Exceptionally poor effort at pornographic sadism

Rating: 2/10 (28 June 2010)

I really don't like this movie. I think right now I'm rating it like a 2 or 3. I haven't seen "Death Proof" but I think I've seen all the other ones he's directed and this is definitely the worst. In fact his films have been getting worse all the time and the last respectable thing he did was "Jackie Brown" as far as I'm concerned. I'm pretty much through with him. His credit is totally gone with me. As far as I can tell he makes movies to feed the fantasies of 14 year old boys. It seems like his early movies were fun and different, even if they used a lot of stuff from older movies they put it together in a different way. But this movie and "Kill Bill", these are just stupid movies to me. Pornography of violence basically.
There's something to be said for the old exploitation movies. I'm not entirely ignorant on this subject. He used a lot of ideas from the B-crime movies of the 50s with "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs", and then he did I guess his version of "blaxpoloitation" with "Jackie Brown." But the thing is, that movie was made with respect to black people. It's not even really a blaxploitation movie at all, just a decent modern caper movie that uses music from the 70s movies. But with this "Inglorious Basterds" thing, it's really like he's trying to make his own "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" movie. But he's trying to have his cake by making it "Ilsa, She Wolf of the Jewish resistance." And ultimately he just presents this sad tableau where every character and every scene is dehumanized and dehumanizing. If he had actually wanted to make a movie that would have entertained Hitler, he couldn't have done better.
I want to give this movie points for being different, but how can you reward somebody just for being worse than others, for daring to go further into violence for the sake of violence and justifying it with some lame-arse stuff like "oh they're all Nazis, who cares what happens to Nazis?" It's still dehumanizing in my opinion, it debases us to be encouraged to fantasize about committing this kind of violence to anyone. Movies like this are what makes me scared for the future of America, which I love dearly. Don't try to say that the "Basterds" are presented in some kind of negative light, or the film is a parody of American Exceptionalism. That's just an excuse that Tarantino built into the film with a few throw-away lines like "watching the Jew Bear bash a Nazi is the closest thing we get to a movie." Just to be self conscious about using violence and hate as a cinematic value (like the most base and disgusting exploitation films Tarantino apparently adores in a different way than I ever could) is not to justify it, not even in an aesthetic sense.