INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Review Part 4

Here's another one at Huff Po: http://tinyurl.com/md3uda which is better than the others. But still not enough to shut me up. It is again all about violence Tarantino style. Tarantino says violence is like a color, and that's the way he uses it. It is not supposed to frighten and shake you to the core. You are to look at it like a movie, like TV. As he says about 9-11 it didn't affect him. He had seen planes crash into buildings in movies. There is an early Arnold flick where a young boy flying a plane crashes into a high (not a skyscraper) building to commit suicide. This was way before 9-11. Military and domestic intelligence need to use the minds of its imaginative thinkers to predict future attacks. But then there would be so many choices they would get confused. Not Condi Rice, though, the who woulda thought blah blah blah person who was guarding us at the time.

Back to the early sixties with the murder of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was stabbed to death on a public street in 1964 while thirty-eight onlookers watching from their apartments out their windows did nothing to help her. Her assailant took 30 minutes to stalkand stab her to death while she screamed for help. Bibb Latane, a young doctoral student, made his career on his dissertation as to what was going on with those bystanders. Actually they were just precursors to present day onlookers who watch atrocities on TV, in theatres, and on the streets as if they were not real, as if no one is suffering.We have all been desensitized in a behavioral paradigm long long ago. So quit with the ranting about violence. And just slow down for the next roadkill and look.

Back to Blankenship's take on violence. Resevoir Dogs is often brought up here to beat Tarantino over the head. RD shows us just how stupid and boring these aging petty criminals really are. Cocky adolescent delinquents now just low mediocre getting older men who have no imagination as to how to torture or obtain a confession. Just like those peon recruits in Iraq who went to prison for doing what the uppers wanted them to do. Remember the childhood game where you were told to do something bad. If you were clever you knew you would take the blame if caught and the one who instigated it would walk. It's the same fucking game. Cover your ass. Get the jerks to do the dirty work.

So much for blaming Tarantino for gratuitous violence. The theatre scene where the Nazis will get blown up and shot mirrors the film they are watching of the young German soldier killing Americans. The flames that devour the screen and the theatre with their locked doors mirrors the Reichstag fire (German's 9-11) just before Hitler came to power but which was instigated by his stormtroopers. A beautiful parallel with a footnote to Rienzi, the Grand Opera of Wagner where flames engulf all. We know Hitler loved that opera of destruction, the tale of the last Roman Tribune. The locked doors are also the locked doors of the church where Jews were herded and burned I forget where and when but it was a crucial scene in The Reader.

I am not finished with this part yet. Continued in part 5.