As a number of online critics have noted, Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" has inspired some of the most exciting critical discussion of the year. I'm grateful to Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, who has been a big part of that discussion, for pointing out one of the most penetrating pieces on the movie yet, "For Bravery: Das Unheimliche and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" by Chris Stangl at The Exploding Kinetoscope.
Although I think he misinterprets something I wrote (and I'll get to that later), he's a superb writer who has an affinity for Tarantino's work and an ability to articulate it compellingly.
Stangl offers inspired analysis of the structures and character games in Tarantino's films; the invocation of decadent "Nazisploitation" (from "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" to Visconti's "The Damned") among the layered movie textures in "IB"; Tarantino's use of deep focus "to impart as much information as possible in a shot"...
(All spoilers ahead.)
I love his characterization of Nazi war hero/movie star Fredrick Zoller as a character who thinks he's in a romantic comedy, stubbornly refusing to face certain facts about his own uniform: "There are, in the end, those things Nazis believed, things they did, which cannot be made up for by doses of charm, frailty and circumstance." (Stangl is also one of the few writers to acknowledge Zoller's sexual feelings of entitlement "as occupying force," when he bursts into Shoshanna's booth and threatens her, proudly citing the three hundred men he killed as evidence he's not the kind of man you say "no" to.)
I began one article by comparing "IB" to (among a laundry list of other things) a wartime propaganda cartoon ("Herr Meets Hare"), Stangl begins by citing the cover of the first Captain America comic book, created by Jewish artists who "correctly guessed that their audience wanted to see the Nazi leader cracked in the mouth." So, what of the concept of "Jewish revenge" in "Inglourious Basterds"? Stangl writes:
We never see the Basterds or Shosanna Dreyfus behave or react to the world in any particular way reflective of the Jewish experience, but their ethnicity is fuel for the plot engines and bolsters the righteousness of the murders and mutilations that serve as the only twisted justice of the "Inglourious Basterds" universe. [...]
One of the basic reasons we go to the movies is their bottomless capacity for wish fulfillment fantasy. It is a shade of escapism, or perhaps vice versa. These wishes and their cinematic granting may be base, unhealthy, cathartic, pathetic, unarticulated, mysterious or unhealthy. The movies provide a potentially powerful and relatively safe arena for working it out. [...]
A fantasy of vengeance is not the same as a wish for justice, as moral instruction, as poetic justice, as a prescription for behavior. It may be weird, it may not be the voice of our better angels, but it is a real human impulse.
Beautifully put, and it captures what Stangl calls the "headspace" in which the movie takes place: "Movieland, in Movie History where Movie People operate on Movie Rules. This is not the same as saying the film operates with weightless unreality, that situations are not serious in any way."
That's part of what I was saying when I wrote:
A wily WWII Looney Tunes propaganda movie that conjures up 1945's "Herr Meets Hare," (in which Bugs Bunny goes a-hunting with Hermann Goering in the Black Forest; full cartoon below) and the towering legends of Sergio Leone's widescreen Westerns -- and about a gazillion other movies and bits of movie history from Leni Riefenstahl to Anthony Mann to Brian De Palma -- Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" is a gorgeous and goofy revenge cartoon, a conceptual genre picture about the mythmaking power of cinema. Re-writing history? That's missing the point by several kilometers. This is pure celluloid fantasy -- an invigorating wallow in the vicarious pleasures of movie-watching by someone who would rather watch movies than do anything else in the world. Except maybe talk about them.
Stangl seems to think I'm merely repeating the standard-issue criticism of Tarantino as slight because he only makes movies about movies:
Jim Emerson makes the agreeable but problematic comparison to Warner Bros. cartoons about Bugs Bunny tormenting Axis powers with Brooklynite pluck -- implication being, if it is all a cartoon, not to take it seriously... even while he takes the movie pretty seriously. It's the reading method of the Dana Polan BFI volume above: "Those who like this film do so because it doesn't seem to have anything to say and renders the cinematic experience as pure play." This hardly accounts for any viewers deeply moved in the heart or powerfully stimulated in the head by Basterds...
