tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post6812637768768347268..comments2023-11-03T06:02:02.128-07:00Comments on By Ken Levine: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSBy Ken Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17305293821975250420noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-20645565533958965572012-01-11T20:03:05.906-08:002012-01-11T20:03:05.906-08:00It should be "then" not "than"...It should be "then" not "than"....Spelling geeknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-73285818141899066792009-10-13T04:31:53.685-07:002009-10-13T04:31:53.685-07:00No doubt Inglourious Basterds is a good and succes...No doubt Inglourious Basterds is a good and successful movie by Tarantino.Thanks for the review. I am going to watch it again.Tontinehttp://tontineblog.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-79163431488619758722009-09-25T06:31:00.582-07:002009-09-25T06:31:00.582-07:00This is me in my own voice again, rather than the ...This is me in my own voice again, rather than the Washington <i>Post</i> author I've quoted so extensively above. I did so because of the debate on how Nazis should be treated in World War II films, to show that whether one approves or not, something very much like Mr. Tarantino depicts did in fact happen.<br /><br />When I worked at the old Jewish Hospital side of the combined Barnes-Jewish Hospital here in St. Louis, I had a patient who had been in the Polish Underground, where, he told me, he had permanently damaged his lungs breathing grain dust as he hid from the <i>Gestapo</i> in a silo. He had lost <b>140</b> members of his (presumably extended) family to the Camps.<br /><br />I never knew the nature of his illness, but I'm sure he thought he didn't have much time left. He would look up from his copies of the <i>Torah</i> and the <i>Talmud</i>, grab my arm, and emphatically tell me <b>"Never forget! NEVER FORGET!"</b>David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-34620361025174809962009-09-25T06:19:24.493-07:002009-09-25T06:19:24.493-07:00"He says he has never...had any moral qualms ..."He says he has never...had any moral qualms about his actions. 'I never gave it much thought after the war,' he says. 'The point is: What do you do with these guys? The war crimes courts were already backlogged with more senior Nazis. The jails were full. They were going to slip through the cracks.'<br /><br />"The overwhelming majority of the lower-level SS guards did in fact escape justice.<br /><br />"Ferencz prosecuted members of the <i>Einsatzgruppen</i>. 'There were 3,000 members of these killing squads who did nothing but kill women and children for three straight years,' he says. 'These 3,000 men alone were responsible for almost 1 million murders. Do you know how many I brought indictments against? Twenty-two. The rest were never tried.'<br /><br />"'I remember talking to Soviet officers,' he adds. 'And they were baffled. "You know they're guilty," they'd say. "Why don't you just shoot them?" There was a lot of that kind of feeling in postwar Germany.'<br /><br />"Weiss, for his part, says he never went to Germany bent on revenge. 'Whatever anger I might have had was dissipated by the devastation and destruction I witnessed of German society. The German people paid dearly for their infatuation with Hitler. But there were times when justice just had to be done.'"David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-8462366440469864932009-09-25T06:18:02.838-07:002009-09-25T06:18:02.838-07:00"Ferencz -- who went on to a distinguished le..."Ferencz -- who went on to a distinguished legal career, became a founder of the International Criminal Court and is today probably the leading authority on military jurisprudence of the era -- cannot specifically address Weiss's actions. But he says it's important to recall that military legal norms at the time permitted a host of flexibilities that wouldn't fly today. 'You know how I got witness statements?' he says. 'I'd go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I'd say, "Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot." It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid.'<br /><br />"Weiss says that his unit had its own system of ethics when it came to handing former death camp guards over to the DPs. 'You couldn't do that by yourself,' he says. 'You consulted with the other CIC agents, and usually there was a duty officer. We would have never done this,' he adds, 'without at least some nod from a superior.'<br /><br />"The key was to make certain that there were no cases of mistaken identity. The SS men would have to own up to their participation in mass murders of their own volition, never as a result of torture, since people tend to admit to anything under such circumstances, says Weiss. As a backup, 'I'd make them write out a detailed history of their war record, including who they served with, when and under who.' This was double-checked against captured Nazi records to make sure that the person was indeed who they claimed to be. Only then was the decision taken, Weiss says.<br /><br />"Weiss remembers the panic in the SS men's eyes when they finally realized where they were being taken. 'We never told them where they were going,' he says. At the sight of the old German Army barracks, they grasped their fate. Some would try to cling to the jeep, but the reception committee would forcibly remove them. Weiss says he never looked back in the rearview mirror to see what happened next. Nor did he need to."David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-27526793036165737492009-09-25T06:16:40.466-07:002009-09-25T06:16:40.466-07:00"Weiss says he spent less than an hour in the..."Weiss says he spent less than an hour in the cell, getting the information he needed: names of superiors, other guards and so on. 'I just wanted to get out of there and take a shower.<br /><br />"'I guess what got me was the complete absence of humanity. To him, Auschwitz had just been a job. The fact that more than a million people were killed there didn't seem to faze him in the least bit. He didn't see Jews as people.'