1. Inglourious Basterds

One distinguishing characteristic of postmodernism is its willingness to accept low culture. For postmodernists, the lines separating high art and low art are not only removed so the contiguous arts can sit nicely by each other, but they collide, liked two fused atoms, creating an amorphous blob of concentrated culture.

Director Quentin Tarantino's career has demonstrated his ability in fulfilling this postmodern aspiration. Scouring through classic Hollywood and European cinema, Tarantino has a knack for deconstructing these films' styles and themes and then filtering them into contemporary American cinema, all the while subverting genre expectations.

Inglourious Basterds is his latest and most successful attempt at merging the concepts of high and low art into one package. The film open in the French countryside at the home of diary farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet). As LaPadite chops wood, in the distance some vehicles make their way down his long driveway. When LaPadite's daughter notices the German motorcade, Beethoven's ominous "Fur Eelise" starts but then quickly dissolves into a theme straight out of a Sergio Leone Spaghetti western. In fact, a duel is about to take place.

The man coming to meet LaPadite is Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) of the German S.S. He has been charged with rounding up the remaining Jews in occupied France, a job he relishes--he views himself as a detective. Wonderfully executed by Waltz, Landa is both menacing and yet compelling. As the two men enter the farmhouse, LaPadite is able to hold his own in this verbose duel with the loquacious Landa. But LaPadite cannot hold firm, and with one slow turn of the camera, reminiscent of Hitchcock's 360 degree shot in Notorious (another movie about Nazis) Landa usurps the conversation, and the film for that matter.

Landa eventually finds the hiding Jews, except for Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), who manages to escape to plot her revenge. The film's second storyline features Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his basterds (sic). the men have slowly worked their way across France, killing, scalping, and attempting to instill the fear of God in the German army. They too, in their own less personal way, are seeking revenge, and the two stories ultimately collide with similar results as I mentioned earlier.

The entire fil is filled with moments of such collisions, but the ultimate affect of the film is broader. Tarantino has always been able to merge the sensibilities of independent and foreign film with the necessary action that Hollywood and the American public demands. Who could imagine two lengthy scenes of dialogue working in the hands of any other Hollywood director today? But Tarantino, unlike other directors, has been able to achieve the postmodern ideal: high art affects low art and low art affects high art. In Tarantino's mind, the two concepts have become entangled and certainly express similar traits to what Einstein called "quantum weirdness." Here, the weirdness is definitely weird, but oh so good.