Mindless Ones

It is, in other words, a deliberate assault on the facts surrounding the deaths of millions and millions of people, including the systematic genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust… It’s morally monstrous and its practitioners are moral monsters.

Oh, wait, shit. That’s not quite right. That’s what Sean C. had to say about Nazi-sympathizing turd-monger Pat Buchanan. Sorry everyone, but problems like this tend to occur when you start to mess around with history, you know?

In order to find what Sean actually thought of Inglourious Basterds we have to go back even further, to August 2009 no less! It was a kinder time, a gentler time, a time where a man could read an essay on the cathartic, history rupturing violence of Tarantino’s latest picture without any danger of stumbling onto this long winded response.

Here’s what Sean actually said about the film:

…Inglourious Basterds may be the punkest movie I’ve seen in I can’t even think how long. Maybe ever. It’s about nothing less than the power of art to destroy evil. It’s about how important it is to love film more than the likes of Hitler hate life. It’s about how movie violence, art violence, art designed as a FUCK YOU, can help you deal with the violence that so terrified Chamberlain’s cohorts and to which Hitler and his cohorts were so indifferent. It’s Woody Guthrie’s “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” guitar slogan made literal. It’s a lingering closeup on the bloodlust-saturated eyes of Eli Roth, the beautiful Jewish torture-porn poster boy and enemy of good taste, as he empties a machine gun into the bodies of members of the Third Reich. And it’s a total fucking fantasy. Yet that’s what makes it so vital.

Collins then went on to compare the release he finds in Inglourious Basterds with the traumatized euphoria of a Nine Inch Nails concert. It’s a good essay — so good, in fact, that it almost had me convinced that I felt the same way. Except that if I’m honest, I didn’t find any release in Tarantino’s spaghetti-western-war-punk-fantasy.That said, Inglourious Basterds didn’t bother me the way it bothered David Fiore! Still, I get where Dave’s coming from, because it’s a deeply strange movie — the mix of stomach wrenching tension, goofy comedy, expressive violence and defiantly “Tarantino-esque” banter makes it hard for the viewer to know how they’re supposed to react. Even the film’s first chapter, which Sean correctly describes as being loaded with real danger, has at least one absurd laugh in it. It’s not easy to keep a straight face when Landa pulls out his massive comedy pipe, is it?

Well, some how *he* manages…