If This Is Food for Thought, We'd Better Chew

I watched Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" this weekend and I enjoyed it, but I didn't find it to be as cool as most critics think it is. Well, so be it. So the subtitles were hard to read and were important so that was inconvenient, the pacing wasn't as good as I expect from Tarantino, and if you are getting sick of Tarantino's signature film elements you were rolling your eyes quickly.

Frankly, I am not sick of the director's signature moments. From Samuel Jackson's cameo as The Narrator, the uber violence, flashback moments, and even the director's own cameo, I love that stuff. It makes the film an event for folks who know what to look for with out distracting the QT first timer.

And Christoph Waltz was fabulous. Sure, other characters were great fun, but Waltz as Hans Landa, the brutally effective Sicherheitsdienst officer, was dead solid perfect. He has all ready won several awards for this performance and should win many more.

It is Hans Landa who gives us the food for thought. In one of the climactic scenes, Landa has captured two of the Basterds, 1st Lieutenant Aldo Raine and PFC Smithson Utivich. (Raine is played by Brad Pitt in a truly odd and wonderfully off center performance.)

Landa describes two possible outcomes for the evening. The Basterds are trying to blow up a movie theater and everyone in it. When talking about their plan, a plan to kill 350 people including the entire German High Command along with some civilians and doing extensive property damage, Landa describes the plan saying, "some would say this act of terror."

This act of terror.

Here is what we need to chew upon. What constitutes an act of terror? Is it the person who does it? Is a turban or Yemeni passport required to commit an act of terror? Are we as Americans incapable of committing acts of terror against others? (Tim McVey proved we can commit terror against ourselves, such is the horror of terror.) Or is it an act itself which defines terror?

Tarantino is making the case that it is the act, not the actor, where the qualification for terror lies.

Let me just say that when I heard Landa say this, I knew it was going to make me think. What do you say--Can we give Christoph Waltz the Academy Award now?