I hope that by taking movie pretty seriously I show that I was not implying that "IB" is not to be taken seriously. Besides, I thought that particular cartoon comparison was a pretty hefty compliment. Some of the best movies ever made are Looney Tunes, and there's a bit of Bugs Bunny wish-fulfillment running through all Tarantino's movies. (As Chuck Jones said: "Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.") What I did say is that I don't think the film is offering moral object-lessons and that I do not think it is meant to be "an emotional experience" so much as a visceral and conceptual one. That is where its pleasures, and Tarantino's particular talents, lie. The constant reminders of the movie's movieness create an aestheticized distance (Brechtian? Godardian? Tarantinian?) that does not encourage emotional involvement. He's more interested in playing with/deconstructing the familiar techniques that provoke those emotional responses from the audience. (It's easy to push buttons and get emotional responses when you're dealing with Jews and Nazis. See Tarantino's own comments about how he wanted to avoid the "hand-wringing" Holocaust sub-genre that has become so popular in recent years.)
And yet, that certainly doesn't mean people won't have emotional responses. It would be absurd for me to tell anybody they can't be moved by something if, in fact, they are moved by it -- whether by conventional movie conditioning or something more subtle or personal. Indeed, I also wrote that I sometimes found myself moved by Tarantino's filmmaking itself ("the flow of images") and the ways he interpolates other movies into his own universe (the image from "The Searchers"; the shot of Shoshanna and Zoller dead on the floor of the projection booth as the film inexorably unreels...). "Meaningful," "serious" and "emotional" are not synonymous, and neither are their antonyms. To say that something is not emotional does not mean it is not meaningful or serious.
On the other hand, obviously, just because somebody has an emotional response to a film does not alone mark it as a work of superior quality. (All the crying in the world isn't going to make "Out of Africa" or "Flashdance" a better movie.) By which I mean to say that pointing out whether a movie does or does not operate as a primarily "emotional" experience isn't a value judgement unless the movie itself demands to be viewed in those terms. Tarantino's movies don't. Even the massacre of Shoshanna's family is presented as the bravura climax of a tense conversational set-piece. (Stagl nails it: "'Kill Bill,' 'Death Proof' and 'Inglourious Basterds' are structured as strings of conflict with nearly self-evident resolution, giving off an unbearable heat of suspense because we know they will end but cannot tell when.") As I said before:
[Chances] are very good you're not gonna get misty-eyed at a Tarantino picture -- unless that shot that so beautifully echoes "Once Upon a Time in the West" or "The Searchers" or "Carrie" (QT's a big De Palma fan) gives you goosebumps from its sheer gorgeousness. But Tarantino is not rapturously operatic like De Palma can be; he's harder, drier. He provides textural and intellectual pleasures, but little in the way of complex emotion. I suppose it is possible for, say, a Warhol silkscreen or a Schwitters collage or a Lichtenstein comic-painting to get an emotional response from you, but that's not really what they're particularly good at. Like them, Tarantino is a conceptual talent, an abstract pastiche pop-artist, and that's primarily how his films function.
I've found myself saying it over and over: "Inglourious Basterds" is a movie that leaves room for a range of responses and interpretations, ambiguity and ambivalence. Overall, I think it is, above all, a pretty straightforward revenge movie -- with generic twists, of course. And it allows other readings to coexist, as well. One doesn't exclude all others.
Check out Edmund Mullins' survey of comic-book Hitler bashing at BlackBook.
I find Tarintino's "set-pieces" to be curiously bland, something that the film's champions seem to never want to contest is the authority of the kineticism found in them (it seems to be taken for granted that even detractors are moved here in some way.)
Tarintino had one good set piece this decade, the mid point car crash from death point, everything else he has done has left me cold (on a pure joy of watching moving images level.) I feel I can't even get in on this discussion because the assumed truth of his mastery of suspense is not a truth in my world. Aside from that filmic problem the article runs on and on about the various influences as some sort of reason for its importance. IB is a silly misfire from a man who has had more silly misfires than I would have believed ten years ago. I mean really movies are all movies- we have to thank the "god" of cinema for this little nugget of wisdom? I'm not suprised to find Tarintino standing up for Woody Allen's recent output, he has more in common with Allen than De Palma, at least on a visual level (and thats really where it counts round these parts.) One thinks he's become Chabrol and the other De Godarda.
