Pulp Holocaust

[Nergol]

I've always thought that Tarantino was a no-talent hack, so I have to say that I'm really hoping that the sheer tastelessness of this will finally be enough to sink his career:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1027043.html

The Holocaust, Tarantino-style: Jews scalping Nazis
By Assaf Uni



BERLIN - For weeks, Germany's tabloids and culture pages have been preoccupied with Quentin Tarantino's film "Inglorious Bastards," slated to start filming next week in Germany.

While the tabloids are drooling over the movie's star, Brad Pitt, who is moving with his wife Angelina Jolie and their children to a villa close to Berlin ("The most beautiful couple in Wannsee," one headline declared), the serious media is focusing on another angle: Is Germany ready for a Tarantino-style treatment of World War II?

An early draft of the script leaked onto the Internet three months ago suggested the film would contain scenes of bloody vengeance exacted by Jews against Nazis. One campaign would be carried out by Jews in the U.S. Army intent on scalping Nazi soldiers on occupied French soil; another would be a Jewish refugee's revenge against the Nazi officer who murdered her parents.
Advertisement

Pitt is to play Jewish-American Lt. Aldo Raine, the leader of a revenge squad known as "The Bastards," who launch a killing spree in which they hang, torture, disembowel and scalp German soldiers and engrave Swastikas on their foreheads, according to the leaked draft.

The film is raising controversy in Germany, where the subjects of World War II and the Holocaust are usually restricted to historical discourse.

"This is pop culture meeting Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force," said the film critic of SuedDeutche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe. "The effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable."

German film critics blasted last week's decision to grant the film money from the German Film Fund and another local fund, saying that Germany cannot finance a movie that uses Jewish-Nazi relations as entertainment, especially one by Tarantino.

The SuedDeutche Zeitung warned that the film may be no less explosive than the Hollywood film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, about German officers' abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler toward the end of WWII. The movie, filmed in Germany and scheduled to be released in spring 2009, has already drawn fire from German historians.

"All the German historians and critics who were left gasping for breath by Tom Cruise and his worthy attempts to produce a correct image of Stauffenberg will be so shocked by 'Inglorious Bastards' that they will savage it on the spot," writes Kneibe.

Tarantino's film is not supposed to mix history and fiction, but to offer the pure, hyper-violent entertainment that the American director of "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Kill Bill" is known for.

"It is sort of a spaghetti western set in World War II," Tarantino told the German News Agency DPA. "I am not going to call it this, but if it had a subtitle for it, it would be called, 'Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France.'"

Films that treat the Holocaust period as pure entertainment could be destructive, says Alexander Kluge, a noted film director and author, who has been dealing with the Holocaust and its memory for more than 50 years.

He cites Swiss-Jewish director Dany Levy's comedy "Mein Fuehrer" as a case in point. This film raised a storm in Germany two years ago, when it portrayed for the first time a neurotic, empathy-evoking Hitler. "Such films can obscure the events' true significance," says Kluge.

Tarantino's film received a 300,000 euro grant from the state of Brandenburg, because it will be filmed in Potsdam's Babelsberg studios. Founded in 1911, this is the world's oldest major film studio. Films including Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and "The Blue Angel" with Marlene Dietrich were filmed there in the 1920s and 1930s, as were numerous Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films.

Tarantino's film is also expected to receive 20 percent of its budget from the German Film Fund because it is being filmed in Germany. It is scheduled to be released in June 2009. "

[Tripe]

Ooh this has the potential to be right up there with that Jerry Lewis Clown of Auschwitz movie.

[Doctor Who?]

This film sounds like the most tasteless thing ever made.

Tarantino is the most overrated director ever.

Here's hoping all the people who flipped over The Passion of the Christ will take this thing down too.

[Rattrap007]

Ooh this has the potential to be right up there with that Jerry Lewis Clown of Auschwitz movie.

The Roberto Benini film?

[Folly]

Wow. Just wow.

[Plastic Self-Cleaning Duck]

Ooh this has the potential to be right up there with that Jerry Lewis Clown of Auschwitz movie.

The Roberto Benini film?

No...that had some charm.  You got why he was clowning around where he was.

The Day The Clown Cried[

[Compound]

Huh. Having seen the film that QT is remaking, I don't recall any Nazi scalp hunting in it.

[ScottotD]

Sounds cool to me.

Here's hoping all the people who flipped over The Passion of the Christ will take this thing down too.

...and that right-wing christians will bully the ratings board to pass it too?

[Doc Steve]

The 101st Airborne got wind of some Nazi propaganda in May of 1941 to the effect that the U.S. Airborne Divisions were almost entirely manned by "Indian savages" who would scalp the Germans if given the chance.  This is why many of the men who dropped on Normandy shaved their heads to Mohawks and wore war paint on D-Day.  From what I can tell, this wasn't effective one way or the other.  (Helmets covered the hair, and battlefield grime covered the paint.) 

I am sort of a WWII buff, and to my knowledge, no American ever scalped a German.  I'm not saying it never happened; I'm just saying I kind of doubt it.  Scalping is normally done to a corpse, not a living prisoner (unless we're talking Apaches), so I'm not sure what the big deal is anyway.   Desecration of corpses is all too common in wartime.  (I'm not excusing it, just commenting.) 

[mrbasehart]

Huh. Having seen the film that QT is remaking, I don't recall any Nazi scalp hunting in it.

I don't think it's a remake, he just liked the title. 

While the linked story makes it sound a little dodgy, Empire Magazine in the UK has read the leaked script as well and had nothing but good things to say about it.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I don't get it. =/

Where does the foot fetish scene come in?

[Relaxing Dragon]

Given that I'm a complete Tarentino fanboy, I'm in full support of this one. Should be awesome.

And I've also been hearing good things about the script (from the usually-very-cynical CHUD), so that's a good sign.

[Doc Steve]

Huh. Having seen the film that QT is remaking, I don't recall any Nazi scalp hunting in it.

I don't think it's a remake, he just liked the title. 

While the linked story makes it sound a little dodgy, Empire Magazine in the UK has read the leaked script as well and had nothing but good things to say about it.

I have seen the original Inglorious Bastards.  It's a lot more like the Dirty Dozen or Force 10 from Navarone.  It's an Italian exploitation film, but no scalping occurs.  (You'll just have to trust me on this one until you can find it.) 

[Relaxing Dragon]

Huh. Having seen the film that QT is remaking, I don't recall any Nazi scalp hunting in it.

I don't think it's a remake, he just liked the title. 

While the linked story makes it sound a little dodgy, Empire Magazine in the UK has read the leaked script as well and had nothing but good things to say about it.

I have seen the original Inglorious Bastards.  It's a lot more like the Dirty Dozen or Force 10 from Navarone.  It's an Italian exploitation film, but no scalping occurs.  (You'll just have to trust me on this one until you can find it.) 

They released the original on DVD recently, I've been meaning to check it out for some time.

[Doc Steve]

IIRC, I first saw it on HBO back in 1979.