by Ryan Stewart
“Donny doesnt give a fuck.”
-Eli Roth
Donny doesnt give a fuck, is how Eli Roth sums up the bloody-minded motivations of his character in Quentin Tarantinos delirious new WWII film, Inglourious Basterds. A Boston-bred Jewish kid turned soldier who is fully aware of the existence and breadth of the Holocaust as its occurring, and is motivated by inconsolable rage towards Nazis as a result, Donny is one of many carefully-sculpted, subtly modernized characters in a film that is itself a counterfactual kaleidoscope, cut loose from the moorings of history and propelled solely by the emotional impulses of its makers. Donny’s blind, seething anger, and the justice he dispenses with a baseball bat are the secret weapons of the Basterds, an unlikely platoon of Jewish-American soldiers dropped into Nazi-occupied France by the Allies to act as a roving insurgency, capturing and mutilating Nazi stragglers in order to unnerve the German high command. At least, thats their mission until they become tasked with something even grander – a top-secret assignment to target the Nazi leadership, which is personally shepherded by a cigar-chomping Winston Churchill.