THE TOP TENS: COUSIN, BUSINESS IS A'BOOMIN'

Something You Can't Take Off

Earlier this month, I gained my first paid subscriber¹ - gentleman, scholar, longtime Pixar miracle worker and old friend Chris Burrows. As the founder of the feast, he got to pick a movie from my personal top ten for me to write about.

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Last weekend, I rewatched Babylon², a wildly divisive underperformer, whose faults I will grant down the line, but will still lead the charge for its eventual reappraisal as a deeply flawed neo-classic. Set in Hollywood’s earlyish days, and bumping over the transition from silent to sound (deliberately echoing Boogie Nights’ transition from film to videotape), it’s a messy, bawdy, gross, gorgeous movie that, at heart, adores movies’ incomparable ability to surprise and delight, while also holding firm to the pretension to believe it’s in a class with the masterpieces it mimics and lauds.

That Babylon expresses the purest dose of its cinephilia through the open, expressive face of ever-less-naïf Manny Torres (Diego Calva) keeps it strangely wholesome, even among snowstorms of coke, writhing debauched piles of flesh, and anamorphic waterfalls of piss and shit (human and, on one memorably infamous occasion, elephant).

It’s that sprinkle of open-hearted winsomeness that keeps me coming back for rewatches (alongside Linus Sandgren’s rich cinematography and Justin Hurwitz’s juggernaut score), because truly, nothing can pack surprise and delight like a good movie.

And nothing surprises and delights me like a movie I’ve been wrong about.

Movies can disappoint you - that’s a frequent enough occurrence not to warrant mention - but off the top of my head, there have only been three movies in the past couple of decades that I called so spectacularly wrong, I practically owed the movies an apology.

For instance, I couldn’t imagine what value there was in remaking³ West Side Story⁴; compounding that, Spielberg never shown much alacrity for musicals outside of the opening of Temple of Doom and a few moments in 1941 (hardly the cream of the crop for him), and his work in the 21st Century has been fitfully brilliant, but generally … not.

I can’t tell you how elated I wound up when I ate those words.

About twenty years earlier, a script leaked online for a reportedly embattled comeback production⁵ by a filmmaker who’d been in the weeds for a few years. He was off in Japan shooting God Knows What with a cast of “ok, if you’re sure,” and the script was a whole entire mess - an overwritten KFC Famous Bowl of, what, spaghetti western samurai kung fu exploitation bullshit? And now they’re splitting it into two movies⁶?

Ok, enjoy your hot mess, people, but I’ve got better things to do with my ohhhhhhh shit.

A few years later, that guy’s most recent script hit the Internet about a year before it was supposed to come out, and what the fuck is this? Sure, he won me back with the Kill Bills, and Death Proof was a surprise gem, but buddy, what are you doing? Forget that this thing is rotten with typos - repeated typos, at that, “Shoshanna” has a second “h” in it, for fuck’s sake - but what’s with fetishizing Judaism in one of the most goyische scripts I’ve ever read, and what the hell is with that functional-illiterate-ass title?

The following summer, I ate those words hard.

I’m big enough to admit how wrong I was about all three of these, and I own the shortsighted wrongness of my earlier assessments; they came from ungenerous interpretations of the facts in advance (not to mention an unhealthy dollop of trying to “outgrow” onetime idols as a shortcut to maturity).

Ultimately, I had forgotten two things:

• The reason I admire the people I admire is that they do things I admire, and

• This only applies to Basterds but there is almost nothing as endlessly cinematic and satisfying as watching Nazis get the everloving dogshit kicked out of them.

Basterds is Tarantino at arguably his most have-it-his-way – a spiritual throwback that spreadeagles gritty 60s-70s WWIIsploitation flicks⁷ between QT’s (often self-satisfied⁸) deep bench of 1930s European film culture and 80s-thru-aughts stylistic grab-bag.

Hungry Like the Wolf-coded

But the riskiest needle it threads - and that’s no small amount of needles - is making its most charismatic figure a Nazi. Now, it’s exceedingly important to note that just because SS Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, in a supremely-deserved Oscar turn) is suave, complex and entertaining it should not imply that Tarantino is saying “He is good and cool, actually.” From his first appearance - a deliberately lulling dialogue scene that weaponizes the multilingual conventions of WW2 movies into a chilling, bloody climax - we know Landa’s full, lethal measure. For as often as Tarantino peppers cackling juvenility into his filmography, he clearly knows that depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, and the relentlessness of the sadistic cruelty under Landa’s silver-tongue act is a long prologue to a deeply satisfying comeuppance.

But the road to that satisfaction is paved with Nazi scalps and skulls, at the hands of the titular Basterds, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt)’s all-Jewish platoon – to the movie’s credit, most if not all of the performers playing the squad are Jewish themselves, a surprising rarity in movies about Jews⁹. Acting on Raine’s mandate for each soldier to collect one hunnit Nat-zee scalps, the Basterds spend a fair amount of the movie offscreen - background radiation to the film’s far-flung ensemble - their numbers dwindling without explanation before a final confrontation pits the last four standing against the Reich high command.

Up to this point, we’ve been cozily in the pocket of plausible historical fiction - the events depicted couched in plausibility among the shrapnel of a world at war - but only because Tarantino saves his biggest, most cinematic swing for the movie’s final moments:

The ahistorical but deeply satisfying assassination of Adolf Hitler.

It didn’t take me nearly this far into the movie for me to recant my doomsaying, but this moment did crystallize what I hadn’t taken into account in that early snap judgment: the deeply cinematic satisfaction of watching Nazis get their shit absolutely wrecked.

