For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

18. Inglourious Basterds (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Sometimes you see a movie and you feel like it was made just for you. I have been a huge fan of World War II movies since I was a kid, and seeing Quentin Tarantino’s spin on the genre on the big screen in the summer of 2009 was one of the most euphoric movie going experiences I can remember. I have dozens of Blu-Rays in my personal collection, but the only one I really watch is Inglorious Basterds. Once a year or so I’ll get the itch and throw it on before bed. “I’ll only watch up until the Bear Jew clobbers the Nazi’s head with a baseball bat,” I lie to myself, and at 2 AM I’m watching Shoshanna’s ghostly face laughing in the smoke of the burning theater as the Basterds machine gun Hitler’s face into ground beef and that theater explodes in a burst of Nazi-annihilating glory. 

Quentin Tarantino can be divisive among film lovers. I remember I almost turned away from him in film school when every backwards-hat sporting film major bro’s top 3 favorite movies were 1.) Fight Club 2.) Donnie Darko 3.) Pulp Fiction. “These Philistines have never even seen Godard or Kurosawa,” I muttered to myself in my pretentious erudite teenaged brain. But I was kidding myself if I ever thought I would forsake Tarantino. His movies bring me too much joy to ever do that. His films are what happens when you give the ultimate ravenous film nerd a movie camera. 

Throw 100 WWII movies into the blender that is Tarantino’s brain and you get Inglorious Basterds, and yet the film is so much more than the sum of its influences. I can still feel the tension of that opening scene where Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa is interrogating Denis Menochet’s French dairy farmer about the Jewish family they both know are hidden beneath his floorboards. The scene starts like a poker game where you are wondering who is going to out bluff who, but by the end of the sequence you realize it was never a poker game at all and always a foregone conclusion that ends with that bone chilling “Au revoir, Shoshanna!” 

It’s hard to fathom a more perfect villain than a Nazi. You can kill a million of them and it still wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the bloodlust any reasonable person feels about the Third Reich. Where history is full of grey areas, there is nothing complicated about a Nazi. They’re pure evil and you can melt their faces, force them to chow down on diamonds, or bash one’s head in with a baseball bat with impunity. As fascism becomes in vogue again in America and around the world, Inglorious Basterds feels more relevant than ever. Beneath its pulpy WWII grindhouse aesthetic is a reminder that the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi, or at the very least one with a big swastika carved into his forehead.

The way Tarantino initially portrays Daniel Bruhl’s Frederick Zoller as a humble soldier doing his job and a “Good Nazi” only to reveal him as a sociopath just like the rest of them is a twist that serves to reinforce the idea that fascism is fascism no matter how you dress it up. It’s why people love that video of well-dressed and eloquent neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. If I’m having a bad day, I queue up that video and its countless remixes until I feel better. 

I don’t know why I’m always surprised that Tarantino’s movies are essentially blockbusters. They just feel so niche and full of so many hyper-specific references that only the nerdiest of film nerds will pick up on. And yet I can very clearly remember my incredibly normal parents coming home from seeing Pulp Fiction in the theater and having their minds blown. I think that happened to a lot of people in the mid-90s, and thus Tarantino earned a sort of brand recognition. Despite having made it as one of Hollywood’s most profitable auteurs, Tarantino always does whatever the hell he wants. Inglorious Basterds is a war movie lover’s fever dream that performs the alchemy of both ripping off classics like The Dirty Dozen, The Big Red One, and Kelly’s Heroes and yet sits alongside them as paragons of the genre.