Inglourious Basterds and Fight club can both be considered postmodern film's, as they both incorporate many post modernistic features, for example the heavily distributed intertextual references throughout the film, and the blurring of reality and fiction through various techniques between both media texts.
Inglourious Basterds, a 2009 war film by Quentin Tarantino, was a huge hit at the box office, grossing over $300,000,000 in theatres worldwide, making it Tarantino’s most successful film to date. The film is about a group of Jewish American Assassins, on a mission to kill any Nazi they come across and take no prisoners, with a mission to kill Hitler. The whole fantasy element which is evident from the start of the film as it is introduced ‘Once upon a time…’, and ends in the woods, a very generic setting for fairy tales, the fantasy of killing Hitler is a postmodern feature in its self, as it is trying to rewrite past events, due to the very evident historical truth that Hitler committed suicide, another postmodern element within this context is the fact that Hitler is assassinated by the race of people he is trying to destroy; the Jews.
Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish is another postmodern feature which occurs through many of his films, and is postmodern due to the fact he is putting the personal into the public, and although it is a very strange scene, it somehow fits the film giving a fairytale ‘cinderella’ element to it, also making the audience notice how it isn’t real life and is a fictional film, which is a very postmodern feature.
Within Inglorious Basterds, there are many intertextual references for example, The Battleship Potempkin with the Odessa steps sequence. The ‘film within a film’ Nations pride also has two Battleship Potempkin sequences, with the soldier being shot in the eye and the baby in a pram rolling across the town square. Also, within Inglourious Basterds the British officer makes a reference to the film 'White hell of pitz palu'.
Another postmodern feature of Inglorious Basterds is the over the ‘parodic' acting style, using famous well known actors such as Brad Pitt (Aldo Raine) playing the role of a South American Lieutenant, who is very merciless as he wants 100 Nazi scalps from every member of his assassin group. Mike Myers, who is best known for comedy films takes the part of a British Colonel. The high contrast in the sheer professionalism of a colonel portrayed by a comedian is entirely postmodern because the audiences buy into the idea that he is this serious colonel, rather than the Mike Myers from other well-known films.
The Violence within Inglourious Basterds is so brutal and gory, that it is comical. It adds to the sheer insanity of the fact they are killing humans as if it were a game, and shows the true brutality of these actors through violent acts, for example, when Eli Roth (Sgt. Donny Donowitz) smashes in the head of a German soldier with a baseball bat, commentating as if he were playing for a proper team and had hit a home run.
Fight Club a 1999 film by David Fincher movie which grossed over $100,000,000 worldwide. The film is about an unnamed character played by Ed Norton who is leading a very boring day-to-day life, so boring infact that he attends social meetings for problems he doesn’t even have. He meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap seller who is everything Ed Norton's character is not, he has the looks, the talent and the body Ed Norton’s character aspires to have. Tyler Durden and Ed Norton’s character start a Fight Club for men, to try re-masculinise men within today’s society. As the Fight Clubs grow. they start performing ‘homework assignments’ which are normally criminal or violence, which Tyler Durden had set to give everyone the chance to live their dreams and start afresh on a level playing field. This violent ‘justice’ for example threatening to kill a supermarket owner because he is running a store and not doing what he Tyler scares him into promising he will become what he always wanted to be. In a sense the contrasting element of pain giving pleasure is very postmodern as they are conflicting elements, along with more realistic sound effects which make the viewer question how much we tolerate what could be considered ‘fake’ sounding fights instead of convincing ‘real’ sounding ones.
One major postmodern aspect within Fight Club is the IKEA catalogue scene where everything in Ed Norton’s apartment is shown to be labeled and priced, linking to how the film teaches you that society is now overcome by consumer goods, and Tyler Durden proves that these materialistic things aren’t needed, by blowing up Ed Norton’s apartment to prove his point of "What you own ends up owning you".
