Inglourious Basterds Wins Weekend Box Office, Stirs Debate
Inglorious Basterds
Along with a slew of bodies, the latest tour de force Inglorious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino starring Brad Pitt and Diane Krueger piled up over $37.6 million at the domestic box office over the weekend. Overseas the movie earned an estimated $27.5 million. The film will open up in 42 more countries in the coming weeks.
The movie has polarized Tarantino’s critics. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times calls it “a big, bold audacious war movie,” and applauds: “For once, the basterds get what’s coming to them.” Claudia Puig in USA Today, however, is among those heaping praise on the film. Tarantino’s “tall tale, with its tense and jangly pacing,” she writes, “is immediately riveting.”
Many critics are not won over. Joanne Kaufman remarks in the Wall Street Journal that “nothing about the emotionally unmoored Inglourious Basterds adds up. Whether it’s parody, farce or a fever dream is anyone’s guess.” Nonsense, contends Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun. “The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did ‘Springtime for Hitler’ [in Mel Brooks's The Producers]: because it’s so bad they think it’s good.
Where Tarantino really may have slipped up however, is with his public relations with the Jewish Community. 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. 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 protagonists who scalp German soldiers, beat them to death with baseball bats, carve swastikas into their foreheads, and commit suicide bombings. Jonathan Foreman in Britain’s Jewish Chronicle writes, “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.”