Some Notes on Inglourious Basterds

Some random thoughts on watching Inglourious Basterds (spoilers abound):

• I am closer to a thumbs-up than a thumbs-down, although I can see where everyone is coming from (including my unusually divided group of film buddies).
  
• Scene by scene, I would much rather watch this movie than the Kill Bills, which probably has a lot to do with my interest in the subject matter.
• Quentin is not exactly a deep guy, which I think we should all know by now, so I wasn't looking for Army of Darkness here.
• I found the film terrifically entertaining, yet quite low in dramatic tension, despite the obvious effort expended in each chapter on building tension up. I think this disconnect has a lot to do with the flimsiness of the characters --juicily written, well acted (for the most part), but not really people you can care much about -- Denis Menochet as the farmer in the opening sequence comes closest to establishing real empathy.
  
• Also, you figure out very early on that almost everyone is going to die (not just in the movie overall, but in any given scene!), which makes it difficult to worry about anyone's particular fate.
• The casting of Eli Roth is a real blemish. Given the care that QT took to cast absolutely superb European actors, throwing a non-actor friend into the mix seems childish (but somehow characteristic).
  
• The Basterds in general are not well differentiated (especially for such a long film), and since from Pitt on down they are largely caricatural, I take that depicting Americans as basically cartoonish is part of Tarantino's intent, although I'm not sure where that leads, exactly. I mean, if Pitt's Aldo Raine is meant to be somehow symbolic of America, then I say let the Axis win.
  
• The British and American scheming involved in "Operation Kino" is ill-conceived and poorly carried out, but it's hard to decide whether that's a problem with their thinking or with Tarantino's screenplay -- a diegetic malfunction or a meta-malfunction?
• As good as Christoph Waltz is, after all the awards I was expecting something along the lines of the greatest performance ever captured, and it isn't that, quite. Waltz hits a note and sustains it, very well, but there's no character development, no "arc" -- I question how challenging a role it really is. He certainly handles all the languages brilliantly. But I enjoyed Daniel Bruhl, Denis Menochet, August Diehl, Diane Kruger, Melanie Laurent, and Michael Fassbender every bit as much as Waltz.
• Lot of male eye candy here -- Bruhl and Fassbender in particular are shot in a way that trips my gaydar.
• It's interesting, isn't it, that the film condones suicide bombing in a good cause? I haven't seen comments on that anywhere, perhaps because revealing it would be such a spoiler.
• Despite what David Denby said in his New Yorker review about Jews probably not appreciating Tarantino's revenge fantasy, I'm not sure that's right. The rabbis he showed the film loved it, in part because they felt it recapitulated the Purim story in the Biblical Book of Esther, in which the Hebrews not only foil but destroy their enemies, killing 75,000 of them: http://andthewinneris.blog.com/2010/02/28/ad/
• Am I surprised by the rabbis' reactions, since the movie reduces its Jews to monsters virtually indistinguishable from the Nazis? Well, a little surprised. But -- I want to be careful about how I put this -- there is a strong vein of retribution in portions of the Old Testament ("an eye for an eye") that appears to have God's sanction (and the Old Testament God can be pretty vengeful himself). I don't think QT was particularly thinking of that while he was writing (as the article at the link says, he didn't even know the Purim story), but some folks seem to have latched onto it. One rabbi describes the movie as "a fun, action-packed Jewish revenge fantasy." I'm not sure if that makes me more troubled about the movie or about the rabbi.
• Finally: I think Quentin Tarantino's real contribution to movies is that he generally can get a sort-of-mass-audience (if not quite Michael Bay's or James Cameron's audience) to go along with seemingly non-commercial structures and premises: twisted chronology, main actions off-screen (Reservoir Dogs), aging characters (Jackie Brown), characters who don't stay important for the length of the film, long dialogue scenes, subtitles, films split in two (Kill Bill), and so on. He didn't get the audience to follow for the double-feature-and-trailers structure of Grindhouse (which I thought was surefire), or the interlocking stories of Four Rooms, but usually, he gets away with whatever he tries without killing his box office take. It's an unusual gift, and I must salute him for it.