Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care "plan."

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It's already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It's already made its compromises with reality. It's already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It's one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It's another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren't even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn't perfect, but in comparison, it's looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I'm pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn't be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Quentin Tarantino is talking again about Kill Bill 3.

Thursday morning.

* Tarantino on Tarantino on Charlie Rose. It gets better once Tarantino gets going on IB-related subjects like Goebbels's theory of film or the origins of Col. Hans Landa and the Bride. Watch out for spoilers.

* 61 literary euphemisms for masturbation.

* More Snow Leopard reviews.

* Reading Rainbow to end its 26-year run. You don't have to take my word for it.

The film is run through with the sense that only an American film can do this, can master narrative causality by becoming the first among its slaves: though no onscreen American character really drives the action in any significant sense until the very end, no event in IB is allowed to pass that isn’t authorized by the U.S.A. Therefore only America, as the sovereign of cinema’s narrative logic, can exceed it, and deliver the audience its greatest possible pleasures. Cinematic pleasure is defined as American. Again, not because America is good, but because good is American. When other countries make a ‘fun’ or ‘pleasing’ film they can only do so within conditions determined by us. With IB, the ‘meaning’ of the Tarantinoverse is finally clear: the U.S. rules cinema, and the U.S. cannot die until cinema dies a second death.

Traxus has now put up his own review of Inglourious Basterds.

Traxus considers survival horror:

There are ‘left’ and ‘right’ versions of the zombie myth, but the message is always the same: the horrors wrought by humanity in extremis are always worse than the zombies.The absolute manichean split between human and zombie is insisted on only to be ’shockingly’ deconstructed, with all other differences either elided or made to look ridiculous by comparison. Like them, we must kill to live, even if there is no reason to go on (civilization is destroyed, etc.). We are them, they are us.

while Alex Greenberg considers Tarantino:

Tarantino does not critique violence. He loves it. The parodies of violence in Kill Bill are not criticisms aimed at violence but criticisms aimed at film. He wants filmmakers to understand that they can make violence fun and to revel in this fact. Of course, for him, film is film and real life is real life, and I agree that one cannot draw a connection between violent acts in film and violent acts in "the real world." But I would add that the relationship between ideology and action is always an ideological one: it shapes opinions and attitudes, forming how people look at the world, in this case, one starkly divided between good and evil, as Eli Roth said in an interview with The Onion AV Club: "[My character is] not taking pleasure in killing. He’s fighting evil on behalf of those who can’t fight. He knows he’s the biggest and strongest one in the bunch, and he wants to terrorize them. But he’s doing it to stop evil." This would sit very well with my "Bible and the Holocaust" professor, who viewed human history as a gigantic contest between David and Hitler. But for those of us who are stuck in the realm of the human, this film adds nothing to the conversation.

It's a bit hard for me to understand the person who has heard of both Quentin Tarantino and the Holocaust, who then willingly goes to see a Quentin Tarantino movie about the Holocaust, and yet leaves the theater afterwards claiming to feel "offended." Putting aside the highly fraught question of what exactly it is we mean when we say we are "offended," do you really expect us to believe you didn't know in advance what you were walking into? (See TNR for an example of this sort of strange reaction. Writing as if his meaning were clear beyond all possible clarification, Isaac Chotiner proclaims: "[T]he film is one of the most morally repulsive movies of the past decade." In what respect, Charlie?)

Traxus and I spent some time after the film trying to puzzle all this out, but our discussion bounced around the question of whether Inglourious Basterds was completely without moral content (my initial inclination) or else the morally weightiest of Tarantino's films (Traxus's take and the one I eventually came around to, though it's not exactly incompatible with the first).

Spoilers about the end of the film follow.

What we were specifically trying to work out was the way the film-within-a-film works as an (obvious) metacommentary on the whole, with a shot-reverse-shot logic that repeats itself almost exactly inside and outside Nation's Pride. This, Traxus was arguing, suggests a kind of formal moral equivalence between the Nazi enjoyment of their propaganda film and our enjoyment of ours, on at least two levels. First there is the level of content, which we both agree is the weaker of the two. (Nazis constitute a threat that is now so vanquished as to seem completely impossible and even cartoonish, and the impossibly excessive fantasy of a alternate history in which Hitler is machine-gunned to death by Jewish-American GIs breaks whatever remaining hold the catharsis of the moment might have held on us.) But on the level of subject position Traxus has, I think, a much better point—the can't-miss-it repetition of shot-reverse-shot, over and over, really does suggest the audience's willing construction of this violence in a way that approaches actual moral weight.