<br /><br />"Weiss thought of his father, his friends at the orphanage, his grandmother. The SS man had worked at the same two camps where she had been sent. He was only a lowly cog in the killing machine, and that meant he was of little value to intelligence headquarters in Frankfurt...he didn't have to be kicked up the intelligence food chain. In that sense, the man had been right about not needing to go into hiding. No one at Allied Command was particularly interested in someone of his status. But if he believed that his low rank would somehow spare him from justice, he was dead wrong.<br /><br />"'How did you do it?' I ask Weiss. 'The kapos,' he explains, 'that's where we got the idea. We had seen what the DPs did to the kapos, and we realized they could do us a favor.'<br /><br />"DPs, or displaced persons, were the survivors of death and POW camps -- Jews, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, refugees of virtually every nationality who either could not return home or no longer had any homes to return to. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Europe, and they were housed in huge temporary DP camps. Several such refugee camps, converted German Army barracks, were near Munich.<br /><br />"'We studied up a little on military law, and there was nothing on the books preventing us from delivering suspects for additional debriefing to the DPs,' Weiss recalls. He says he's not sure where the idea originated, who first put it into motion, or how widespread it was. 'Whoever first came up with this, I honestly don't know. I don't think they'd own up to it anyway.'<br /><br />"While it was perfectly legal under military law to hand over suspects for further questioning to DPs, says Benjamin Ferencz, who was a lead U. S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals in 1945 and 1947, knowingly delivering suspects for execution was not. And of course the DPs were not interested in extracting information.<br /><br />"Ferencz, who today is 85 and lives in New York, cautions against making sweeping armchair moral judgments. 'Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was,' he says. 'I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?'David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-31126528223272081422009-09-25T06:13:16.248-07:002009-09-25T06:13:16.248-07:00"When the war ended, Weiss's real work be..."When the war ended, Weiss's real work began. The vast death machine Hitler assembled had untold parts and myriad accomplices, and most of them did not simply vanish with Hitler's suicide. The job of identifying and accounting for those with the blood of millions on their hands would be neither quick nor easy. Weiss had a daunting list of thousands of wanted Nazis to find. He remembers one in particular, a man who had not even bothered to move from his pre-war address or take on an assumed name. Weiss had simply looked him up in the Munich phone book and knocked on his door early one morning in 1946.<br /><br />"Why the man had not bothered to conceal his tracks was a puzzle. Perhaps he thought that after all these months no one would come looking for him. Or maybe he believed he could hide beneath his low rank. He was an enlisted man; there were plenty of bigger fish for the Americans to fry. But he had belonged to the SS Death's Head, the notorious battalions tasked with liquidating Europe's Jews, and Weiss, if he could help it, wasn't going to let the even lowliest private from any of those killing squads go free.<br /><br />"'This guy was walking around Munich without a care while most of the people I knew were dead,' he says. 'And at the time we still didn't even comprehend the enormity of what they had done.'<br /><br />"Of all branches of the SS, it was the Death's Head, and specifically its <i>Einsatzgruppen</i> and <i>sonderkomandos</i> units, who ran the death camps and herded entire villages into synagogues to be burned alive. They were the ones who dug the mass burial pits on the outskirts of towns and dumped truckloads of earth on women and children gasping for air. It was the Death's Head that was responsible for devising ever more efficient ways of killing. At Auschwitz, the pinnacle of their industriousness, they 'processed' 60,000 people a day.<br /><br />"The man had been a guard at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. It said so in his military service ID record, which, astonishingly, he was still carrying when Weiss nabbed him, as if these posts were somehow marks of distinction. Nor did he make an effort to deny who he was or where he had worked, once Weiss had him in a concrete cell flanked by two MPs.<br /><br />"'I had interrogated some very bad people,' Weiss recalls, 'but there was something about this guy, an utter lack of remorse. He was oblivious, like he'd done nothing wrong.'"David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-63179809140865427932009-09-25T06:11:03.600-07:002009-09-25T06:11:03.600-07:00"Orders had come from 7th Army head-quarters ..."Orders had come from 7th Army head-quarters for advance elements of the 45th to rush to Dachau, to liberate the camp before a group of highly valued political prisoners held there was moved or killed.... What he remembers most about Dachau, though, was the smell. 'I still have dreams about it,' he says. A revolt had broken out in the camp before the 45th's arrival, and while the SS retained control of parts of the perimeter, the crematoriums had not worked for some days. Bodies just piled up, or lay decomposing between the long rows of low, wooden barracks. Where SS guards still manned the watchtowers, near the main rail embankment, an entire trainload of corpses rotted. 'The SS had prevented anyone from unloading it. The people locked inside the cattle cars slowly suffocated or died of thirst,' Weiss says.<br /><br />"Even though the camp was technically liberated, the prisoners were so weak and skeletal that they perished at a rate of several hundred per day. <b>Some would crawl on their hands and knees to get outside through holes cut in the barbed wire, so that they could die free.</b> Others were 'hell bent' on finding and killing kapos, the club-wielding prisoner turnkeys who, in exchange for extra rations, were as brutal as the SS guards they worked for. 