Recently in Inglourious Basterds Category

"As a sequence is being cut, the cutter should know where a particular setup most effectively presents the information needed for that particular part of the scene. In other words, he will stay with the shot as long as that shot is the one which best delivers the required information and cut to another shot only when the new cut will better serve the purposes of the scene, whether because the size is more effective, the composition is more suitable, or the interpretation is superior.... In short, as long as the scene is playing at its best in the selected angle, leave it alone!"
-- veteran Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk ("Murder, My Sweet," "Crossfire," "The Caine Mutiny"), On Film Editing (1984)

Steven Boone at Big Media Vandalism says he gave up on film criticism (for the fourth or fifth time) this year:

I quit film criticism because somebody has banished the shot from mainstream commercial cinema.

The shot, man.

That unit of film composition which lends film its cumulative power and structural integrity.

In place of the shot, like a leaky sandbag in place of a brick, somebody put... Well, what to call it, this fragment of film that has more in common with a spontaneous cutaway during Monday Night Football than with the ruminative, kinetic moving image discovered by Kuleshov, Porter, Griffith, et al? I once jokingly called it a gotcha-fragment, but that doesn't quite get it. The word for "shot" in the new century shall be...

Snatch.

In his two-part round-up of summer movies, David Bordwell finds himself not only impressed with Quentin Tatantino's latest film (after finding "Death Proof" "merely proof of the director's creative death"), but with the quality, quantity and intensity of the online analysis of it:

It's a measure of the changes wrought by the Internets that "Inglourious Basterds" has in about a month amassed a daunting volume of serious commentary. Without benefit of DVD (let's be charitable and assume no BitTorrenting), dozens of online writers have dug deep into this movie. As if to demonstrate the virtues of crowdsourcing, this flurry of critical discussion has shown that most professional movie reviewers have tired ideas, know little about film history, and are constrained by the physical format and looming deadlines of print publication. At this point, I'm very glad I'm not writing a book on Tarantino; the sort of secondary sources that normally take years to accrete have piled up in a few weeks, and the pile can only grow bigger, faster.

(He also offers well-deserved praise for the "knowledgeable readers" here at Scanners!)

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"...

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" is about World War II in roughly the same way that, I suppose, Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" is about a haunted hotel. The war is indeed the setting, but that's not so much what the movie is about. I also don't see it as an act of Holocaust denial or an anti-vengeance fable in which we are supposed to first applaud the Face of Jewish Revenge, and then feel uncomfortable sympathy for the Nazis. The movie comes down firmly on the side of the Jews, and of revenge, of an early end to the war and the saving of thousands of lives, with barely a quibble.

But while "Inglourious Basterds" is indisputably a WW II revenge fantasy (and, of course, a typically Tarantinian "love letter to cinema"), a theme that is central to nearly every moment, every image, every line of dialog, is that of performance -- of existence as a form of acting, and human identity as both projection and perception. As you would expect from a film that is also an espionage picture and a detective movie, it's shot through with identity games, interrogations, role-playing and people or situations that are not what they appear to be...

I hope you're enjoying all the arguments swirling around "Inglourious Basterds" as much as I am -- not just here, but all over the place. Since I posted "Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds [sic]," I've been reading other people's reviews and comments and interviews about the movie and, hell, even Quentin Tarantino doesn't always agree with Quentin Tarantino about what the movie's up to. (And why should he? Like all of us, he contains multitudes.) It's not about the Holocaust, but it is about the Holocaust; it's not real, but it's real; it's not fantasy, but it's fantasy; it's not history, but it's history; it's not amoral, but it's amoral; it's not moral, but it's moral...

What some people have difficulty with is exactly what others delight in: "Inglorious Basterds" is never situated in one reality or another reality. It's always juggling various combinations of reality and unreality -- history, alt-history, war movie (platoon movie, mission movie, spy movie, detective movie, propaganda movie, European art movie...), cartoon, folklore, satire, comic book, revenge fantasy, etc. -- and the combinations change from one moment to the next. And that, I think, is its subject. I don't think there's anything more to it than QT trying to create movie-moments. He does, and some of them are superb. I don't blame people who find its story and characters thin, or factual liberties preposterous, or generic conventions twisted, or (a-)morality ambiguous, or humor offensive, but he's got no reason to apologize for creating his alternative historical universe in a Hollywood movie -- a world in which all of the above are woven into its warp and woof.

