Movies: His son killed Hitler.

I knew the murder of Adolf Hitler as a fact.

Sheldon Roth is the father of director and actor Eli Roth. Over at Patheos, an online religious journal, Roth has an interesting post about what it felt like to see his son assassinate Adolf Hitler in the spelling-challenged film Inglourious Basterds.

From the post:

What I scarcely expected were the overwhelming feelings that flooded me as I witnessed the scene in the film, Inglourious Basterds. I watched my son, in his character of "The Bear Jew," machine-gun the Fuhrer's face to a bloody pulp. In that moment, I felt that my beloved boychik was carrying out wishes of mine from my Brownsville, Brooklyn childhood, wild longings from a lifetime of agonizing over the Holocaust. I felt a powerful mixture of rescue, revenge, redemption, relief, and a strange grief. My son was sacrificing himself for all of us. He was doing what I could not. And I cried.

And later:

It strikes me that what these questions fail to take into account is that there are two kinds of facts: historical facts and emotional ones. Emotional facts, or feelings, are a condensed, animal form of personal history; expanding them tells the story of one's life. Feelings are just as much reality as facts. Art, similarly, functions as a condensed statement about life. When art resonates with an audience, those emotions are real -- they cannot be dismissed because the story is "historically inaccurate."

Quentin Tarantino understood that it was more important to be emotionally accurate than to follow a story previously written by history. Art must resonate with a truthful emotion inside the viewer in order for it to survive, and, if not, it falls by the wayside, disregarded, and dies a forgotten work. So, where do Inglourious Basterds and my reactions fit into this picture?

At Passover we read of the sages who urge us to tell the tale of the Exodus tirelessly -- one cannot say enough to describe that devastation in the lives of the Hebrews. However, time has laid dust on the tongue's capacity to be fluent in those events. How historically accurate is the story most Jews repeat not once, but twice a year, for some of us even four times, every year of our lives? Reciting the plagues of Egypt is quaintly interesting, but watching Eli turn his armed fury on Hitler in a cinematic oven of burning Nazis is awesome and much closer to my own history.

The Holocaust provides anew an endless capacity to relate Jewish history. I am in my 70s, and all my life I have studied the Holocaust. But I am still startled by the unthought-of newness of stories. I cannot hear enough; it never ends. Inglourious Basterds partakes of the Passover injunction to tell our story. The feelings evoked while watching this film contain our history -- personal and group. The film, though not "factual," represents a psychological reality. This psychological reality is a fact, not empty fantasy. Uncannily, unbidden, a gift-giver, Eli was acting out my dreams, dreams based on my life -- through a film.

Movies: Oh, you meant the other Tarantino.

Just like his more famous namesake, the Tarantino behind the 2005 haunted office spook-flick Headhunter is a writer and director. But unlike Quentin, Paul Tarantino's films – including a second 2005 project called I Shot Myself (presumably not autobiographical in nature, but that might be justified) – have not become the toast of Cannes, have never been considered milestones of contemporary cinema, and are not likely to spur intense devotion and cult status on the auteur.

Headhunter is low-budget horror fare that gets off to a rocky start, takes a promising turn, and then collapses so thoroughly that, by the end of it, even the cast and crew seem to have lost any sense that it should be horrific, settling instead for sub-Zucker grade silly.

The plot involves an insurance salesman who, after taking a tip from a wealthy client, ends up seeking the assistance of a corporate headhunter. Luckily, this headhunter – a hottie-boombalottie blonde with a bit of a temper – keeps odd office hours and is available to see our hero in the middle of the night. I should point out that our hero does not find the headhunter's creepy, nocturnal manner – or the homeless dude that hangs outside of her office warning people not to enter her lair – sufficiently off-putting to cause him to seek a headhunter who, say, has lights installed in their office.

The headhunter hooks him up with a new gig that involves him working the night shift, reviewing actuary charts or some such thing.

It is during this bit, when our hapless insurer starts his new gig, that the movie is at its best. The contemporary office is a criminally underused setting for modern horror. Temporary and deliberately soulless, most offices have all the charm and warmth of Eastern German secret police interrogation centers. There is something genuinely monstrous in there cookie-cutter monotony – as if the spaces were intentionally designed to crush the humanity out the workers who toil away there. Dim the lights of your everyday white collar cube farm and you've got yourself a primo little setting for your horror flick.

As an aside, the wonderful Kings of Infinite Space - a gem of a novel by James Hynes – think Office Space meets The Island of Doctor Moreau, published the same year Headhunter was released – uses the creepy emptiness of office spaces to great effect. This is your bit of added value – instead of watching this flick, do yourself the favor and go read Kings of Infinite Space.

Where were we? Oh, yes. So, when Mr. Indemnity starts his new job, we get a genuinely creep set of scenes that really use the dim, emotionally deadening office set to perfect effect. It is truly creepy.

Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there. The scares fail to scare, the one sex scene fails to titillate, and the spooky tone developed so wonderfully evaporates as we stumble our way through an increasingly goofy plot.

Headhunter falls in that unforgiving ground between slight entertainment and so-bad-it's-good. After some promise, it fails to keep one involved and never gets so silly or outrageous that it enters into the realm of transcendent badness. It is, sadly, bad in a purely uninterestingly bad way. Dusting of the old Purported Diet of David Bowie in His Thin White Duke Phase Film Rating System, I'm giving this flick a rating of "milk." It is a disaster or some crime against humanity – in fact, it would be worth more consideration if it were.