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Inglourious Basteards by Quentin Tarantino

From:     Jfilms
Category: Films
Date:     26 August 2009
Time:     06:28 AM

Review:

Is it ok to mispell a deliberately misspelt film titles? Is it all right to fantasise about the holocaust? 
I felt a slight feeling of dread at seeing Basturds due to bad reviews and the sense that if people are 
beginning to rewrite history for entertainment then that history may have lost its true power. No art 
after auschwitz  has become the holocaust as just another genre to be played with. Yada yada, blah 
blah. Have we forgotten already.

In fact Tarantino's movie turns out to be a tonic. Given that the film is produced by the Jewish 
American Weinsteins and that QT's not a Holocaust denier or really a closet relativist, the film acts as 
a thought experiment, most/all war movies are fantastic jingoistic untruthful, especially the horrific and 
pukily sentimental Schindlers List, so why pretend? Inglorious starts with once upon a time in Nazi 
occupied France.... and this makes obvious that what follows is fantasy.

What if the second world war was turned upside down(most films turn war invert history by giving us 
some sort of happy ending) and a band of Jewish American went round murdering Nazis, and 
finished up by killing Hitler and all the nastiest Nazis. Isn't this what many of us daydream, and it 
seems perfectly valid for Tarantino to express this idea in a film. It does not say history is 
meaningless or all the same or all relative, it merely and creatively says here is what we desire.

Amusingly the film is all talk, and little violence or action. And  lost in a dream watching the absurd 
meandering menacing conversations, you wonder whether those going to see a bloody war film will 
not feel shortchanged. Bastards ends with the words "this might be my masterpiece", and perhaps 
the cute suggestion is accurate.


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