Oh man, all this talk of inglorious basterds is getting me down. I have to skip all the fascinating discussions, since the film only opens in my country at the end of October. So far i have managed to avoid spoilers...
Emotion is such a difficult thing to quantify in a film..."Inglourious Basterds" didn't "move" me in the traditional sense where I was holding back tears or hissing in anger. But it did leave me feeling exhilarated with the experience of watching something so tightly wound and expertly-executed snap into place. Isn't exhilaration a kind of emotion?
With regards to Tarantino's ouvre as a whole, I actually find his most emotionally resonant film to be "Kill Bill Volume 2". Three scenes in particular are ones I found oddly resonant: the Bride's escape from the coffin; Bill's final, quiet death march, and an often unremarked-upon exchange between Bill and the Bride just before Bill's death:
Bill - "Pai Mei taught you the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Why didn't you tell me?"
Bride - "I don't know. Maybe, because...I'm a bad person"
Bill - "No, you're not a bad person. You're a terrific person. You're my favourite person. But every once in a while, you can be a real c**t".
The punchline brings some humour to the exchange, but it's always struck me as a very moving, realistic way that two ex-lovers can relate to one another...granted, it all takes place on an elevated, operatic stage, but that's what we expect from Tarantino.
One of the ongoing discussions of IG I've been having with a friend of mine postulates that not only does the film present an alternate reality of WW II, it postulates two competing realities within the film itself. I noticed that the film could easily chopped into two separate movies (the Basterds half and the Shoshanna half), because the two strains of narrative never really intersect. My friend noticed that the one common element between them, Landa, seems like a different character in the Basterds half than the one in the Shoshanna half. Having noticed this, I'm still trying to figure out what it means. I still haven't ruled out the possibility that the film is pop eating itself.
Jim,
I think that there are many people who reacted negatively to those who pointed out IB's status as a cartoony revenge flick that's not overly concerned with the emotional depth of its characters. Since words like "goofy" and "cartoon" are often used pejoratively to denote a certain childishness, people forget that such things can also be great compliments. More often than not, doesn't calling something goofy mean that it put a smile on your face in spite of yourself? But once we reach a certain age and develop to a certain level intellectually, we're taught to sniff at that which is goofy and cartoony. Maybe some day people will realize that (sometimes) those qualities warrant a smile, and that you need not be ashamed for smiling.
This next part of the probably post belongs in the Basterd ancestry thread, but I hope you read it anyway. The reason why I'm posting it here is because your use of old Captain America comics for graphics inspired the thought.
When I was watching "Basterds" the first (and second) time, the one thought that would not leave my head was of those old Marvel (actually, not yet Marvel) and DC propaganda comics. There are a few of Superman fighting Hitler, and I think the Superman example is a bit more intriguing than Captain America (and a bit more relevant to discussions involving Tarantino and "Basterds"). Consider that Superman was created by two young Jewish-American men several months after Hitler began truly cementing his power in Germany by taking control of the military. If you think about it, Superman is something of a golem in that he is a superhuman being whose sole purpose is to protect (and in his earliest incarnation forcefully avenge) the innocent and victimized. Because of Kill Bill Vol. 2, we already know what Tarantino (well, Tarantino by way of Bill)thinks of Superman
Little in the way of complex emotion, yes. Intellectual pleasures perhaps, but almost entirely restricted to the reference following sort. I agree with most defenses of Basterds, but only because I think most of the criticisms are silly and should be rebutted. However, it still surprises me to see critics attempt to read moral lessons into this piece of cake, even as they pick apart less sophisticated attempts to do the same thing by pointing out, rightly, in my opinion, that the movie is "pure celluloid fantasy." What about: "There are, in the end, those things Nazis believed, things they did, which cannot be made up for by doses of charm, frailty and circumstance." Is the reader NOT supposed to take this as Stangl pointing out a, dare I say, obvious moral lesson? What about those last two paragraphs? Is the reader NOT supposed to take this as Stangl taking Tarantino's ridiculously over the top paean to the power of cinema at face value, and a jab a the philistines who just don't get it? Or is that just me projecting my own desire to find a moral lesson onto the criticism, as I projected it onto the film? I'd be happy to dismiss the review as pure textual fantasy, but I'd like to think it deserves to be taken seriously. I guess I'm just not sure how to do that. Is Stangl's review, or my own opinion, reductive, or just another perspective?
