More in ‘Quentin Tarantino’

Your Oscar Cheat Sheet

Here’s what to root for
By Marc Tracy | 3:46 PM Mar 5, 2010

The Oscars air Sunday evening on ABC, hosted by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Below: the five most Jewish movies in contention (in increasing order of Jewy-ness!), and which categories they’re nominated in. Because how else are you going to know when to cheer, and when to Tweet your grievances?
UPDATE: This list should have included ...

Sundown: Foxman Loves ‘Basterds’

Plus Norman Finkelstein, crazy college kids, and more
By Marc Tracy | 5:06 PM Feb 22, 2010

• The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman called for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds to be … honored with an Academy Award. [HuffPo/ADL]
• Norman Finkelstein, the notorious writer (his prime shtick is, he’s the son of survivors who compares Israel to the Nazis), has been trying to secure speaking venues in Germany. [JPost]
• Long Island’s Holocaust Museum ...

‘A Serious Man,’ ‘Basterds,’ and ‘Ajami’ Nominated

Congrats to Tablet contributing editor David Rakoff
By Marc Tracy | 2:00 PM Feb 2, 2010

And the Oscar nominations go to … two very prominently Jewish-themed films, among others. Both Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (about Nazi-killing Jews) and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (which is almost exclusively about Jews, and which is, for my money, the most profoundly Jewish American movie in years) are up for the big award: ...

Ritual & Observance

Slay Ride

A haftorah of monarchy and madness
By Liel Leibovitz | 7:00 AM Jan 1, 2010

The new year is upon us, which means that, once again, ’tis time for resolutions, these delightful little rituals in which we, awash with unfailing optimism and a searing faith in man’s power to overcome the hurdles of heredity and circumstance, solemnly swear to eradicate our flaws and reemerge, come January first, as greatly improved ...

Daybreak: Is an Attack on Iran Inevitable?

Tarantino in Israel, U.N. bias, and more in the news
By Hadara Graubart | 9:02 AM Sep 16, 2009

• The International Institute for Strategic Studies has said that Israel will definitely attack a nuclear-armed Iran. [Times of London]
• In which case, would President Obama be to blame? [WSJ]
• Director Quentin Tarantino, on a visit to Israel, is eager to see how a Jewish audience there will react to Inglourious Basterds. [AP]
• A spokesman ...

Sundown: Blogger Expected More ‘Inglourious’ Kvetching

Praise, slander, and a grand slam decade
By Hadara Graubart | 5:30 PM Aug 28, 2009

• A Beliefnet blogger wonders why he’s “not reading or hearing more from the Jewish community about the inglorious representation” of Jews in Tarantino’s latest film. [Beliefnet]
• The obvious answer: he’s not paying attention. Besides our own takedown, the Los Angeles Times rounds up a plethora of disturbed Jewish reactions to Inglourious Basterds, and Slate’s ...

Nazis Die, Germans Cheer

Teutonic love for Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’
By Marc Tracy | 1:04 PM Aug 24, 2009

We’ve been told that Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which depicts a group of Jewish-Americans sent to kill as many German soldiers as they can, provides the greatest vicarious thrill to contemporary Jewish viewers, who get to watch some of their own tell the Nazis just where they can stick that Holocaust of theirs. But according ...

Real-Life Revenge Fantasy, German Style

‘Baader Meinhof Complex’ shows things still end badly for the Jews
By Allison Hoffman | 10:00 AM Aug 24, 2009

Audiences across the country this weekend were watching Quentin Tarantino’s (nominally) Jewish-American Basterds joyfully hunt for Nazi scalps. But a relative handful of filmgoers in New York opted instead for The Baader Meinhof Complex, in which a group of actual Germans—the violent Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader and the erstwhile journalist Ulrike Meinhof—combat ...

Critics Fascinated, Repulsed, and a Little Bored

By ‘Inglourious Basterds’
By Marissa Brostoff | 1:13 PM Aug 21, 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s version of the World War II epic opened today, and critics seem to find the film more interesting to discuss than to watch. It’s “unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history,” writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times; Manohla Dargis of The New ...

Don’t Forget Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust Movie

It’s so much worse than ‘Basterds’
By Marc Tracy | 12:10 PM Aug 21, 2009

Even if you hold a low opinion of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which opens today—like, say, Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz—you can perhaps take some consolation from the fact that the Holocaust-revenge-fantasy flick is likely not even close to the most vulgar, unseemly movie ever made about the Shoah. That distinction, rather, is said to belong ...