But for my money it's the scene that follows the cinema massacre that finally implicates the audience in this fantasy of brutal violence. Faced with the unhappy choice between letting Nazi Hans Landa walk away from the war a false hero or else executing him against orders, Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine squares the circle by carving a swastika into Landa's head (but otherwise letting him live). It's an act he's done earlier in the movie, but the callback is (first) a moment of genuinely pleasurable narrative cleverness that (second) turns rapidly disturbing as the actual scarring is performed on-screen. Several bloody shot-reverse-shots later, Aldo says something like "I think this is my masterpiece" directly into the camera, followed by an immediate cut to the credits: WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY QUENTIN TARANTINO, with Tarantino thereby claiming his guilt/authorship over all these events and, by implication, once again accusing us of our participation in them.

Only here do I feel as though Tarantino has drawn out my dark side. Everywhere else, the violence in Inglourious Basterds is not pleasurable, at least not for me. (There's also not all that much of it, hyperbolic reviews aside; most of the film is calm dialogue.) I don't revel in violence, even against Nazis, and I'm no more glad to see an actor playing Hitler pretend to be shot than I would be to see him pretend to get away. The cinema fantasy scene and the film's other violent set pieces have, I think, no real vibrancy to them; it's only Hans Landa who gets under my skin and exposes my inner possibilities of hate to light. (And I don't think it's exactly fair to blame Tarantino for something that was inside me all along.)

While not exactly parodic, the rest of the violence does take on (for me) a cover-charge quality, a price that must be exacted to get to the good stuff. And there's quite a bit of good stuff here; this is a great and enjoyable film, with good acting, typically skilled directing, and a better-than-expected script. If it's not exactly a perfect film, it may well be a perfect Tarantino film. And I would humbly suggest that anyone who likes Tarantino's other films, but hates this one, isn't evaluating this one on the merits but is instead letting the fear of irreverence towards the Holocaust cloud their aesthetic judgment. It is, to butcher Adorno, still possible to make an exploitation flick after Auschwitz.

The standard defense of Quentin Tarantino’s films is to wearily dismiss the standard criticisms—i.e., they’re movies about movies; the violence is hyped up and out of context; the atmosphere is juvenile—as if they were outdated and banal. But don’t fall for it.

Because such a tactic is like a lawyer defending his client by wearily deriding a “guilty” verdict as uncool: “I know what you’re going to say, members of the jury, that killing a candy-store owner is wrong, heinous, morally repugnant, blah blah blah. Could we just get over it and talk about the defendant’s technically impressive approach to crime, and about his phenomenal knowledge of the history of murder?”

Lee Siegel pans Inglourious Basterds (and Tarantino in general) at the Daily Beast.

As you can see it's a little bit hectic this week. A few links:

* I've got another review in the Indy this week, this one about an upcoming fiction anthology on bad breakups.

* Five things you didn't know about District 9.

The District 9 alien homes were actually shot in a recently evacuated area of impoverished housing. The homes you see the aliens getting evicted from were homes that humans had recently been kicked out of, for real.

* The latest hints from the White House suggest that they have finally realized that Republicans are not negotiating in good faith and that Democrats will have to go it alone. This, combined with the fervor over the no-public-option trial balloon and the subsequent back-peddling, are good reason for optimism. Here's one way it might happen.

* 'Whole Foods under financial pressure.'

* Quentin Tarantino, Socrates in a dive bar.

Midday Monday. Another apology for so many linkdumps is in order, but I'm afraid I don't have time to write it at the moment.

* What does it take to really disappear? Wired investigates faking your own death.

* Tarantino's top-twenty films since he started directing.

* Criterion Collection top-tens from Jonathan Lethem, Steve Buscemi, Robin Wood, and Richard Linklater.

* Usian Bolt sets a new 100m world record. Via MeFi, which immediately accused him of juicing.

* The House Next Door's review of District 9—which incidentally comes to many of the same conclusions as mine—includes a neat look at the six-minute short from Neill Blomkamp that preceded it, Alive in Joburg.

