POP CULTURE QUERY:

I've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie --
is INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS worth a look?

Frederic Raphael at Commentary has a review. I read the first couple of paragraphs and was unsure where he was going with it -- there were indications that he has seen Taratino's other films, as well as various compliments to the artistry. Then, fearing that there might be spoilers in the review, I scrolled to the bottom line to see if he recommended it:

As Harvey Weinstein would surely say, when a job is also a hit, what can possibly be wrong with it, unless you’re some kind of a pussyfooting elitist loser? Inglourious Basterds has to be great because, if the boffo box-office figures are true, people love it. It’s therefore undemocratic to go calling it the antihuman dirty dream of a pretentious, vacuous clown primed with Hollywood gelt to do the Jews a favor by showing that they too, given the chance, coulda/woulda behaved like mindless monsters. What does it matter, after all this time, if the world gets sold the idea that what Shoshanna and the Basterds did to the Nazis was exactly what the Jews would have done to the Germans if Harvey had been around to greenlight the project?

Going to Inglourious Basterds reminded me of Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties, in which a concentration-camp inmate commits liberating suicide by leaping into a lake of sewage. Tarantino makes an even bigger splash by getting us all to pay to jump into an ocean of his own effluent from which he and Harv alone emerge, with $$ carved in their foreheads.

I'm guessing.....not?

Why am I not surprised? I've always had this sense that Tarantino, kind of like Cronenberg, is a man with many innate talents who has volunteered them to be enslaved to a set of truly base appetites. Won't be rushing out to Blockbuster for his oeuvre any time soon.

THE WIDER WORLD

I've been ducking any survey of the News o' the World in recent days, since it's all so very chilling, and the Reader of the Free World so increasingly, ludicrously incompetent at coping with it.

For a dose of major league reality, Michael Yon contributes to the Washington Times this morning. Return in kind by contributing to him, and he'll keep on delivering the straight story, from deep within the belly of the major beasts.

And then there's the hub of representative democracy, where the Democrat[ic?] Party is fixing to use legislative sleight-of-hand to ram through a massive health care bill as an amendment to an unrelated codicil to their earlier economic disastrathon. It's not that difficult to understand, but the Heritage Foundation does a good job of breaking it down. America, get ready to kiss your ass [your liberty, your economic security, your children's future] G'BYE!