Watching it again on YouTube I think the truth is somewhere in between. I think Pitt’s character and most of the Basterds are gleeful, but there’s a look on “the Bear Jew”'s face as he touches the bat to the officer’s head [and the officer doesn’t flinch] that makes you realize he does respect him. (About :27 into this clip.) Admittedly I might be reading that into it.
I agree with Skammer and Bosstone.
1.) He wanted to fuck with her.
2.) He didn’t know who she was. But he wanted to fuck with her.
I have been waffling on this.
Currently I do not believe Landa knew Shosanna was specifically the girl who escaped from him in the opening scene.
However, her reaction to him made him realize that he had fucked with her in the past, even if he can’t place exactly where, and he was poking to make her squirm.
1.) She was too far away. The Luger P08 was one of the most accurate handguns of WWII, but even a marksman using a rest (not a forearm), would have trouble hitting a target more than 100m away.
2.) Landa ordering milk for Shosanna hinted that he remembered her, but the rest of the scene indicated that he really didn’t care, although he still enjoyed screwing with her. Plot-wise though, that might be a weakness since a dedicated officer would certainly not let someone with motives for revenge get anywhere near Hitler. But since we find out later that Landa pretty much had an idea what the protagonists were up to beforehand, it makes more sense for him to let her be.
Some trivia I’ll mention just because: Christoph Waltz who played Landa is the first male actor ever to win an Oscar for playing a Nazi (the first ever was Kate Winslet for The Reader). An irony is that in real life his son is an orthodox rabbi in Israel (cite). Waltz himself is not Jewish but his American ex-wife was. I wonder to what degree if any this informed his performance as “the Jew Hunter”.
Don’t know, but as long as we’re musing off-topic, I was just thinking yesterday about how it must have felt for German actors in 1940s Hollywood to be typecast as Nazis, considering many of them had left their homeland because they had ample reason to hate and/or fear the ruling party. (E.g, *Casablanca’*s “Major Strasser” had a Jewish wife. And one of his first leading roles was a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, which probably didn’t endear him to the fascists.)
I finally watched this movie over the holiday weekend, and the entire plot of this movie made no sense, so why should any single part of it? The movie really struck me the wrong way because they took one of the most important historical narratives in history and made a complete farce out of it.
Definitely don’t watch Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. While not to the level of the Holocaust and WWII, rewriting the Tate-LaBanca murders into a happy ending to me is worse, because the victims are not abstractions (or Hitler) but real people in living memory. I enjoyed the surprise ending of IB as a one-off, but refuse to think all QT movies exist in the same universe (that if you asked Vincent Vega how WWII ended, he’d say Hitler died in a fire in Paris).
This thread reappearing led me to a theory that offering milk/creme and a pastry probably containing lard was a secret test of Jewishness. Hmmm.
I have some serious issues with this film.
The first, of course, is that it has almost no action in it. You’d think that a movie about elite soldiers hunting Nazis would feature a scene or two of them actually fighting, but no: you see them talk about fighting, you see the aftermath of fighting, but actual fighting? Barely any of that here.
I also don’t like how Tarantino tried to force his obsession with revenge and torture where it really isn’t appropriate. You don’t waste time intimidating and torturing a Nazi while the war is still being fought - you kill him, and then you move on to the next one. The time for revenge, if at all, is after the war’s over.
But my biggest issue with the movie was Jew erasure. Shoshana was great - I have absolutely no complaints about Shoshana (although she really shouldn’t have allowed herself to be sucker shot like that in the end). No, my problem was with the so-called elite Jewish squad. A crack team of Jewish soldiers! Except… their commander isn’t Jewish. And the biggest, toughest one? Also not Jewish. And the suave, handsome spy they recruit for undercover work? You guessed it: not Jewish. It ended up being a movie about some Gentile heroes and their near-silent Jewish sidekicks. Who never shoot at anyone capable of shooting back.
Donnie Donowitz? The Bear Jew? Played by Jewish actor Eli Roth? Why do you say he wasnt Jewish?
No - Hugo Stiglitz, who was the toughest guy on the team, wasn’t Jewish, and actually got a backstory.
The only one they intimidated was in order to get operational information from him?
And the purpose of the Basterds was more terrorism and propaganda than it was anything else so I think it’s fine anyway. Plus, you know, it’s not meant to be realistic.
I think it’s the other way around, actually – it’s the historical milieu that arguably isn’t appropriate, but the real core of the movie is that it’s an updated version of an Elizabethan / Jacobean revenge tragedy, which means the torture / revenge themes are integral. (Seriously, if you know the genre, Tarantino hits every element, including some highly specific stuff like incorporating the performing arts into your revenge. And Shoshana has to die because revengers always die at the end, regardless of whether they absolutely need to in plotting terms.)
That’s pretty much every QT movie, starting with Reservoir Dogs. Sometimes it works, or at least, fits in with the movie. Other times, like IMO Hateful 8, the film is just an excuse to torture his actors even more than the characters.
But, as for IB, for not having much actual action, it has two of the most tense scenes I can remember. First the farmhouse scene had me practically sweating in my seat from the tension. And the rat cellar bar scene was very well done.
I agree that they were very tense scenes. However, tension, action and violence are three different things. IB has a lot of tension and a lot of violence, but very little action. Which is a shame, because Kill Bill proved that Tarantino can be a very talented director of action when he wants to.
That’s actually very interesting. I’ve never heard that before.
Still, we seem to agree that the milieu was a poor match for the story. There’s a war on. If you fight, you fight for victory, or you fight for justice, or you fight to save people. Revenge is a distraction.
He told Lt Aldo Raine:
“I’m a detective. A damn good detective. Finding people is my specialty so naturally I worked for the Nazis finding people. And yes, some of them were Jews.”
This gave a whiff of a hint about his background and still told nothing. Was he some kind of cop or secret agent in a past life? We’ll never know.