'Mobs would descend on them and rip them limb from limb.'"David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-36454518562438729662009-09-25T06:08:59.565-07:002009-09-25T06:08:59.565-07:00http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072101680_pf.html<br /><br />"The soldier who returned to Nuremberg in 1945 with the 45th division was a different person from the refugee who had left seven years before. He had a new name, for one, borrowed from the back of the jersey of a fleet-footed University of Wisconsin football star; a new family back in Janesville; and a new nationality and mother tongue, which he spoke with a flat Midwestern accent. Nor was he a boy any longer, forced to run away from Nazi bullies. He was a man, part of the most powerful army the world had ever seen, and it was his turn to do the chasing.<br /><br />"Advancing through sniper-filled Nuremberg, Weiss barely recognized the city he grew up in. Its narrow streets were too littered with rubble for U. S. tanks to pass. The block where his parents had lived was a smoldering hulk; his old orphanage stood silent and empty. Virtually everyone he had been close to was dead: the stern but kind-hearted orphanage director, the kids he had bunked with, the friends he had gone to school with. His uncles had shot themselves rather than face deportation to the death camps. And his grandmother, the person he was probably closest to in the whole world, the warm, loving woman he would sneak out of the orphanage to visit, had been sent to the ghetto at Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, and then to Auschwitz in Poland to become one of the 6 million."David K. M. Klaushttp://davidkevin.livejournal.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-62665545512491014052009-09-25T01:33:25.701-07:002009-09-25T01:33:25.701-07:00"As long as we're assigning "shoulds..."As long as we're assigning "shoulds," people with taste should think his movies are slick trash."<br /><br />D., all due respect, you know I love ya -- but you admit the only Tarantino film you've seen is Pulp Fiction. I'm not saying you'd like the others if you'd see them, but I would think that seeing them is a prerequisite for forming an opinion. Inglourious Basterds is actually getting some strong reviews from critics who haven't been particularly enamored of Tarantino in the past, so ya never know.jbryantnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-3406213531605381722009-09-25T00:52:15.535-07:002009-09-25T00:52:15.535-07:00"Alan Coil said...
I can understand why some..."Alan Coil said... <br />I can understand why some women might not like Tarantino movies, but men should think his movies are genius."<br /><br />I should expect such rampant sexism from someone who thinks Tarantino films are "GENIUS!"<br /><br />This particular man will decide for himself what he likes, not simply accept the reactions blanketly assigned to his entire gender by someone with lousy taste in movies.<br /><br />As long as we're assigning "shoulds," people with taste should think his movies are slick trash.D. McEwannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-47988112988288381602009-09-24T23:45:20.354-07:002009-09-24T23:45:20.354-07:00Surely some readers here will enjoy this recent it...Surely some readers here will enjoy this recent item from <i>The Onion</i>: <br /><br />"Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director's Youth"<br /><br />(www.theonion.com/content/news/next_tarantino_movie_an_homage_to)gottacooknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-10177169077588571002009-09-24T22:06:15.724-07:002009-09-24T22:06:15.724-07:00And I'm still not getting this internet thing ...And I'm still not getting this internet thing where it is a requirement that one post a response, or an endless series of responses, telling all the world how much one hates something or how little one cares.Alan Coilhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09049940361953267636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-85235862080171635192009-09-24T22:03:18.233-07:002009-09-24T22:03:18.233-07:00I can understand why some women might not like Tar...I can understand why some women might not like Tarantino movies, but men should think his movies are genius. GENIUS, I tell you. They are exactly what men want most in movies...a lot of blood and violence, and some attractive women.<br /><br />The crowd I hang with, mostly age 30-40, absolutely love Tarantino, as do many other younger people I know.Alan Coilhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09049940361953267636noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-15474567290580428332009-09-24T19:25:41.932-07:002009-09-24T19:25:41.932-07:00I think you could argue that "The Bridge At R...I think you could argue that "The Bridge At Remagen" and "Kelly's Heroes" both had a hipster vibe to them, but that's just my opinion.<br /><br />IB was good, albeit rather talky and a bit too slow. But Christoph Waltz will get a well-deserved Oscar nod, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Brad Pitt get one, too.UncleWaltynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-52476210676552665342009-09-24T18:16:22.651-07:002009-09-24T18:16:22.651-07:00On a semi-related note, towards the very end of WW...On a semi-related note, towards the very end of WWII, the British High Command realized there would be many, MANY Nazi war criminals who, by reason of relatively low rank, etc., would get off unpunished by any war crimes tribunal.<br /><br />The Nazis in question had done particularly awful things (even by Nazi standards, and that's saying something) and teh idea they would get off scot-free deeply rankled certain high-ranking British generals.<br /><br />So, they authorized several groups of SAS personnel to hunt down these Nazis and "take them into His Majesty's permanent custody."<br /><br />While I doubt they scalped anybody, they also didn't seem to be troubled by any discomfort these Nazis underwent. The idea being not only to dispose of these, but to strike terror into their comrades in a way that a mere sniper shot would have never been able to accomplish.Joehttp://blog.vinapedia.netnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-85997378151165845442009-09-24T17:44:09.282-07:002009-09-24T17:44:09.282-07:00Tiffiny Kaye Whitney said:
"He pays a lot of ...Tiffiny Kaye Whitney said:<br />"He pays a lot of homage to Goebbels (sp?) and Liefenstahl."<br /><br />Not to split herrs but I think you mean Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl.<br /><br />RayAlaskaRaynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-4065755892163025532009-09-24T15:44:02.944-07:002009-09-24T15:44:02.944-07:00"jbryant said...
