Jewish Critics Chime In on Inglourious Basterds

[Reboot]

Studio Briefing | August 21, 2009

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds may be getting mixed reviews from leading U.S. critics; it is getting scathing reviews from the Jewish press. The national Jewish Daily Forward calls it "Jewish revenge porn." In Connecticut's Jewish Ledger, Michael Fox writes that since the film doesn't pretend to be historically accurate, "there's no percentage in railing against [it] as blathering, self-indulgent drivel." Nevertheless, he writes, Tarantino's plot amounts to "pages and pages and pages of amusingly pointless dialogue." He concludes, "Tarantino's riff on Nazis and Jews may amuse and satisfy less mature audiences. For those with a deeper and fuller understanding of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, particularly one gleaned from sources other than action movies, it is shockingly superficial."

The movie features scenes in which the "good guys" scalp German soldiers, beat them to death with baseball bats for refusing to reveal the location of comrades, carve swastikas into the foreheads of those who do cooperate, and commit suicide bombings. Jonathan Foreman in Britain's Jewish Chronicle comments, "There is something about the idea of inspiring holy terror by mutilation, decapitations, etc. that inevitably evokes today's real-life masters of cruelty and demoralization by atrocity, al-Qaeda."


Earlier threads about the movie:

In Germany, an ovation for 'Inglourious Basterds'

Tarantino: Hollywood's Jewish Avenger

Quentin Tarantino bloodfest, Inglourious Basterds (another Jewish propaganda)