I've just returned from watching the newly released movie,
Inglourious Basterds, with a friend. I don't know what bothered me more the huge amount of gratuitous violence or the audience's reaction to it. When German soldiers were being brutally clubbed to death, movie-goers laughed - not the kind of embarrassed laugh but the "Yeah, go get 'em, tiger" laugh. Juxtaposed to that was the cinema within the movie that had the mainly Nazi audience laughing while over 200 American soldiers were being picked off by a German sniper. It was hard to gauge the reaction of those around me to that scene. I wonder if those who laughed earlier saw the similarity. The total lack of humanity in this movie - not to mention the total lack of historic fact - is appalling and the audience's applause at the end is frightening. How many of these movie goers will be sitting in church tomorrow?
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