I saw an interesting documentary last night on the Einsatz group in Norway.

It was called Dead Snow. 

You're right, there's no "right."

There's nothing realistic about Basterds; it's a freaking fairy tale from start to finish.  For just one little thing, a team of American commandos wouldn't have lasted 10 days in occupied France; that's why we didn't send any in there.  For another, the Army would never have preferred Jews for such an assignment.  But it's all just Tarantino's fantasy, so these details are only the start of how ridiculous the story is, if taken as a possible history.  The question is, what justifies it?  While I enjoyed the witty dialogue and the extreme suspense in many of the scenes, I came away with a negative judgment of it.

As for Letters from Iwo Jima, if you look at it discerningly and with some understanding of current Japanese politics (not that I have any deep understanding of that, but I have some), it really does seem to pander to modern Japanese excuse-making and denial about their country's history.  It's rather as if Eastwood wanted to make sure that it would sell in Japan, something that I rather suspect was behind many of the decisions that went into it.  

I'm no big expert on the Pacific island campaigns, but it's my understanding that the Japanese island defenders routinely tortured and mutilated the Americans they captured.  The memoire I'm reading recounts bizarre mutilations of American corpses on Peleliu, which is suggestive of how live prisoners would have been or perhaps were treated.  Perhaps there was the odd incident where something of the same was done by Americans, but in general, I don't think our people did this sort of thing, nor in general did the British or the Germans.

Markovich, I agree with you on Basterds. However, I reached the same conclusion for a different reason. Issues of political correctness aside, a film needs to be internally consistent. The only thing consistent is that everyone is evil. Except maybe for the Brit that gets killed in the bar.

There is a scene where the heroine of the movie threatens an innocent "friend" of hers with death, physically beats him up, to get him to develop her film strip in his lab. It's violent and pointlessly so...now keep in mind I LIKED the first three Saw movies and even Pasolini's 120 days of Sodom. That scene however, offended the %$#@ out of me. 

That a character would torture and perhaps kill someone else to develop a film (when doing so would involve the innocent in a crime that would get him excecuted or deported to a death camp) merely for a coup de grace to top a revenge plot on Nazis - acting as a Nazi while doing it - strikes me as internally inconsistent.

Having said that, I disagree with you about Flags of Our Fathers. Yes, the Japanese were worse than the Germans (experiments on Chinese, rape of Nanking, war crimes in Thailand, Filipina sex slaves) but those didn't take place on Iwo Jima. So the film was internally consistent.

Stigma wrote on 03/09/10 at 02:15:50:


Oh, you mean the terrorist film ? 

Stigma wrote on 03/09/10 at 02:15:50:


I don't know what to make of a movie where the entire Nazi hierarchy gets killed before D-Day.  However I did think that Tarantino directed several amazing scenes where his characters are engaged in lengthy, seemingly ordinary conversation and yet the situation is fraught with extreme suspense that ratchets up as the conversation progresses.

Wow, than you probably never have seen a movie by Liliane Cavani or Lena Wertmüller, to name two females who should have won Oscars about 35 years ago. But of course I am an European chauvinist pig. It has been a long time - possibly even until before I was born - that an Oscar was a recommendation for me.