Because "Inglourious Basterds" provides so much to talk about and to interpret, I thought I'd put together some fascinating observations (some of which I wish I'd made myself; some of which I think are off-base, but nevertheless revealing of something about the film) and set them bouncing off one another to get your own analytical juices flowing, starting with QT's (and others') takes on the nature of the world in which it unreels:

"I stop short of calling it a fantasy. I present it in this fairytale kind of thing as far as for the masses to take in, but that's not where I'm coming from. Where I'm coming from is my characters changed the course of the war. Now that didn't happen, because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed, everything that happens in the movie is possible."
-- QT, after a Museum of Jewish Heritage screening in Manhattan

Laird Jimenez, Thomas Swenson and staffers at Seattle's famous Scarecrow Video have put together a list of movie references and influences they have found in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds." In the introduction ("Before They Were Basterds, Jimenez opines that "IB" is perhaps Tarantino's "most deft handling of reference and homage yet.... Some of these films are directly referenced in the film, others are only evoked, while others still are films we simply felt should go on the list."

A few samples:

Action in Arabia

Featured in Tarantino's list of top five WWII pictures, also stars George Sanders on whose film persona the Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) character seemed to be modeled.

Battleship Potemkin
Eli Roth watched this for inspiration before making the "Nation's Pride" film within the film, and the famous gunshot to the eye image appears recreated in "Nation's Pride."

Le Corbeau
Shows at Shosanna's theater, Le Gamaar. A classic anti-collaborationist satire from director Clouzot. This film got Clouzot in trouble with the resistance and the Reich.

"When I'm making a movie, the world goes away and I'm on Mt. Everest. Obama is President? Who cares? I'm making my movie."
-- Quentin Tarantino, Village Voice interview (2009)

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.

I spent the last week preparing for "Inglourious Basterds" by watching the two Tarantinos I'd missed: both volumes of "Kill Bill" and "Death Proof." (I came to think of it as the Foot-Fetish Film Festival.) So, with that in mind, I thought I'd begin by taking a general look at how I think Tarantino's movies work -- what they do, and what they don't do -- because, although I haven't read more than a few brief passages from other "Basterds" reviews yet, people seem to think there's been a lot of misrepresentation and/or misinterpretation going around (starting with Newsweek and The Atlantic). Some clearly wanted or expected the movie to be something else. A morality lesson, perhaps. But those other movies would not be ones Quentin Tarantino has ever shown any interest in making. "Inglourious Basterds," love it or hate it (and I think it puts most contemporary American filmmaking to shame), it is what it is because it's exactly the way Tarantino wants it to be. Let's consider...

Roger Ebert writes of seeing "Inglourious Basterds" for the first time at Cannes: "I knew Tarantino had made a considerable film, but I wanted it to settle, and to see it again. I'm glad I did. Like a lot of real movies, you relish it more the next time." Keith Uhlich says he's "loving [it] more and more as I reflect on it." Glenn Kenny has already seen it twice and has offered "a structural breakdown" of the film's five chapters.

And Karina Longworth -- well, she has a whole new take on "Inglorious Basterds" since she saw it in that French place last spring:

When I first saw "Inglourious Basterds" at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was ... off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. "Quentin Tarantino," I wrote, "has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film." I complained about the film's pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. "'Basterds' plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is," I concluded.

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (that's QT's spelling for you) has been greeted with love and hate since it played Cannes last spring. It opens Friday, and to prepare for the occastion, Matt Zoller Seitz, with an able assist from Keith Uhlich, has composed "Quentin Tarantino: Words in Action for L Magazine. It's very well put-together, and it lets Tarantino riff in his own words.

I find QT's work alternately exhilarating (his fluid direction) and exhausting/embarrassing (his cutesy, over-written dialog that all sounds the same -- a monolog divided up among "characters"). You can see and hear the whole range in this montage.

Matt writes:

Bottom line: unfair as it probably sounds, Tarantino's still not quite the director I'd personally like him to be -- the Tarantino-influenced South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook, whose movies are equally artificial but more emotionally engaging, is much more my speed. But while re-watching QT's films, I did find myself admiring elements that had previously bugged the hell out of me....