Is Tarantino good for the Jews? "Inglourious Basterds" depicts Jews pursuing ultraviolent, absurdist revenge against their Nazi oppressors. Discuss.

Sure, I'll go.

In 2006, Salon.com published "Cool Jews" (http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2006/07/10/cool_jews/).

"Where are the hip male Jews?" writer David Marchese lamented. After all, in the 60s and 70s, he posits, Jewish dudes could be "tough guys and gangsters," you know, really hip guys, "rock 'n' roll heroes and sensitive singer-songwriters," hailing from the deep South or from deep space ("Starsky. Spock."). And he adds -- and this is important -- "And if nothing connects the aforementioned men other than their Judaism, well, that's kind of the point."

Marchese's beef is with the Woody Allens and Seth Rogens and Adam Sandlers and Larry Davids, all those fellows who make bank by playing nebbish, nerdy, and neurotic (which, really, are very young stereotypes). So when I first read about Inglourious Basterds, I totally consciously thought, "Huh, Tarantino and I must've read the same Salon article." Finally, some real cool Jews!

Maybe Tarantino's work is meant to be taken superficially, but that by no means should imply the director himself isn't perfectly self-aware. With a movie like Death Proof, for instance, Tarantino takes a genre -- 70s car exploitation, I guess? -- and crams the whole genre into leatherclad Kurt Russell. Then he toys with the genre, relentlessly and cruelly badgering it. I mean, Uma Thurman's own stuntwoman basically curb-stomps Russell's character.

What's meaningful about that movie is, those three women who star -- and in particular, the talented stuntwoman and actor Zoe Bell -- are mocking the genre, sure, but they also may well never have another opportunity to lead in an action movie, least of all a 70s genre action movie. Moreover, their three characters become merciless, absolutely ruthless, frighteningly vindictive, violent, because they are superheroes, or superhuman anyway: they are untempered by compassionate human hesitation. They are action stars, not characters. It's meaningful because you never once realize how rare it is, in cinema, to see a woman attack a man. It feels perfectly natural; it slips by, unnoticed. While Kurt Russell and his car might play misogynists, Death Proof isn't misogynistic in the slightest. It isn't anything. It doesn't need to be anything. These are some Cool Ladies.

What's wrong with letting the men of Inglourious Basterds be, not superheroes, exactly, but superhuman? What's wrong with loading a movie up with a bunch of Cool Jews? And what's wrong with amazing feats of strength, valor, violence, and absurdity anyway? It's a movie!

--I can't stand to.

I burst into tears at the end of this piece. I don't understand why people are so hard and cruel.

My mother has mobility issues, and my father, 89, suffers from dementia. He has, in the last two years, deteriorated tremendously. I've spent seven of the last fourteen months with him.

On Wednesdays, a woman goes to their house to bathe him, because that's all they can afford -- Wednesday baths, I mean. My father has two doctors, one in town and one in the next city over. They like to test his brain and his memory, and at each visit he misses a couple more questions, and the doctors go, "Hmm, hmm, all right" and, it seems, are basically waiting for my father to wither away and stop bugging them.

For my own part, I have a year-old emergency room bill -- $1000 for, I guess, some Tylenol -- from a suddenly ruptured ovarian cyst. The diagnosis was something like, "Hmm, hmm, all right." At the time, I'd worried I was dying. I waited hours to go to the ER, terrified about the money. I waited several hours more in the emergency room.

I have no health insurance. I work at a small business in an enormous US city, where I make $9 every hour. I'm well educated. I think I'm friendly, sometimes, and polite, kind of. My parents were hardworking, when they could work, and they're God-fearing, kind people.

Who will take care of us?

I wish I hadn't typed all that. "Woe am I!" and all that. I'd delete it if I could. Sorry.