col.schickn wrote:

First off, not funny.

Second. His entire pool of information comes from shitty movies. That's all the Holocaust is to him. Something in a film.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:

Recommended Reading: “When Jews Attack” by Daniel Mendelsohn, a two-page spread in the August 24 & 31 issue of Newsweek, begins to help me account for what I find so deeply offensive as well as profoundly stupid about Inglourious Basterds [sic sic — or maybe I should say, sic, sic, sic]. A film that didn’t even entertain me past its opening sequence, and that profoundly bored me during the endlessly protracted build-up to a cellar shoot-out, it also gave me the sort of malaise that made me wonder periodically what it was (and is) about the film that seems morally akin to Holocaust denial, even though it proudly claims to be the opposite of that. It’s more than just the blindness to history that leaks out of every pore in this production (even when it’s being most attentive to period details) or the infantile lust for revenge that’s so obnoxious. When Mendelsohn asks, “Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into Nazis, that makes Jews into `sickening’ perpetrators?”, he zeroes in on what’s so vile about this gleeful celebration of savagery. He also clarifies the ugly meaning of Tarantino’s final scene when he points out that Nazis carved Stars of David into the chests of rabbis before killing them — a fact I either hadn’t known before or had somehow managed to suppress.

It’s amazing to me that some fellow Jews who were so indignant about Sophie’s Choice (by which I mean the Styron novel — arguably his best — and not the hollow Pakula movie) can give Tarantino a free ride on this one, presumably under the theory that this boy should be allowed to enjoy every last drop of his all-American fun, even at the expense of real-life Holocaust victims. As far as I’m concerned, whatever Tarantino’s actual or imagined politics might be, he’s become the cinematic equivalent of Sarah Palin, death-panel fantasies and all.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:

Part of the assumption of his defenders seems to be that no subject is so sacrosanct that it can’t be met with an adolescent snicker — including, say, the Holocaust or, closer to the present, 9/11. But maybe what Tarantino has to say about our post-9/11 sense of atrocity is more developed and thoughtful and helpful than anything I’m implying. I’m just waiting for some guidance about what that wisdom or revelation might be.

Here’s what he had to say five or six years ago about 9/11, in a Rolling Stone interview:

Rolling Stone wrote:

Q: Has 9/11 or the war on terror had any impact on you personally or creatively?

A: “9/11 didn’t affect me, because there’s, like, a Hong Kong movie that came out called Purple Storm and it’s fantastic, a great action movie. And they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a giant skyscraper. It was done before 9/11, but the shot almost is a semiduplicate shot of 9/11. I actually enjoyed inviting people over to watch the movie and not telling them about it. I shocked the shit out of them…I was almost thrilled by that naughty aspect of it. It made it all the more exciting.”

Q: But on some level you must have been caught up in the reality of 9/11.

A: “I was scared, like everybody else. ‘OK, what is this new world we’re going to be living in? Is it going to be fucking Belfast here?’ And I didn’t want to fucking fly nowhere. I remember thinking at the time - this was when they were shooting the Matrix sequels in Australia - ‘What if everything, all this shit, breaks out, man?’ And all that’s left in Hollywood are the Matrix people? That would be a fuckin’ drag’ (Laughs).”

I agree with QT: that would be a fuckin’ drag. And maybe also, what is this new world we’re now living in?

Postscript: Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think Inglourious Basterds is akin to Holocaust denial, I’ll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. (He was speaking about Pasolini’s Salo, but I think one can also say that anything that makes Nazism unreal is wrong.) For me, Inglourious Basterds makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention — by which I mean a reality derived only from other movies — it loses its historical reality.