Movie Reviews: "Inglourious Basterds"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Inglourious Basterds

There is something about Quentin Tarrantino's work that polarizes both his audiences in general and film critics in particular.

Never was that fact more evident than it is with his latest film, Inglourious Basterds, in which Tarrantino suggests that World War II could have ended far more quickly if the good guys had set aside such niceties as the Geneva Convention and had bashed a few German soldiers' heads with baseball bats and scalped them instead.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times calls it "a big, bold audacious war movie," and applauds: "For once, the basterds get what's coming to them."

On the other hand, Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel argues that the movie tops every other World War II movie in "awfulness."
Inglourious Basterds, he writes, "is slow, dumb -- and in a first for Qt in his cinema savant career -- incompetent."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times agrees. "Rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one," she writes.
On a positive note, she praises the performance of Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as Nazi Col.

Hans Landa and says that the film represents another testament to Tarantino's love for films. "The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love."

Claudia Puig in USA Today, however, is among those heaping praise on the film. Tarantino's "tall tale, with its tense and jangly pacing," she writes, "is immediately riveting."

On the other hand, Joanne Kaufman remarks in the Wall Street Journal that "nothing about the emotionally unmoored Inglourious Basterds adds up. Whether it's parody, farce or a fever dream is anyone's guess."

But Tom Maurstad in the Dallas Morning News says that what it really adds up to is "tour-de-force filmmaking."

Nonsense, contends Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun. "The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did 'Springtime for Hitler' [in Mel Brooks's The Producers]: because it's so bad they think it's good.

-IMDB News




Jewish Critics Chime In On Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarrantino's Inglourious Basterds may be getting mixed reviews from leading U.S. critics; it is getting scathing reviews from the Jewish press.

The national Jewish Daily Forward calls it "Jewish revenge porn."

In Connecticut's Jewish Ledger, Michael Fox writes that since the film doesn't pretend to be historically accurate, "there's no percentage in railing against [it] as blathering, self-indulgent drivel."
Nevertheless, he writes, Tarantino's plot amounts to "pages and pages and pages of amusingly pointless dialogue."
He concludes, "Tarantino's riff on Nazis and Jews may amuse and satisfy less mature audiences. For those with a deeper and fuller understanding of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, particularly one gleaned from sources other than action movies, it is shockingly superficial."

The movie features scenes in which the "good guys" scalp German soldiers, beat them to death with baseball bats for refusing to reveal the location of comrades, carve swastikas into the foreheads of those who do cooperate, and commit suicide bombings.

Jonathan Foreman in Britain's Jewish Chronicle comments, "There is something about the idea of inspiring holy terror by mutilation, decapitations, etc. that inevitably evokes today's real-life masters of cruelty and demoralization by atrocity, al-Qaeda."

-IMDB News

[Atlas]

Wow, this is only a movie right? Some people need to relax and just watch it. I'm sure it's going to be great!