James Jones


INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/aug/19/inglourious-basterds-review-brad-pitt-quentin-tarantino

When I saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, my traumatised complaint was that it fails as conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp. Since then, its defenders have claimed that the point of the film is that it is "kosher porn": an over-the-top revenge fantasy for Jews. 

And if "kosher porn" was the point, wouldn't it have been better to make the Basterds' leader actually Jewish? Instead of which, their CO is Brad Pitt, the good ol' boy from Tennessee, a part of the world in which progressive sympathies with European Jewry are - how can I put it? - atypical. 

Wildly bad-taste ahistorical fantasies about Nazi Germany are great: but here they are nullified by middlebrow good-taste cinephile stuff referencing UFA, Emil Jannings etc, in which the details of course have to be exactly right.



In Cannes, the movie's climax split critics, with some offended by Tarantino's contrivances. But the big clue here lies in the opening title card, which simply states, "Once Upon A Time...in Nazi-Occupied France.
From the off, with that one phrase, Tarantino makes it clear that Inglourious Basterds will not be taking the austere, reverent approach of a Schindler's List. Instead, this is a fairy tale, a 'what if...?' story that takes place in a typically Tarantino 'movie-movie' universe”



Django Unchained


Samuel L Jackson talking about how slaves were treated in America, and how the film is a representation of it. Uses the character Stephen to show how some black slaves would virtually run the fields, such as the character Stephen does in “Candyland” 

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