A quite revealing exchange has broken out between the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan and Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Goldstein about the merits, or lack of same, of Quentin Tarantino’s award-winning and popular film Inglourious Basterds. Klavan, a conservative whose fiction writings are quite admirable, started it with an item called “Inglorious Malarky,” which conveyed the following opinion and argument: I found it an appalling movie—really; appalling. t exhibits an understanding of human suffering so shallow it falls outside the bounds of civil discussion. . . . or Tarantino, no matter how talented, to address the issues inherent in the event as pure fodder for storytelling, to think his squirrelly man-on-man torture fantasies or his video geek understanding of life provide an adequate moral response to that level of history—I don’t know, man—it just felt to me like he was molding toy soldiers out of the ashes of the dead. . . . When you ask yourself how our creative class could have responded so shabbily to 9/11; when you wonder how they could’ve made movies that gave aid and comfort to our enemies while our soldiers were in the field; when you wonder why so few of
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