Ultimately I find this sort of hand-wringing as boring as I found the film. I embrace my desire to see moral lessons in everything. Reading these discussions has increased my understanding of Tarantino's body of work quite a bit (I've rewatched several of his movies over the last week), but it hasn't really changed my opinion of it that much. I see a progression from Mr. Orange trying to convince himself that people will believe him if he plays it cool - and the eventual nihilistic collapse of each meta-actor's movie-embracing facades - to a full-on embrace of annihilation-by-cinema, with our heroes milking the deaths of cartoon figures for maximal propaganda effect, gleefully branding and butchering any who dare to rise above the level of caricature. I think I will always prefer the tragedy of a Das Boot to Tarantino pulping a soldier's head in order to revel in the power and propaganda value of violence, even, perhaps especially, when I can appreciate the cinematic virtues of the latter. No more cake for me, thanks.
JE: Thanks for those thoughts. I guess I wouldn't consider "Nazis are people too" some kind of moral lesson. As Kristian has pointed out, we don't see any ordinary Germans in the movie, just people who are personally invested in the Nazi cause -- especially the "Nation's Pride" audience, hand-picked by Goebbels himself. My view of the final slaughter is that it is purely fantastic/symbolic -- a blending of the fiery climax of De Palma's "Carrie" and slaughter of Beef in the showstopper finale of De Palma's "Phantom of the Paradise." It's taking place on a cinematic/mythological level, and is not a turnaround commentary about Nazis being made of flesh and blood, too. As I've detailed elsewhere, Tarantino doesn't shoot the scene that way, and has expressed a desire to avoid the "hand-wringing" Holocaust-movie approach that has become so pervasive in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Besides, Hitler's Swiss cheese bullet make-up is straight out of the comic books; the image of Shoshanna's giant face on the screen/smoke is fantastical, not "realistic."
Here I am just diving back into it again.
Hello, Jim.
Hello everyone.
Christianne, I will say this about Landa, and the comment you make about him being two different characters. Well, he's in two completely different situations, isn't he? As he confesses to Aldo near the end, he's a Detective, one who sees himself as Sherlock Holmes (judging from his pipe), it wouldn't matter if they were Jews or not. He'd still be hunting down people and solving mysteries. He just happens to be a German, during the Nazi regime, so why not. He also shows a healthy respect for his opponents when they seem his equal. He lets Shoshanna run away, as he lets Aldo. He enjoys the play of it all, as opposed to the outcome, a cat playing with his mouse, before the inevitable crunch. Why does he decide to do what he does near the end? He obviously has great respect for America, and the Jewish people that he hunts down. I don't think he realizes just how evil he is.
Jim! Of all Tarantino's movies, aside form maybe Jackie Brown, this movie contained some of the most well developed characters of any of his films. Your thoughts concerning how cartoonish they appear, to me, those elements made the film that much more real. Have you walked down a street in the deep South and seen all the Lt. Aldos. Have you traipsed around any big city and just taken in the "characters", sometimes it feels like I'm walking around in a cartoon. Sometimes in fact those old Bugs Bunny cartoons feel more real in a city like LA than you'd imagine. These characters are so bright and vibrant and live on their own terms outside of Tarantino's film embraced skull. They don't always sound like Tarantino. You watch "Dogs", "Fiction", "Death Proof", even the Kill Bills, you hear Tarantino in every line of dialogue. Not in "Basterds". For me this is his first step (since "Jackie Brown" and to an extent "Kill Bill 2") in becoming the filmmaker everyone knew he was.
Those are some quick thoughts. I've of course written more at my blog. And it seems glancing at some of your excerpts from other bloggers I'm kind of on the same track as others.
There are three things I'd like to point out that struck me. First the sparing but incredibly relevant use of extreme close ups. As with the pastry and what becomes of it.
Second, Tarantino's use of revealing information when it dramatically heightens the scene. I feel any other filmmaker would willy nilly put information out to the audience, so they can get to the action, but Tarantino doesn't let you in on all the circumstances of the scenes he's crafted until it really means something. This is a filmmaker that has learned the power of patience.
Third, his way of creating helplessness in the audience members, a helplessness you feel in "Saving Private Ryan" when the soldier is getting a knife to the chest, or in "Straw Dogs" when she's getting raped (is Bosworth really going to go as far as all that in the remake???). Without that sense of helplessness Tarantino's microcosm of the war, this feeling of need for revenge wouldn't have been as honed in. Sure, it would have been easy to show the piles of Holocaust victims. While powerful images, they create a sadness more often than anger.
There might have been a fourth, but I can't recall. I broke my toe last night, so my thoughts are a little scattered right now....read my review if you want it.
"The Basterds Who Would Not Die!" God, I wish they would already. Only Quentin Tarantino would get a pass on this film that is 1/3 great and 2/3 self indulgent and boring. For me, that adds up to about a 3 star movie, not some kind of masterpiece that it unfortunately appears it will go down as. It's funny how making a great film (Pulp Fiction) with brilliant dialogue permanently labels you as a master at writing dialogue. Chapter 1 of IB was brilliant. The dialogue was brilliantly written, but the remainder of the scenes with long stretches of dialogue were banal and unnecessary. ..and the dialogue in "Death Proof" was worse. ...to be fair, I now recall the dialogue was great in "Kill Bill 2," but nonetheless, it seems the "master" may have lost his touch, no?
I just saw "The Hurt Locker" one week after seeing IB. Why don't I see endless message board threads about how Kathryn Bigelow avoids all cliches and organically creates suspense without the use of slow motion, musical cues, etc?? THL makes IB look like it was directed by Alan Smithee.
"Carrie"? Really? There are a lot of revenge flicks out there...why "Carrie"? The final few moments of the film felt a lot more haunting to me. As if the ghosts of everyone the Nazi's killed were coming back and laughing at them while they were being piled into the same room and slaughtered (like the Jews). That hardly rings of High School angst turned gore revenge. "Carrie"??? Really??? Huh? Why not "Taxi Driver" when De Niro takes revenge on the city through the microcosm of the pimp and his minions? Or "Unforgiven" when Eastwood walks into a room full of abhorrent humans to get back at the man who cut a hooker on the face and kills them all. Why "Carrie"? That seems a trifle diminishing to me considering the subject matter. Tarantino has taken a pulp idea with "Basterds" and turned it into something with a lot more substance...elevated.
JE: Or "Phantom of the Paradise." Or maybe "The Fury." But, in this case, "Carrie" because... the "revenge" consists of a large group of people, gathered for a gala occasion, locked into a big room that is set ablaze. And because it's Tarantino, and he recently cited "Carrie" as one of his top-five or -six favorite films. And De Palma has always been one of his favorite directors, whose influence is felt more strongly in "IB" than in any QT picture since "Reservoir Dogs." Not sure what you mean by "substance" exactly, but I find "Carrie"'s climax more emotionally complex and moving. That's not an insult to "IB," though, which is not quite up to the same things.