I doubt you'd find many..."jbryant said... <br />I doubt you'd find many concentration camp survivors who think the Nazis just needed some hug therapy."<br /><br />There is a middle ground between "hug therapy" and committing war atrocities, let alone committing them as revenge slapstick comedy. You'll find that middle ground at the Nuremburg trials. Fortunately, the real-life allies were considerably more civilized than Quentin Tarantino (not that it's hard to be more civilized than Tarantino).<br /><br />His films, as a whole, celebrate depravity as a "kick." They are dehumanizing.<br /><br />"Anonymous said... <br />What D. McEwan said."<br /><br />You lived in that building also? It's gone now. It was so severely damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, it had to be demolished. It was gone before PULP FICTION played Cannes.D. McEwannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-72970377522542660792009-09-24T15:39:57.781-07:002009-09-24T15:39:57.781-07:00I forgot to mention my disagreement (unless you we...I forgot to mention my disagreement (unless you were being sarcastic) about Eli Roth. I thought he was TERRIBAL! I cringed every time he opened his mouth. Everyone else was great, though, which made his performance even more noticeable.Tim W.https://www.blogger.com/profile/16860726607106078491noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-67230821248325313282009-09-24T13:39:10.066-07:002009-09-24T13:39:10.066-07:00Christoph Waltz's performance was nothing less...Christoph Waltz's performance was nothing less than brilliant. A shame the rest of the film didn't live up to that. Entertaining as it might have been, I found Tarantino's work -- as always -- overly long, and far too self-congratulatory for my taste.Cathy Fieldinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13938684179454515074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-79498037907837413872009-09-24T13:37:52.115-07:002009-09-24T13:37:52.115-07:00I haven't seen this yet but the Levine seal of...I haven't seen this yet but the Levine seal of approval will certainly speed that up.<br /><br />I was just telling a friend Tarantino should redo the old Trinity movies with Brad Pitt. I am referring to the Terence Hill movies, My Name is Trinity & Trinity is still my name. I think that has huge potential. Maybe James Gandolifini as bambino. <br /><br />Please contact somebody in hollywood and make that happen right away.Michael Tassonenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-16111292118429372622009-09-24T13:36:08.196-07:002009-09-24T13:36:08.196-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Cathy Fieldinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13938684179454515074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-87089067181071517902009-09-24T11:25:26.706-07:002009-09-24T11:25:26.706-07:00Tarantino, not Tarentino.Tarantino, not Tarentino.V. Salthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11009972172814347335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-36050854875344738142009-09-24T10:58:23.207-07:002009-09-24T10:58:23.207-07:00"I would put the first scene in the movie and..."I would put the first scene in the movie and the bar scene up against any other film from the last few years as masterful examples creating drama and ratcheting tension, before delivering the explosive goods."<br /><br /><br />The other films would win because their scenes of tension likely wouldn't have required so much audience indulgence. QT's scene is like a roller coaster that lasts for 35 minutes.<br /><br />MikeAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19336675.post-16686404162447875972009-09-24T10:51:06.169-07:002009-09-24T10:51:06.169-07:00@ Mark
"QT's movies are all so divorced ...@ Mark<br /><br />"QT's movies are all so divorced from reality, it's impossible to take them seriously as drama. "<br /><br />I understand your point about QT's movies not having a footing in reality, but totally disagree that that precludes them from being good drama. I would put the first scene in the movie and the bar scene up against any other film from the last few years as masterful examples creating drama and ratcheting tension, before delivering the explosive goods.Jameshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05449692420450306435noreply@blogger.com