I don’t know what the first movie to capitalize on this thrill is, though certainly some of the more notable entries in the subgenre are:

• The Dirty Dozen¹⁰’s climactic bunker bombing (to which Basterds owes a great, acknowledged debt)

• Raiders of the Lost Ark¹¹’s airstrip buzzcut / truck bonanza / closing ceremony

• Last Crusade¹²’s 3-for-1 commentary on the Luger’s effectiveness

• This year’s Freaky Tales¹³, which features the denizens of an 80s Oakland punk club protecting their turf from skinheads

• And even more recently, Sinners¹⁴’ cathartic coda (much, much more on that in a subsequent post)

And in each case, it’s an absolute stand-and-cheer banger every time.

Now, before you accuse me of missing the point, Basterds tempers our response by having the fire/silver nitrate/machine gun/dynamite massacre happen at the premiere of just as gleefully ultraviolent a movie, only inverted - Stolz der Nation, the in-universe creation of auteur Joseph Goebbels, an historical retelling of the one-man massacre perpetrated by sharpshooter Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). Stolz draws just as rollicking a response from its audience of the Nazi A-listers as we ourselves are meant to respond with to the slaughter of those same Nazis moments later.

Tarantino’s commentary isn’t subtle, enlarging Truffaut’s axiom about the nonexistence of an anti-war film to crowdpleaser scale.

I’ve been chastised online for “mistaking” the Basterds for heroes - particularly “The Bear Jew” Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), whose Louisville Slugger-wielding entrance has become meme short hand for killin’ nat-zees - and with the exception of Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), who utilizes her inventory of deeply inflammable silver nitrate films to exact revenge for her murdered family, this isn’t necessarily a “heroes” kind of movie.

But when you’ve got two characters in the room - one’s a Geneva Convention nightmare notching crushed skulls in his bat, and the other is a Nazi - I’m gonna side with whichever one’s not a Nazi, and that’s before we get to the fact that unaliving Nazis with extreme prejudice is good, actually.

But in 2009, this was an apolitical movie. If Tarantino made it today, it would still likely be apolitical, because that’s Tarantino’s style. Yes, there are complex themes with real-world applications in his work - Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, and Shoshanna’s story make a neat tetralogy about women’s agency in historically male genres - but even then, his broad, categorical strokes comment on film, not the world surrounding that medium.

However well-researched and handsomely executed, Tarantino’s not talking about the fascism we face in life, he’s talking about the Movie Fascism; he’s not picking off the Hitler who ran amok through Europe and Africa, he’s picking off the Hitler of Downfall’s Bruno Ganz, of The Last Ten Days’ Sir Alec Guinness, of The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission and Last Crusade's Michael Sheard.

But then … a weird thing happened between 2009 and now.

Since cinema’s greatest power - after the power to surprise and delight - is to fire the imagination, Tarantino’s Movie Movie has only grown in stature as a visual, cultural shorthand for the once (and future 🤞🏽) great American pastime:

With each inch that the Overton Window has slid over the past decade, Inglourious Basterds has become, increasingly, a feelgood movie.

1. Also my second, and I’ll get to you ASAP, Jess!!

2. Babylon - W/D: Damien Chazelle; Prod: Olivia Hamilton, Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe; DP: Linus Sandgren; Ed: Tom Cross; Paramount Pictures (2022).

3. West Side Story - Dir/Prod: Steven Spielberg; W: Tony Kushner, based on the play by Arthur Laurents; Prod: Kristie Macosko Krieger, Kevin McCollu, Carla Raij; DP: Janusz Kaminski; Ed: Sarah Broshar, Michael Kahn; 20th Century Studios (2021).

4. The 1961 original is an unimpeachable classic to me, at least until I stop and think about it for a minute and realize that’s not exactly the case.

5. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 -W/D: Quentin Tarantino; Prod. Lawrence Bender; DP: Robert Richardson; Ed. Sally Menke; The Weinstein Company (2003).

6. Kill Bill, Vol. 2 - W/D: Quentin Tarantino; Prod. Lawrence Bender; DP: Robert Richardson; Ed. Sally Menke; The Weinstein Company (2004).

7. The Dirty Dozen, the original Inglorious Bastards, the fictitious 14 Fists of McCluskey

8. Tarantino? Self-satisfied? Could you imagine.

9. Looking at you, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Munich, and The Fabulous Mrs. Maisel …

10. The Dirty Dozen - Dir: Robert Aldrich, W: Nunnally Johnson & Lukas Heller, based the novel by E.M. Nathanson; Prod: Kenneth Hyman; DP: Edward Scaife; Ed: Michael Luciano; MGM/Seven Arts (1967)

11. Raiders of the Lost Ark - Dir: Steven Spielberg; W: Lawrence Kasdan, from a story by Philip Kaufman & George Lucas; Prod: Frank Marshall; DP: Douglas Slocombe; Ed: Michael Kahn, George Lucas (uncredited); Paramount Pictures (1981).

12. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - Dir: Steven Spielberg; W: Jeffrey Boam, from a story by George Lucas & Menno Meyjes; Prod: Robert Watts; DP: Douglas Slocombe; Ed: Michael Kahn; Paramount Pictures (1989).

13. Freaky Tales - W/D/P: Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck; Prod: Poppy Hanks, Jelani Johnson; DP: Jac Fitzgerald; Ed: Robert Komatsu; eOne (2025).

14. Sinners - W/D/P: Ryan Coogler; Prod: Zinzi Coogler, Zev Ohanian; DP: Autumn Durald Arkapaw; Ed: Michael P. Shawver; WB / Proximity (2025).