War is a little word which encompasses a pretty big deal, especially for those who are personally involved in it. Most of us never get anywhere near to the type of action portrayed in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ and that is a good enough reason to go see it. Such things do really happen and we are all responsible to a greater or lesser extent for this fact and should at least attempt to be more aware of what is actually involved when we collectively fail to peacefully resolve our differences.

Dana Steven’s review is quite good, enough so that I feel free to nitpick about one point. She wrote,

“As a cathartic fantasy about kicking Nazi ass, Inglourious Bastards falls short even of last year's pallid Defiance. The scenes showing the Basterds in action offer plenty of Nazi-bashing, but they're dramatically inert. We learn nothing about, for example, why the unit is under the command of the gentile Lt. Raine or how the soldiers relate to him or to one another. The death camps are never directly mentioned, perhaps because Tarantino sensed that acknowledging their existence would shatter the movie's carefully maintained half-mocking tone. The idea of an all-Jewish unit is a joke that arrives fully formed and never goes anywhere.”

To which I respond that the film is to be applauded for not resorting to a ‘Saving Private Ryan’ type of digression into homespun tales about large breasted neighbors who give great hugs to deploying boy-soldiers or the English teacher home-life of the Lieutenant. War doesn’t much care about character development and neither should a movie about war. Just give us the martial facts since they are never addressed elsewhere in life and make good use of the war film forum to educate people about what really happens. The scene in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ where the Staff Sergeant gets sentimental about saving a little French girl and ends up dead and no longer able to help protect his fellow soldiers while they complete their mission is more to the point of character development in war, you get smarter and meaner or you get dead.

The film is semi-documentary in form (if not in historical accuracy) but still does a fine job of examining the vicious heart of war. That is its greatest achievement.

Did we even see the same film?

If anything the violence was antiseptic compared to the real brutality of war.

By doing such a poor job of maintaining the "suspension of disbelief" - Tarantino cartoonized the violence to the extent that none of it comes across as real, not even the "snuff scene" of the actress that was a wierd homage to Phillip Kaufman's Rising Sun..

As a result any actual message or commentary on the "viscious heart of war" that this movie might have comes across instead as the over-earnest rantings of someone who has no clue about the real world.

degsme:

...As a result any actual message or commentary on the "viscious heart of war" that this movie might have comes across instead as the over-earnest rantings of someone who has no clue about the real world.

I have a clue or two having served over ten years on active duty including a year in Iraq (2004) as a military intelligence Sergeant. I actually convoyed to Abu Ghraib prison once. Not to be excessively precious I am simply noting that Tarantino has done a good job of presenting some extremely repugnant aspects of human nature in ways which are demonstrative without being celebratory or so revolting to the viewer as to be inaccessible to a general audience, a difficult tight wire act done well.

I did not sense any 'cartoonish' portrayal of violence but the tenor of the film overall and the close-up scenes displaying killing in particular were reminiscent of the scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' where the Czech SS soldier kills the American sniper with a bayonet in an excruciatingly slow and sadistic manner which prior to this film marked the most credible display of depraved malevolence in war that I have seen in a film. But we shall disagree upon that point.

Well I'd agree that Tarantino is TRYING to make comments about the depraved malevolence of war. but unlike the SPR scene (which was truly terrifying and disconcerting), the mechanics of the moviemaking itself so got in the way of the story and its intents, that I don't think that people actually are getting that intent at all.

It is hard to know what stories will stick in someone's mind. I remember a Biology teacher in grade school who told us all a story about an American soldier with an unusually high metabolic rate nicknamed 'Shorty' who was machine gunned in half by German soldiers in WWII. I don't know if that is actually possible but the story certainly has stuck in my mind for forty years.

Tarantino has used the same type of casual storytelling to relate some important truths about war and human nature while avoiding most of the dilemmas posed by JFK-esque 'magic bullets' and other nagging problems of trying to be utterly literal in recreating firefights and other lethal engagements on a big, shiny two dimensional movie screen in a finite period of time.

A viewer may not even know what they just saw but still be affected by the 'content' in a way that will stay with them for the rest of their life. The ability of the viewer to describe every fine detail of the fight scene is much less significant than is the scene's ability to demonstrate some important truth about human nature in a way that will illuminate all future thoughts by the viewer about war and why it exists. The mechanics are incidental to the morals.

A viewer may not even know what they just saw but still be affected by the 'content' in a way that will stay with them for the rest of their life.

This is where the "mechanics" of art - which in the case of film is Composition, Lighting, Pacing, Dialogue, Script, Acting, Music, Sound, Special Effects, Stunts etc - come into play. Art insinuates itself into the mind's memory by leveraging the way the human senses interact with the brain and consciousness.

And it is on this level that Tarantino fails.

I have not attended film school but I have been to war a couple or three times and Tarantino does as good a job in 'Inglourious Basterds' as Renoir did in 'The Grand Illusion' when it comes to making moral observations about an enigmatic subject of the first order of importance and relevance; no mean feat even if the film's technical aspects are less than perfect.

