"Inglourious Basterds"- I enjoyed the film, but I hate to think about it.

I saw the film "Inglourious Basterds", and first off, I will cite some reactions.

photo via wsj.com

Richard Bernstein:

"“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” Mr. Tarantino said to Mr. Goldberg of The Atlantic, explaining his motivation. “I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews” and “take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”

"Sure, let’s make the Holocaust fun."

Praise for the villain- Colonel Hans Landa ( Christoph Waltz):

"Aided in no small measure by Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant script, the actor, unknown in the U.S. until now, creates one of the cinema’s most sinister and unforgettable villains–right up there with Dracula and Darth Vader." - Elephant Journal

Roger Ebert has this film in his list of best films in 2009: he too is all praise for the villain-

"Waltz won best actor at Cannes 2009, has swept the critic's awards, is a shoo-in as best supporting actor."

Hunter Baker at The Touchstone Magazine writes,

"Inglourious Basterds is a cultural low point. It is the revenge fantasy of a poorly educated and completely unreflective thirteen year old. It is a jerky exercise in crudely manipulating the feelings of the audience in order to give them an excuse to hate the bad guys enough to want them brutally and cruelly dispatched."

Daniel Mendelsohn has this to say,

""Facts can be so misleading," Hans Landa, the evil SS man, murmurs at one point in Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps, but fantasies are even more misleading. To indulge them at the expense of the truth of history would be the most inglorious bastardization of all."

And finally, here at "The New Yorker" is this scathing comment by David Denby-

"...But, in “Basterds,” Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn’t carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes. Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager."

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I was deeply disturbed by the film, and much more by the praise it has received-

Imagine this film being made here in Tamil, where Vijaykant goes on a mission to take out the Nazis- songs, comedy and then, the stunst- where our Captain plays football with about a hundred Nazi soldiers, if not more, bites the spray of machine-gun spewed bullets, rolls them around in his motormouth, chews them out, and at last collars Hitler, delivers a long sermon on Ahimsa at the unrepentant Hitler, who in a desparate lunge at the gun, trips and falls on a grenade which blows him to pieces- and then, finally, to cut an unending story short, titles roll, as Captain walks towards us in slow motion, to the tune of a song which goes, "Don't take on the Indians- we are a non-violent people, born in the soil of Buddha, Gandhi, Anna and Aiya Periyar, but if people like Hitler mess with with us, then India will unleash a volcanic violent lava that will bathe the Nazis in a river of blood".

Nauseous? Yes, that kind of fun-film. Total nonsense, fantasy immune to the calls of reality. Or taste.

Imagine a closed theatre/ stadium set on fire, and you see fumes everywhere, and people screaming to get out but are killed by machine gun wielding soldiers... What does this remind you of in a film with Nazis? The gas? Right. The thousands of people locked in crematoriums and gassed to death. In this film, the Nazis get a taste of it.

And then there is this brilliant dialogue where our hero wants the Nazis to keep the uniform. He doesn't like them hiding inside their own human skins. May be I am reading too much into this, but what this means is that there is no ambiguity where evil is concerned. Evil people are evil, and good people are good- no matter that their actions seem similar. What is important is the side you are in, the uniform you wear. And when you catch an evil man, you have to mark him.

Kill a nazi, and when he is dead, scalp him for good measure (this dismemberment of corpses, I found repugnant). And, if for some reason, you have to let the bad man go living, you have to mark him with a swatiska-scar on his forehead to make sure the world knows here is an evil man: And the good men, they don't shoot people for disobeying orders, they just give a 'chewing up'.

And then the good folk, they can walk all over the world bombing people to pieces, no moral questions asked: all you need is a label that marks a person/ group as evil.

The more I think of it, the more the title "Inglourious Basterds" looks self-reflexive.

It is a slick film, enjoyable if you like pointless bloodletting, great acting, good picturisation and all that- but ultimately its seduction- the nonsensical posturing of Jews avenging the Nazis- is a fatuous glorification of violence: a cartoonish view of history, and a tempting justification for our lazy morality- where good and evil are diametrically opposite and your goodness is guaranteed by the extent of confidence in your cause, the outrageous faith in your overwhelming, unsullied righteousness.

I am sorry, I enjoyed watching this film, but I hate to think what it tells about me- and people like me who like the action.

Any reactions?