Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Tarantino's latest is a war-western suspense epic about the time that the movies killed Hitler and ended World War II. It's funny that I used to think of him as a director interested in violence; even in Reservoir Dogs the bullets are there to punctuate the dialogue.

Death Proof showed otherwise. It was startlingly talky, extending scenes that genre conventions suggest be short and to the point -- like the girls spending time in the bar before setting off on their journey to be attacked -- to ten or fifteen minutes of girl talk and pickup lines.

Inglourious Basterds is like that. Col. Hans Landa (a magnificent Christoph Waltz) interrogates a farmer suspected of hiding Jews, and the scene goes on, and on, and on, building tension. A masquerade in German uniform stretches out for twenty minutes, much of it taken up by a discussion about a soldier's new baby. One review I read said that Tarantino is dedicated to exploring the spaces between genre.

Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his band of Jewish basterds collect Nazi scalps, but the film is more concerned with Landa and with a plot to wipe out the German high command at the premiere screening of Goebbel's propaganda epic "Nation's Pride".

The most interesting response to the film so far has been from Ben Mendelsohn in Newsweek, who takes on the implications for attitudes towards the Holocaust:

Tarantino, the master of the obsessively paced revenge flick, invites his audiences to applaud this odd inversion—to take, as his films often invite them to take, a deep, emotional satisfaction in turning the tables on the bad guys. ("The Germans will be sickened by us," Raine tells his corps of Jewish savages early on.) But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future. Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino's new film evokes are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that "again" will happen.

He has a point, and with echoes of Baudrillard goes on to discuss the recent trend towards films distorting the popular memory, such as Valkyrie stressing German resistance.

Whether we will eventually regret these competing narratives or not, Tarantino has outdone himself as a film craftsman. An absolute must-see.

See also fantastic discussion at Jim Emerson's Scanners:

• Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds
• Contra-Basterds