Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's newest movie, Inglourious Basterds, has had the biggest opening of his career to date.
This is not surprising, as Basterds is also the best movie of his career to date.

Let me start out by saying that Basterds is NOT a revenge movie (we've already seen one of those, thankyouverymuch, it's called Kill Bill) although the plot is often misconstrued as such. Instead, this movie was made to mock American Bloodlust.

In a nutshell, the movie is about a special troop of Jewish-American soldiers (called the Inglourious Basterds and led by Brad Pitt) who are sent to harass and harangue the Nazis during WWII. The movie culminates with a plot to take out all of the Nazi head-hanchos (Hitler included) during the premiere of a Nazi propaganda movie.

-- spoiler alert!!! --
The first scene of the movie portrays Nazi brutality as they gun down a Jewish family ... and the next hour shows Americans shooting, scalping, stabbing and beating-to-death-with-a-baseball-bat, Nazis. Being that this is a Tarantino movie, all of the above is shown in great (and bloody) detail.
Throughout all of this, a good 90% of the people around me in the theater were cheering, yee-hawing, clapping, and shouting praises at the Basterds' bloody works.

Later on when the higher-ups of the Third Reich are watching the Nazi propaganda movie, the entire Nazi theater is alive with cheering, yee-hawing, clapping, and praises for the hero: who is shown shooting and killing wave after wave of American soldiers.

Sound familiar? I'd just been hearing the *SAME THING* in my East-Tennessee movie theater for the entire previous hour!
There is absolutely no difference between what the Nazis did and what the Basterds are doing on screen, and Tarantino has America yelling for more.

What he has done with Basterds is cleverly point out that - in the movie - we are both the same. In Basterds, American brutality and Nazi brutality are next to indistinguishable
Historically, Nazis would carve the Star of David into the chests of Rabbis, however this is not shown or mentioned in the movie. Instead, in Inglourious Basterds Pitt and his gang carve swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis in able to "identify them after they remove their uniforms". Also, aside from the first scene of the movie and then later on in the propaganda film, there really is very little Nazi violence portrayed onscreen. The vast majority of the blood and gore is the Americans' doing.

Tarantino uses a movie-within-a-movie to make a poignant commentary on the ideas of American superiority and bloodlust; and in doing so, makes Inglourious Basterds truly glorious indeed.