Thursday, August 14, 2008
Movie news: The joys of scalping Nazis
It probably does not reflect well on me that I am looking forward to seeing this movie:
Cult moviemaker Quentin Tarantino is poised to make a blood-spattered World War II epic starring Brad Pitt as the leader of a maverick U.S. unit of Jewish soldiers which scalps Nazis.
Yes, I admit that I think that Tarantino makes gore hilarious. That said, I'd love to see a movie with roughly this plot aimed at Al Qaeda. We won't, because it would be too freighted with current political significance to attract a big foreign audience or any "artistic" support within Hollywood. What a shame.
6 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Thu Aug 14, 03:54:00 PM:
Ah, Quentin. If only you'd dug a little bit deeper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/26/second.world.war
There actually were groups of Jews who went around murdering former SS soldiers after the War. They are passingly referenced in Israel's Secret Wars, by Ian Black and Benny Morris. (gotta check the footnotes)
One of those neat little tidbits of poetic justice in history that even most historians have never heard of.
By 
, at
Thu Aug 14, 04:10:00 PM:
If the pitch meeting sold the script as "showing the hypocrisy of Americans doing what they accuse foreign combatants of doing," you might get a rise out of hollywood.
By , at
Thu Aug 14, 06:21:00 PM:
Nazis are the perfect villain. Best of all, they are not around in sufficient numbers to plague us anymore. No one is expected to be politically-correct when it come to Nazis. Hundreds of years from now, we will still be making movies about the evil Nazis.
By Country Squire, at
Thu Aug 14, 08:12:00 PM:
"Yes, I admit that I think that Tarantino makes gore hilarious."
He certainly does. I remember going to see Pulp Fiction in the theater and hurrying my wife out at the end. When she asked me why I was in such a hurry I told her I didn't want everyone to see who was laughing hysterically throughout the movie.
By Steve, at
Thu Aug 14, 08:39:00 PM:
TH, your taste is indeed dubious when it comes to Tarantino. I could see why Pulp Fiction was popular for its black humour, but could never admire it. I commented to my liberal friend at the time that the worst thing about it was that it made heroin look bad-ass cool, and I wouldn't be surprised if this tempted some people to give it a try. Rubbish, I was told, the characters are all losers, how could anyone say the movie encourages drug taking?
Move forward a year or two, and a prominent liberal radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist here (Australia), who had been involved with a youth charity that dealt with a lot of drug taking street kids, said that heroin use had been on the rise and his charity worker friends thought PF had indeed made it "cool" again.
Really, I say that the use of gore in cheap films was a way of attracting an audience when they had no budget. But to keep making films with high budgets just to show gore, that's pretty juvenile in my books.
By , at
Fri Aug 15, 12:18:00 PM:
Who knew that Brad Pitt was Jewish, or could even "pass"? Less Jewish looking than Paul Newman in "Exodus"? You make the call!
Oy vey!
I saw a few minutes of "Kill Bill" on cable a while back, and frankly, it was pretty stupid. Tarantino is just a guy who is in fashion for now. Someday, he'll be a spent, drunken husk of a man.
Or not.
-David
