Inglourious Basterds (2009), Quentin Tarantino.

In this post: here be spoilers!

The New Yorker's David Denby calls Inglourious Basterds "ridiculous," and the AV Club's Keith Phipps says the movie is "designed to inspire mere minutes of reflection." (Yeah- that's basically all the movie criticism I read unless I drag my ass to the local Mags 'n' Fags and pick up Film Comment, which I haven't done recently). WHAT!? I'll admit, the pacing was off -- not enough scalpin' and lots of yabber. But, I loved this flick.

As Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will let you know, urban Jews were the creators of the comic book superhero and in Inglourious Basterds, they ARE the superheroes! This movie's thesis is that film is so powerful a medium it can change our perception of history - maybe even history itself - and through film, Jewish storytelling has won out over Nazi myth-making. At least, that is what I am going to maintain. In what other WWII movie is the British Lieutenant assigned to assassinate Goebbels a film critic in civilian life? Churchill asks Lt Hicox whether Goebbel's mission as Minister of Propaganda is to beat the Jews "at their own game," and asks if Goebbels sees himself as the Aryan Louis B Mayer. Churchill is told no, Goebbels is more of a David O Selznik. So it's David O. VS Goebbels, and guess who is going down!

The film's Jewish heroine is the proprietor of a Parisian cinema, inside which the staggering denouement takes place: every senior Nazi official (including Hitler) is barricaded inside the theatre watching propagandist claptrap. While a pile of cellulose nitrate ignites, setting the screen on fire, her homemade film spliced into the main feature disrupts the Nazi narrative. Her face takes up the entire screen and she announces: "I'm interrupting your Nazi propaganda horse shit, to inform you despicable German swine that you are all going to die. And I want you to look deep in the face of the Jew who's going to do it." Did you know nitrate creates its own oxygen while burning, therefore fueling its own conflagration? Yes, in addition to baseball bats, machine guns and knives, one of the murder weapons is 35mm film!

How is this movie ridiculous when every movie that has featured Nazis as its antagonist has been ridiculous? The most accessible, one-dimensional, condemnable enemy for American cinema has been Nazis. Remember Tom Cruise's anachronistic desire as a kid to Kill Hitler? Well, here's your opportunity - the Inglourious Basterds rat-a-tat-tat Hitler to de-yeath - and burn the rest to kingdom come! (I'm going to mostly skip over the truly ludicrous production that was Valkyrie... but can't help mentioning that instead of surrounding one implausible actor with Brits with stage cred, IB gives us Mike Myers in a British general's uniform putting on an accent that is just a slightly thinner slice of ham than usual!)

So sure, this deviates a bit from the official historical record that says faced with his own defeat, Hitler offed himself in a bunker. And what is WWII good for except for being perhaps one of the best documented events (colour film appears, the Nazis make blueprints of gas chambers and keep a very tidy paper trail of all their activities). Not even attempting to live in the this-is-exactly-as-it-was-past, this flick is saying sure, we know the Allies won. It's also saying, our story won and your story failed. Is this Tarantino's masterpiece? I don't know, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.