Art does indeed insinuate itself into the mind's memory, as you have noted, but just exactly how it does so is elusive and perennially frustrates those who would reduce 'the arts and sciences' to just 'the sciences'. Unless you have solved that great philosophical dichotomy for the rest of us the distinction is still valid and it is the crux of our differing views of the value of Tarantino's work.

We can both be partially correct without contradiction while the greater philosophical questions surrounding how our minds function will remain unanswered for the moment.

How art insunuates itself into the human mind - particularly how composition works - is not as mysterious as you make it out to be. Things like Golden Section preferences and scansion impacts are evolutionarily logical (human eyes are golden section within the face and we look to another's eyes to get an indication of their emotions and where they are likely to move next).

that's why compostion CAN be taught and is. What can't be taught and what is crucial to art, is how to know waht to leave out. Neither lesson is one Tarantino has learned particularly well.

Your elemental choices differ from Tarantino's and so would your 'style' differ from his. In architecture where composition is also crucial there exists a style known as 'Brutalism' as well as a style known as 'Rococo'; neither of which is universally applicable to fulfilling all of architecture's many needs. Likewise in film there must be definite choices made which promote certain exaggerations at the expense of other aspects which are neglected or given a lesser status in the composition as a whole. You might think that 'symmetry' is so basic to architecture that it is essential in all compositions yet we have seen plenty of 'Victiorian' heaps which have eschewed symmetry in some bold gesture to mimic our own minds bi-cameral and complementary plan.

Your points are well noted but they do not alter the given conditions from which any discussion of a film must begin. Those conditions include the well known and the less well known which always adds the element of uncertainty to the equation which is exactly why film making is an art and not a science. Further there does not exist some single authoritarian viewer whose mind is fully known and who is the arbiter of any given film's adequacy. There are many viewers with many diverse experiences and states of mind to whom the film must attempt to present a unitary vision; a truly daunting challenge.

Your humorous quip (Magnificent 7 meets Shoot Em Up directed by Raimi wannabe) acknowledges this eclectic aspect of the art of film beautifully. Indeed that plastic ability to be juxtaposed and morphed or even transmogrified into something new yet still recognizable is what differentiates art from the 'hard sciences' like chemistry and physics where regularity and invariance are the bases of the very sciences themselves and elements can only be combined according to rigid rules regardless of one's desire to do otherwise.

Roccoco and Brutalism have different styles. But the doorways still have to be at least as big as the average person being admitted and small/light enough to be opened by a single person. Furthermore they also have to contain sufficient "environmental knowledge" so that a human can figure out how to navigate within the space (the solid bar glass doors being the antithesis to this ).

If they don't, then regardless of the style, the architecture fails to work. There ARE some fundamental principles without which the creation fails to convey its intent. And IB lacks the fundamentals. Now it MAY be possible that Tarantino intentionally went against the fundamentals as an artistic statement. One of the best ways to look for that is to look to previous works to see if there is evidence that the artist understands and can wield these fundamentals. The closest Tarantino comes is in Pulp Fiction and even there its not particularly compellingly demonstrated.

So I find it hard to accept that IB lacks the fundamentals as an intentional statement. Its my view that like with every other one of his movies, he just doesn't quite get it.

Tarantino has been around long enough to know what he is doing. I guess you just don't like it.

Being around doesn't mean you really understand an artform at more than a decorative level. For example, if you compare Jackson Pollock's work to other "oil drip" artists of his time, Pollock's work turns out to be constructed with patterns that are fractal in nature, whereas others are just random.

Guess which one works better compositionally?

Picasso was famous for his ability to mimick any style, but that meant he really understood the composition of the genre. Not so of most art forgers.

Tarantino's use of composition and lighting have ALWAYS been pedestrian in all of his movies. That suggests that he doesn't really understand their power and importance.

The scene that insinuated itself into my mind was a red face.

Out of the entire movie, the german officer's face being red with rage and emotion as he strangled the actress stood out more than anything else. Perhaps because it looked so real. It's more a testament to his acting than any skill by tarantino. Tarantino's skill was in casting the actor.

I would say the focus on the strangling feet was weak and even cliched. They should have kept focus on the actor's faces- as they did in SPR.

Personally, I didn't take the SPR scene as malevolent or sadistic. The german or the american was going to die. The german was soothing "Just let go and it will be easier" as he killed the american who was resisting the knife thrust as long as possible.

I thought this film was an "8"- maybe a high "7". It was entertaining and held together. A lot of the scenes felt real, plausible, well thought out. The german actors had many chances to show they were real human beings and also monsters.

That looked real to you? Her literal "kicking off" was rather cartoonish to me (think Daffy Duck expiring after a great but ineffectual kicking of feet.

This film was maybe a 4. Go watch All Quite On the Western Front if you want to see an example of allowing The Enemey to come across as human. Frankly I'm a bit concerned about your view of humanness if you consider IB to have contained ANY "real human beings"...

Further there does not exist some single authoritarian viewer whose mind is fully known and who is the arbiter of any given film's adequacy.

wow! Snap! I love it! No irony intended. A fancy way of saying taste is subjective. and to degsme, I'd like to understand lighting and composition better, it's just not such a deciding factor in if a film is something I successfully enjoy or not.