Jewish Fantasy Fulfilled?

Rating: 7/10 (12 September 2009)

The long anticipated, ultra-violent spaghetti western riddled with WWII iconography is Tarantino's homage to the alleged Jewish fantasy: sadistically bludgeoning the Arian, Nazi race. We follow two savage forces—the Basterds and Shosanna—each who make separate attempts to destroy Hitler and his band of carnal cronies, thereby ending the war.
Made with reminiscent traces of The Great Escape & The Dirty Dozen, not to mention the peppered cruelty of Hostel or any other torturous Eli Roth picture, Inglourious Basterds is a marvelously skewed alternative to how WWII should have ended, rather than how it actually did end. When it was over, I sat in the theater feeling sterile. Fruit could not be produced.
In typical Tarantino form, the film was broken into five headlined chapters, was terribly verbose yet possessed witty dialogue on occasion, masked its bloody and grotesque content in beautiful aesthetics, flowered a pastiche of anachronistic musical melodies, and brought forth extremely rich & compelling character developments—all of which were mesmerizing. Christoph Waltz, in particular, gave a truly haunting performance, the best Nazi portrayal I've ever seen and one in whom I hope wins multiple awards. Brad Pitt was just goofy, nothing special, but Waltz was downright sinister—a manipulatively charismatic Nazi general who toyed with every character's (including the audience's) emotions. Every time he was present on screen, I felt fully secure in the holy moment, or rather the devilish moment.
Similar to the sword picture homage he gave in the Kill Bill series, I.B. reflects Tarantino's obscure reverence towards WWII and the cinema-going experience in general. The film in many instances reveals Tarantino's love of celluloid, as suggested through the multiple Noir, French New Wave, Neo-Realistic and Spaghetti Western nuances. The man has a pervasive education in film history and it greatly heightens the quality of his work—that much I give him. However, as much as the film was provocative and cutting-edge devilry, there was something deeply disturbing about it.
The audience, as I'm sure Tarantino intended, was laughing hysterically at all of the blood-spattered carnage displayed implacably before them: whether it was the scalping of Nazi's, the irrevocable and torturous image of Eli Roth bashing a Nazi's head to pieces, or the slitting of throats or machine-gun riddled faces. It was just sick, twisted. Even Tarantino seemed to get the last laugh via his femme fatale laughing head as she watched the theater hall filled with Nazis burn ironically proxy for the Jews. "Payback is a bitch," he seemed to subtextually scream.
Though I never laughed once, I was just as guilty as they were, for I well knew what I had paid to see. And when you pick up a snake asking it not to bite, you are denying the law of causation; you desire the identities of particular entities to disobey their innate natures and conform instead to your anarchic, destructive wishes. Well, in that sense, the film was a good social experiment. It taught a valuable principle of what it feels like to lose hope and faith in humanity, and as deputy, indulge in the "super-cool," pretty packaged pockets of sadism. I was hoping, though, that one of the characters would be redeemed, rather than have to sit through 2 ½ hours of the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" philosophy.