It’s that well done. My only regrets are 1) that it’s not a true story; and 2) that no-one in Hollywood has the guts to do an “Inglorious Basterds” with Americans fighting our current enemy: Muslim invaders who’ve also replaced their friends, the Nazis, as the thugs upon Europe. If only Abu Steven Spielberg had had the guts to do “Munich” (read my review) like this.

Set a melodrama in a concentration camp (Schindler's List), and the result is sentimental kitsch that wins seven Oscars.

But Tarantino's signature nastiness and his juvenile delight in shocking the audience undercut the movie's larger purpose. Which is what, again? Watching someone get beaten to death with a baseball bat, or having a swastika carved into their flesh in tight closeup, is sickening whether the victim is a Nazi or not. In the scenes where the bloodthirsty Basterds (one of whom is played by Eli Roth, the director of the ultra-sadistic Hostel movies and a friend of Tarantino's) perpetrate these exploits, are we supposed to be cheering them on? Is the best way to work through the atrocities of the 20th century really to dream up ironically apt punishments for the long-dead torturers?

The idea of an all-Jewish unit is a joke that arrives fully formed and never goes anywhere.

so is it a good movie, or not?
by ayalonValley
08/21/2009, 10:42 AM

Jesus, you forgot your job description

But this film is almost blatant in its message. Maybe a bit ambiguous at first, but from the first Nazi-killing scene, I couldn't quite laugh. I think the most obvious part comes (I'm being vague to avoid totally plot-spoillage) as the "Jewish eyes" stare into the audience, while Hitler laughs at the film screen, full of dying Americans. Tarantino confirms that he has been snarking (or something, it's sort of ambiguous, surprise) at you for about three hours. And you've paid to watch it.

Taken as a yin-yang whole, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 constitute a globe-spanning feat of genre scholarship, blithely connecting the dots from Chinese kung fu to Japanese swordplay, from blaxploitation to manga to spaghetti Western. Tarantino's reference-happy method is often dismissed as know-it-all geekery or stunted nostalgia, the video-store dreams of an eternal fanboy. But there is something strikingly of the moment and perhaps even utopian about Kill Bill's obsessive pastiche, which at once celebrates and demonstrates the possibilities of the voracious, hyperlinked 21st-century media gestalt: the idea that whole histories and entire worlds of pop culture are up for grabs, waiting to be revived, reclaimed, remixed.