The anaesthetisation of good taste continues

Inglourious Basterds Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes

Hey, what's this? Initial reviews from Cannes were very mixed, with quite a high degree of negativity in many. But now that more critics have seen it, the positive reviews are far outnumbering the negative. Yes, once again the director who is so easy to dislike both personally (have you seen him in interviews?) and aesthetically is still selling glossy trash and violence to the critics and they are still (by and large) lapping it up. (I'm not so sure it will be a huge hit at the box office, though.)

For me, the effect of his oeuvre is like a cultural anaesthetisation of good taste and decency in cinema. A movie can have tension, wit and excitement without being graphically violent and morally vacuous, but Quentin doesn't seem to know that.

Of course, there are some critics who have come to dislike him, and the best negative review so far is from David Denby in the New Yorker:

Like all the director’s work after “Jackie Brown,” the movie is pure sensation. It’s disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness—it’s too shallow to be called nihilism—undermines even the best scenes....

Moral callousness has been part of Tarantino’s style in the past. In “Pulp Fiction,” his merry roundelay set among Los Angeles lowlifes, the aggressive acts that the characters commit against one another are so abrupt and extreme that they become funny. The movie’s outrageous panache gave the audience license to enjoy the violence as lawless entertainment. But, in “Basterds,” Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history....

Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager....

The film is skillfully made, but it’s too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish boys get to pump Hitler and Göring full of lead), but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated. Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque.

I have never quite understood why the media gives such a juvenile director so much attention. For example, he gets a big spread by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic this month. (It's worth reading merely to confirm how immature Tarantino sounds.)

Goldberg seemingly enjoys the movie as showing Nazi revenge that he used to fantasise about, but later has reservations:

When I came out of the screening room the night before our interview, I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank. But when my blood cooled, I began to think about the morality of kosher porn in the context of current Middle East politics. Some of this was informed by my own experience in the Israeli army, in which I saw my fellow Jewish soldiers do moral things—such as risking their lives to prevent the murder of innocent Jews—as well as immoral things, like beating the hell out of Palestinians because they could.

When Tarantino asked me how I thought his film would be received in Israel—he’s visiting for the first time this summer, to promote the film—I told him that Israelis, who have actual experience with physical power (in a way that most Jews over the course of the past 2,000 years did not), might not take to the film in the way that many of their American cousins might. Some Israeli liberals, including the country’s many filmmakers, might not like his movie very much at all.

Well, revenge movies have never appealed to me. The only movie that I really liked that had a degree of a personal revenge as a theme was probably The Untouchables. (But even then, it was more a matter of spontaneous taking-justice-into-his-own-hands type of thing.) The whole vigilante/avenger thing with Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood never appealed.

So I am sure there will be no need for me to reconsider the value of this latest movie. As for the rest of the world: I feel confident that the intrinsic low value of Tarantino's work will be fully appreciated in retrospect.

UPDATE: a Salon blog goes at length into the Goldberg article and the question of whether this movie is "good for Jews". Certainly the comments that follow indicate that a large number of the public hate Tarantino and see through him better than your average critic. It also links to an amusingly vicious take on Tarantino and Inglorious Basterds in particular.