German critics are ga-ga for Quentin Tarantino's crazy over-the-top Jews-scalping-Nazis revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds. "Tarantino shows the Nazis as they really were: a pack of pompous trash -- thoroughly trivial bad guys," said one German reviewer. And another: "It took 65 years for a film-maker, instead of bringing Germany's evil 20th century history to life once more to have people shudder and bow before it, to simply dream around it. And to mow all the pigs down. Catharsis! Oxygen! Wonderful retro-futuristic insanity of the imagination!"
American critics have been somewhat less enthusiastic; Jeffrey Wells even said of the movie that it amounts to Tarantino sticking his own finger in his ass and sniffing it for 2-and-a-half hours.
Clearly, the German critics are speaking from some place deep down in the national psyche, some bottomless well of received guilt. Any movie that trashes Nazis is going to be seized upon as something positive. So we'll know that the Germans have purged their souls of that stuff forever and we don't have to fear or hate them anymore.
But we know the Germans are good now and want peace. It's the fucked-up Americans we have to worry about. And those shifty Turks.
