Swords and Sandals.

Evangelical scholar Ben Witherington likes the latest Roman epic flick, "The Eagle."

The Passion of Tarantino

When Mel Gibson released his "The Passion of the Christ," critics went wild with describing it as "violence porn." Now, Quentin Tarantino releases "Inglorious Basterds," which is described by its creators as "Jewish revenge fantasy" and "kosher porn."

He certainly ended up in the right movie. The genre-busting Inglourious Basterds is strange, even by Tarantino standards. It's a war movie, a spaghetti western, a spy flick, a comic book, a comedy, tragedy and farce. It's a war film that's at once fiercely attentive to detail - German characters actually speak in German, for example - but full of wild fictional concoctions. There's Tarantino's stunt casting, with Mike Myers appearing as a British officer and cult actor Rod Taylor (The Birds) playing Winston Churchill. And notably, it is a Jewish revenge fantasy: In Tarantino's alternate reality, Brad Pitt leads a Jewish vigilante squad as they hunt down Nazis and scalp them, inciting the fury of Hitler himself.

And

Roth, who directed the Hostel horror flicks, says that Tarantino's bizarre cocktail of reality and fiction is intoxicating. "I'm so glad he wasn't constrained by history. I started thinking about 9/11 too, and how I wished I could go back and kill those hijackers. Quentin is so in tune with human nature, he knows that it's very real to want to go back and sacrifice yourself to stop evil, to save thousands, in this case millions of lives. The idea of going back and killing Nazis? It's so exhilarating. It's like kosher porn, it's orgasmic!"

I suspect that we won't be seeing an outcry about sadomasochistic porn with respec to this movie.

Vox Day argues that Tarantino's film dishonors American soldiers and puts Jews at risk around the world.