie set in WWII. They killed Hitler, ffs. They used WWII as their stage to tell a story, and, to put it in fandom terms, didn't give a fuck about canon. Which is, I guess, a good thing, because it removes the movie from what actually happened--it distances it from any attempts to lay blame or point fingers or make statements about who did what to whom in the actual war. On the other hand, I don't know if you can go there yet. I don't know if people are removed enough from WWII yet to let Tarantino use it as a stage to set up a play that has basically nothing to do with WWII. I don't know if you can do it yet without offending and insulting people for whom this part of history is something very personal.
Tarantino always makes movies about the selfishness of people. Selfishness, basic instinct, those kind of things. In this movie, the main "villain", the Jew Hunter (I forget his actual name), never does anything that doesn't benefit him and him alone. He just likes to kill, and he doesn't care if he's killing Jews, or women, or Nazi brass. And he gets away with it. The only one who actually manages to hurt him is the Apache, the leader of the Basterds, because he's the same--he just wants to kill people, to hurt them and to mark them as his.
I did love the cut from the burning, exploding cinema to the quiet, calm shot of the truck driving through the forest. The world's most recognized evil men--Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, etc--just got blown to bits, and then there are the Apache and the Jew Hunter, two full-blown sociopaths, both about as evil as it gets, sitting in a truck and driving through the forest. They got away, because they looked out for themselves. Maybe that was Tarantino's point. You only get away if you look out for yourself, and only yourself. Kind of like in Reservoir Dogs.
Or maybe it was that real evil is made, not born. Like, the depiction of Hitler was ridiculous. Red cape, the painter in the background, the constant maniacal laughter, him asking the soldier for some gum--he wasn't a real character. He's supposed to be the most evil one of the lot, but whenever he showed up, you got a laugh out of it. The really vile and evil things happened whenever he wasn't around, when people who had been driven to violence by their past acted out, or when people who simply enjoyed the violence got their kicks out of shooting a bunch of Jewish fugitives or carving a swastika in the forehead of a German soldier. Hitler is still remembered as the personification of evil, basically, while a lot of other people who did horrible things in the war, on whichever side, are forgotten.
I don't know. I can't quite figure it out. Any of you guys who have seen it--thoughts?
comment on LJ
Idk. Idk. I mean, Tarantino, so the camera work was neat and inventive, and there were assholes and good guys and good guys being assholes and assholes saving the world, etc etc. There was also a lot of blood, although not as much as in some of his other films, and there were Nazis speaking impeccable German in an American movie, which usually never happens. I guess Tarantino probably figured that if he's got a character who will be speaking German for most of the time, why not simply get a German actor. Thank you, Tarantino, for having that pretty obvious but sadly quite uncommon thought. (Can you tell that movie "Germans" who can't pronounce the umlaut in Führer annoy the fuck out of me?)
But getting back to the idk part. I really don't know what he wanted with this movie. I can't figure it out. Now, I'm the last person to say that every movie needs a moral message, but this was a movie set in WWII. A fictional movie set in WWII. They killed Hitler, ffs. They used WWII as their stage to tell a story, and, to put it in fandom terms, didn't give a fuck about canon. Which is, I guess, a good thing, because it removes the movie from what actually happened--it distances it from any attempts to lay blame or point fingers or make statements about who did what to whom in the actual war. On the other hand, I don't know if you can go there yet. I don't know if people are removed enough from WWII yet to let Tarantino use it as a stage to set up a play that has basically nothing to do with WWII. I don't know if you can do it yet without offending and insulting people for whom this part of history is something very personal.
Tarantino always makes movies about the selfishness of people. Selfishness, basic instinct, those kind of things. In this movie, the main "villain", the Jew Hunter (I forget his actual name), never does anything that doesn't benefit him and him alone. He just likes to kill, and he doesn't care if he's killing Jews, or women, or Nazi brass. And he gets away with it. The only one who actually manages to hurt him is the Apache, the leader of the Basterds, because he's the same--he just wants to kill people, to hurt them and to mark them as his.
I did love the cut from the burning, exploding cinema to the quiet, calm shot of the truck driving through the forest. The world's most recognized evil men--Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, etc--just got blown to bits, and then there are the Apache and the Jew Hunter, two full-blown sociopaths, both about as evil as it gets, sitting in a truck and driving through the forest. They got away, because they looked out for themselves. Maybe that was Tarantino's point. You only get away if you look out for yourself, and only yourself. Kind of like in Reservoir Dogs.
Or maybe it was that real evil is made, not born. Like, the depiction of Hitler was ridiculous. Red cape, the painter in the background, the constant maniacal laughter, him asking the soldier for some gum--he wasn't a real character. He's supposed to be the most evil one of the lot, but whenever he showed up, you got a laugh out of it. The really vile and evil things happened whenever he wasn't around, when people who had been driven to violence by their past acted out, or when people who simply enjoyed the violence got their kicks out of shooting a bunch of Jewish fugitives or carving a swastika in the forehead of a German soldier. Hitler is still remembered as the personification of evil, basically, while a lot of other people who did horrible things in the war, on whichever side, are forgotten.
I don't know. I can't quite figure it out. Any of you guys who have seen it--thoughts?
comment on LJ
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject