This blog originally started as a long, long master post of my favorite films but because I like making gifs too much I had to break each movie out into their own films. 😅 What? You’ll read it either way.

Here’s part four:

Inglourious Basterds (2009) aka Vanessa Loves Sweet, Fiery Vengeance

“America is lucky black people only want equality and not revenge.”

I’ve seen variations of this quote since 2015 and it’s recently flared up with the resurgence of protests against police brutality. It’s relevant for us, people like me but it’s also relevant for another constantly oppressed and brutalized group.

I think that’s why this particular movie speaks to me. It’s a fairy tale of Jewish vengeance and Jewish feminine rage, carefully wrapped up in the usual “America sends in the troops” bravado that eventually gets flipped on its head. This movie subverted my expectations every moment I watched (the first time around).

My husband and I have had numerous conversations about what to name our firstborn daughter, if we’re blessed with one. Shosanna (Shoshana) is a frontrunner for us. It’s the Hebrew word for “rose”, and this important for a few reasons:

• My husband is Jewish and his identity is very important to him, spiritual or not.

• Rose is my maternal grandmother’s name (Rosa) and I had always intended “Rose” to be my future daughter’s middle name, so this discovery for me was a wild one.

• (Not to get too religious here) “God refers to the Jewish nation as a Shoshana: ‘As a rose among the thorns..’” which I think is darkly beautiful in its own way.

So all of this to say, Shosanna the character is deeply important to me in a lot of ways. She is uniquely focused on her mission of revenge, a mission that is really twisted justice in a world where justice simply didn’t exist for people like her back then. Her story is a message of how far can you push a person before they go completely Daenerys and burn shit to the ground.

It’s also a warning.

Read about my other fave movies!