My only problem with the theater conflagration is that it reveals Tarantino's sola cinema philosophy in all it's fantastic and ridiculous glory... and then undermines itself by adding gleefully superfluous Basterds with machine guns. It's not the treatment of the cartoon Nazis in the theater that bothers me, it's the treatment of every character who attempts to transcend the film's propaganda. Zoller seems interesting at first, but is safely revealed as loathsome - an honest character arc, if not a great one. Shoshanna is killed by a cliche (he appears to be dead, but brace yourself for the shocking twist!), and, unlike the viewer, doesn't have to see the Basterds crap all over the poetry of her vengeance. A German lieutenant's simple, non-ideological professionalism makes the Basterds look sub-human by comparison, and so he is clubbed to death in one of the film's weakest scenes. Then there is Landa, who, given the choice between killing a couple of incompetent idiots or betraying the entire Nazi leadership chooses to betray the entire Nazi leadership, and gets a swastika carved on his forehead by those selfsame incompetent idiots for his trouble. He's a great character and I'd like to know more about his motivations before deciding whether he's really a Nazi or just a sociopathic mercenary, but no. The Basterds are going to make that judgment for me, they're going to do it violently, and they're going to call it a masterpiece. Wonderful.
The film dangles pretty cinematography and interesting looking characters in front of me, but every time I reach for them it's like I get hit in the face by a baseball bat. Everywhere I go, every time I try to think it through or just sit back and enjoy the pretty pictures, the Basterds are there to make me wish I was doing something else. The more I think about it, the more I think that they basically play the same role in IB as QT's cameos have played in his other movies, except that, to this film's detriment, they get a lot more screen time than he ever gave himself.
JE: I appreciate the movie a lot more than you do, but you bring up some very interesting points of interpretation. I thought it was clear from the first encounter between Shoshanna and Zoller that she had principles and he would be revealed to be less civilized than he was presenting himself to be. (Are we really supposed to believe that a woman involved with a man like Marcel would fall for a pipsqueak sniper like Zoller, a Nazi war hero who likes Max Linder?) I don't buy that Shoshanna would suddenly have tender feelings for Zoller when, only moments before, he was about to assault her and she Marcel were already set to blow themselves and Zoller and the whole Nazi high command to smithereens. I thought maybe she was checking to see if he was really dead -- but there is a suggestion of tenderness or something, but if she's actually going over to him (to do what?) because she's feeling regret (having seen his image in "Nation's Pride"), that just doesn't play for me. Some have seen a viciousness in the eyes of the machine-gunning Basterds that they say horrified them and that undercut the spectacular revenge scene. I didn't see anything different in the Basterds than I'd seen from the beginning. I saw two guys who were firing heavy-duty machine guns into a crowd of doomed Nazis -- at Hitler and Goebbels no less -- and who knew they were going to die in a burst of flames while doing it. They looked pretty damed fired up. How else would they look under such tense, dramatic circumstances? (You could argue that machine-gunning the crowd was a humane gesture, preferable to being burned to death...)
Jim, I mean, yeah, of course I see "Carrie", but you think in Tarantino's rat-a-tat-tat, movie sponge of a brain, it's "just" "Carrie" and not 20 films all playing out in that scene, because their might be 3 or 4 other films that are far more appropriate. "Carrie" is the obvious and easiest, because of the situation, and all. But to look at it through the magnifying glass of one film, while it may not be this case for you necessarily, will diminish the scene for others that don't know as much about film. "Oh, yeah, Carrie, I love that movie when she blows everyone up in the end." And they'll miss the point of this scene. There's a lot going on in the final gala scene that's about that scene and the events that lead right up to it and after it, that make it it's own scene. And therefore should be discussed as it's own scene. I think reviewers fall into a habit of comparisons sometimes, and stop talking about a movie on it's own terms. Some movies are that thin, but I don't think "Basterds" is. There's more substance there than that. (Maybe that will help clear up what I meant by substance.)
JE: I don't buy that Shoshanna would suddenly have tender feelings for Zoller when, only moments before, he was about to assault her and she Marcel were already set to blow themselves and Zoller and the whole Nazi high command to smithereens. I thought maybe she was checking to see if he was really dead -- but there is a suggestion of tenderness or something, but if she's actually going over to him (to do what?) because she's feeling regret (having seen his image in "Nation's Pride"), that just doesn't play for me.
I couldn't agree more. That moment was a distracting failure, a stapled-on cliche.
