More thoughts on Basterds
Sep. 6th, 2009 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progWas awake in the wee hours, thinking about Inglorious Basterds. The word I finally choose for the film's climax is disturbing. It's a huge energy release after hours of buildup, and while that much is expected, it blasts in directions that feel completely wrong. And it's brilliant. The amazing visuals (not just the special effects, but their context and arrangement) make it all very watchable, letting it batter your brain directly with its very intentional wrongnesses.
Drection one: The shots of terrified and defenseless men and women getting machine-gunned / burned alive en masse by the protagonists are sustained well past the point of comfort, by a director who knew exactly what he was doing. The event might have happened in someone else's movie, but the viewer wouldn't be allowed to linger so over the accruing carnage. An air of "But they're Nazis! Isn't this what you've been wanting to see, for the last two hours?" hangs over it.
Direction two: The movie's matter-of-fact depiction the entire Nazi high command and at least a couple other historical figures meeting violent ends together, casually ripping bullets into the viewer's knowledge that these people most certainly did not die in a theater fire in 1944. This made the film, at a stroke, more fantastic than, like, the backstory of Hellboy, or a hundred other secret-history stories that still keep the historical shape of the war's end intact.
Until someone went and broke it before my eyes, it never occurred to me there was an unwritten rule that you don't let your protagonists fucking kill Hitler in the middle of your (non-SF) war movie. I was struck speechless.
Direction one and a half:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dougo and I were sitting behind a giggly dude who was waving his arms around and hooting during this whole bit. With everything else going all teasingly, brutally semi-meta on-screen, he almost felt like part of the movie.
Drection one: The shots of terrified and defenseless men and women getting machine-gunned / burned alive en masse by the protagonists are sustained well past the point of comfort, by a director who knew exactly what he was doing. The event might have happened in someone else's movie, but the viewer wouldn't be allowed to linger so over the accruing carnage. An air of "But they're Nazis! Isn't this what you've been wanting to see, for the last two hours?" hangs over it.
Direction two: The movie's matter-of-fact depiction the entire Nazi high command and at least a couple other historical figures meeting violent ends together, casually ripping bullets into the viewer's knowledge that these people most certainly did not die in a theater fire in 1944. This made the film, at a stroke, more fantastic than, like, the backstory of Hellboy, or a hundred other secret-history stories that still keep the historical shape of the war's end intact.
Until someone went and broke it before my eyes, it never occurred to me there was an unwritten rule that you don't let your protagonists fucking kill Hitler in the middle of your (non-SF) war movie. I was struck speechless.
Direction one and a half:
dougo and I were sitting behind a giggly dude who was waving his arms around and hooting during this whole bit. With everything else going all teasingly, brutally semi-meta on-screen, he almost felt like part of the movie.