Worth The Money (Just Like Life - Mine Anyway)

"The world is divided into good guys (never mind that some of them are borderline psychopaths) and bad guys. Give or take a few plot twists along the way, the good guys get to kill the bad guys, there’s a decent amount of action and we all get a sense of justice being done."

-- Rob Lyons, reviewing the pretty good Quenton Tarantino movie I saw this weekend, "Inglourious Basterds" (it ain't no "Reservoir Dogs" or "Pulp Fiction", but it's good) and - if you ask me - also summing up how the world works, eventually, in Spiked!

Yea - just as I'm all for waterboarding homeopaths - it's pretty satisfying to see Nazis being scalped or having swastikas carved into their heads. Another thought I had watching this is how drab and lifeless Europe looks, generally, as in the bar scene, above, with it's dank, dark wood interior. I've spent waaay too many evenings in such places, wondering how the villagers stopped from killing themselves.

This film also shows the obvious differences between the Americans, the french, the Germans and the English. We Americans - Real Americans anyway, not this NewAge yuppie thing that's emerged - are uncouth and good, not prone to dilly-dallying around, filled with slang and home-spun aphorisms, and pretty special for all that. We see a french guy pretty-much give up in the movie's first scene, allowing the Jews to be killed, just to save his own skin. ('Nuff said.) The Germans (represented here by Nazis: sorry) are the usual cultivated evil socialites - classic NewAgers - as ruthless as they are wrong. Like I said, it's a pleasure to watch them die. And the English are funny, weak-chinned killing machines. It's quite satisfying to know we're worthy of being on the same side as such men.

I also like the re-emergence of the wartime mentality in this movie: no one thinks about what they're doing - the other side has to die - simple as that. The only question is, how to go about it? Right is right and wrong is wrong, and there's no irony, or post-modernism, that can crash the party. Either you're with it or you die - and you'll probably die anyway so,...hey, get with it.

It's, not surprisingly, how I saw the world before I entered the theatre.