The music video sequence setting up the screening event was also a real misstep in my opinion. It added nothing and pulled me out of the film as the stage was being set for the climax.
JE: That's interesting. I didn't feel that way about the "Cat People" ("Putting out the fire with gasoline") montage. It gave me shivers, in fact, with its ritualistic portrayal of Shoshanna's determination, preparing herself for the masque of the red death sacrifice. I think that sequence also prepares the audience for the Revenge of the Giant Face, puts it firmly on a meta-movie level. Which is why I'm confused by some of the readings of the booth and conflagration scenes. Shoshanna doesn't seem like the kind of person to deviate from plan, or to have second thoughts or feelings once the process has been set in motion. She's a professional projectionist! The changeovers must be made, the show must go on!
We are in agreement. From the opening scenes of the Basterds, I commented to myself, "this is fantasy. This is cowboys and indians, or soldiers for adults." Some movies, such as Defiance, failed for me due to a lack of emotion in relation to how I felt I should feel. Basterds did not need emotion to succeed. Neither did Pulp Fiction. I don't -care- about those characters. Even with the suspenseful moments, I'm not in suspense because I care if those characters live or die, I'm in suspense because I want to know how it all happens.
Hitchcock was a master of this. Do we care about the policeman? No. But we still want to know if he is going to fall or not, and we are tormented while we watch. Its movies that ask us to care, and then don't provide us without to care, that are failures on the emotional level. Other movies only ask us to hop on the ride.
"JE: I don't buy that Shoshanna would suddenly have tender feelings for Zoller when, only moments before, he was about to assault her and she Marcel were already set to blow themselves and Zoller and the whole Nazi high command to smithereens. I thought maybe she was checking to see if he was really dead -- but there is a suggestion of tenderness or something, but if she's actually going over to him (to do what?) because she's feeling regret (having seen his image in "Nation's Pride"), that just doesn't play for me."
I thought the same thing. And maybe it is a slight failure, but it got me thinking: It's interesting that what seems to provoke her to have "some feelings" of empathy toward Zoller is his cinematic image. Not the real Zoller. In a film all about myth and filmic representations, it's interesting that she is moved by the Zoller on film, which she then transfers to the real Zoller, instead of the other way around.
Also...did anyone else notice during the opening scene, the moth (or some other winged insect) landing on the table as the two men talk, and how it proceeded to climb up Landa's glass of milk? Something about that was so wonderful to me. Do you think it was a happy coincidence? Or deliberate?
I just thought it was interesting. And something indescribable about it made me think, "This is what I love about QT."
Re: Shoshanna's death scene. It worked for me. I saw that moment as QT presenting a metaphor for the power inherent to the language of film. Films can move people, sway opinions, draw out sympathies. Shoshanna glances up at the screen and sees Zoller portraying a what seems to be grief or distress (or is it simply exhaustion?) over his actions in "Nation's Pride." She is moved by this campy portrayal for just long enough to let down her guard and get herself killed (though I don't know that I'd call it "regret" - Zoller was going to die whether she shot him or not). QT touches on this in Kill Bill when he explicitly states (I just watched it last night but can't remember the lines) that in order to kill you have to be completely focused on the elimination of your enemies and that you must reject all emotion or anything else that could distract you. Shoshanna is not a trained killer (she's most likely never killed anyone in her life) and this scene serves as the antonym to Black Mamba's perfectly executed revenge. Compare her actions to Zoller's - he is a trained killer and he acts like it, taking careful aim to shoot her one last time before he dies. But all that aside, I think the scene ultimately works because of how it comments on the power of propaganda film.
With Rosenbaum's attacks on Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino, and others, I think its time to put him to bed. He offers up counter opinions, but instead of sticking to facts, he makes personal attacks. He finds it easier to label somebody or a movie than to articulate it. What does he offer to film criticism anymore?
I don't think that Tarantino uses interrupting devices like Brecht or Godard. Those were meant to make the viewer active rather than passive observers. I don't think his movieness interrupts his movies but rather does the opposite.