Seattle Movie Geeks Tackle INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

By Norm Schrager at August 30, 2009 | 10:33 pm | Print

Depending on your film knowledge, movie memory and all-around cinematic obsession, you can have some fun catching the many references in any Quentin Tarantino film. Now if you want to ingest all the homages in Inglourious Basterds, you’ll need to create a pretty massive checklist. So that’s exactly what the movie nuts at Seattle’s Scarecrow Video did.

Here’s Scarecrow Video’s alphabetical list of the films to which Tarantino tips his enormous cap in Basterds.

Now, it’s no surprise that a Tarantino film with movies at its core would need more footnotes than a David Foster Wallace novel. But I have to question the enormous scope of Scarecrow’s list. Yes, it is amazingly thorough, and displays a painfully scary level of movie knowledge, but I think it might be too much.

In my mind, there’s a difference between a reference a filmmaker intends to make, and the type of general similarities that multiple movies might share.

For instance, the Scarecrow geeks list the brutal 1940 German film The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude) as a Basterds reference because it was a “hateful yet influential Nazi propaganda addressing ‘the Jewish problem.’” Yes, Goebbels was behind the film (as he is in Basterds), but that can be seen a loose connection rather than a “reference.”

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine anyone doing this better — or being dorkier and more impressive, all at the same time.

(Thanks Cinematical)

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