* More bad press for New Jersey's Chris Christie originating from his time on the Morris County Board. Discussion at TPM and MyDD.

* And Steve Benen bemoans 44 years of human slavery under Medicare.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg profiles Quentin Tarantino and his latest film, Inglourious Basterds.

Sunday!

* Great Archie comics experiments of 1989-1990.

* This ruling of Sotomayor's, it must be said, was a little douchebaggy.

* "You almost get the sense guys like Thiessen are hoping for an attack so that they can blame Obama when it happens." Almost?

* Republicans who happily sat through three-and-a-half years of Bush vacations are outraged! that Obama took a night off.

* Tough times at Harvard U.

* Non-Whedon directors for the Buffy reboot. Wes Anderson snubbed again, though I bet Tarantino could do a good job with it.

The House Next Door and Moving Image are running a five-part series on Wes Anderson, "the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation." (Tarantino who?) Here's Part 1.

When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl. Anderson and Wilson even made Max a working-class barber’s son, just like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, and gave Seymour Cassel, the actor playing Bert Fischer, glasses similar to Schulz’s.

But Schulz’s impact manifests itself in deeper, more persistent ways—particularly in Anderson’s characters who, regardless of age, seem, like Schulz’s preternaturally eloquent kids, to be frozen in a dream space between childhood and maturity. Think of how Rushmore’s Blume pauses during a phone conversation to run across a basketball court and slap down a student’s would-be layup; the now-adult children in The Royal Tenenbaums navigating adult emotional minefields within the confines of a childhood home crammed with toys, grade-school art, and nostalgic knickknacks; Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic transforming a submarine into a gigantic clubhouse and rec center; and the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited turning a supposed spiritual voyage through India into a more affluent, adult cousin of a summer camp stint.

The arrested adolescence thing is right on the money—we've talked about this before—but the Peanuts thing is strange. What a weirdly intriguing misreading of one's own film...

Kill Bill in one minute and one take. YouTube, is there no end to your treasures?

I had a nasty case of food poisoning or something last night—fever, chills, the whole bit. But now I'm back and quite literally better than ever. A few links to celebrate my recovery:

* Early reviews of Dollhouse remain mixed. We'll know tomorrow....

* This YouTube clip (via MeFi) captures just the barest sliver of the greatness of the Conan DVD commentary. It is our civilization's highest cultural achievement.

* The trailer for the new Tarantino is out.

* How to teach non-canonical material responsibly in a composition class: lesson plans from Scott Eric Kaufman on Dark Knight and Watchmen.

* Two satellites have collided in orbit. Apparently that's never happened before. More from MeFi.

* Happy birthday, Charles Darwin. More from Satisfactory Comics.

Kottke links to Ben Tesch's film personality test.

1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc

I would also personally throw in:

6. Stanley Kubrick: 2001, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, etc.
7. P.T. Anderson: Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia.
8. Errol Morris: The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven, etc.

I play this game all the time, but never in such an academically rigorous environment. On this scale I'm a Lebowskite with strong Hudsucker tendencies, Rushmore-loving pan-Andersonist with slightly fond memories of the one time I saw Chasing Amy, a Pulp Fictionist with Kill Bill sympathies (or maybe the other way around) Strangelovian TWBBloody FCaOoCer.

A fun Brazilian film at hungryman.tv has your grand unified theory of Tarantino. Via MeFi.

It's a slow blogging day, so here's some robots acting out Pulp Fiction.

Could it just be that Tarantino and Godard are essentially the same filmmaker, except part of different time periods and totally different societies? That's the question Kenji Fujishima asks today at the House Next Door.

* The latest culturemonkey post is all about monkeys. More culturemonkey coming over the next few days. (See, we didn't forget about it.)

* The Rake does what the Rake does best, tearing Nick Hornby a new one over his failure to read.

* The Village Voice talks Diary of the Dead.

* Projection Booth reviews the full cut of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

* Paul Krugman is blogging. The free world rejoices. Thesis from the inaugural post:

For now, though, the important thing is to realize that the story of modern America is, in large part, the story of the fall and rise of inequality.

Quentin Tarantino's camero in The Muppet Wizard of Oz is not quite as awesome as Pulp Muppets, but nonetheless it is still moderately awesome. I know I've linked to Pulp Muppets before, but here it is again: