Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterdsⁱ is (yet another) movie about Jews and their WW2 plight.

Christoph Waltz plays an evil Totenkopf SS guy nicknamed "The Jew Hunter" (don't mind me, I'm just trying to rank for "Jew", that's why I keep saying Jew, it has nothing to do with the mediatic obession over an ethnic group roughly the size of some other group that you've never heard of in spite of being the same size - that's what they get for not being Jews - and in any case all this is unrelated with how every Jew who's not a lawyer is producing films which his lawyer friends are financing) who explains quite simply why "zee Germanz" don't like zee Jewz : they just don't. Like, you don't like rats even tho you like squirrels ? Same thing.

Brad Pitt plays some sergeant or somesuch. He is awful. Just... unmitigatedly, indescribably awful. The Koreans can probably make better acting androids out of chewing gum and diner muffins by now. Seriously, I fail to grasp why anyone considers this piece of furniture an actor. Pretty much the only way a director can get him to not grate (a good job is out of the question) is by preventing him from speaking, moving too much or interacting with other people. As a human lampshade he does okay. Gaskammer!

There's also a very campy Hitler. Hardly worth the mention. And since we're on it : the entire film smacks of what the French (Jews) call esprit d'escalier. 3. SS-Panzergrenadier-Division Totenkopf did in fact exist, and unlike the bulk of Allied units it was pretty tough. SS-Totenkopfverbande did in fact exist, and it did in fact butcher millions of Jews. In stark contrast, a bunch of American Jews led by some Apache-wannabe did not exist, and did not scalp anyone. In fact, Jewish resistance is mostly a work of post-hoc manufacture - it didn't exist on the ground in the 1940s, painful and inconvenient as that may be.

The solution to this painful inconvenience can in no case be the enactment of some pretense of "Jewish resistance". I understand that in retrospect it boggles the mind to consider how worthlessly sheepish them Jews were at the time, and perhaps the thought that people so unprepared to defend themselves are better off dead anyway may spark itself in the head of some members of the public. As painfully inconvenient as all this may be, pretending history ain't so is unacceptable.ⁱⁱ

You'd think Tarantino is a failed salesman. You know how some people failed at getting laid back in college and so to this day masturbate furiously to stills of teensy looking chicks in ankle socks ? Or some dood somewhere really wanted to be a doctor but his dumb head couldn't get him through doctor school so he's collecting stetoscopes instead ? This is Tarantino with selling. It works just fine when he's playing himself in Four Rooms, sure. An interaction between Allied and Axis officers during World War Two ? Not so much. And then have Brad Pittance do the selling ? This isn't camp anymore, this is tricking the special needs highschool into filming for Canada's Funniest Duct Tape Accidents on the pretense that they're being selected for McGuyver's sidekick.

Anyway. I did make it through half an hour or so of the nonsense, so I should probably get some sort of trophy for it.

1. 2009, by Quentin Tarantino, with Brad Pitt and Christoph Waltz [↩]
2. And with regards to matters of our time : the millions of exterminated Jews did not bear arms, because weapons kill people. You know that statistic about how it's 87 times more likely to hurt yourself than to hurt an agressor ? Tell it to the Panzergrenadier Division. [↩]