Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil and Jordan Stokes to overthink cold war pop culture in light of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a characteristically unaccountable digression about the repatriation of antiquities to Egypt.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 71 (MP3)

Overthinkers, raising the bar like the flag at Iwo Jima
Dropping you haters for your rhyme misdemeanors
Snooping outside the studio, that’s where I seen ya
Bite our style, your throat burns like you’re chugging drain cleaner …

… and so on.

Diss tracks are a staple of hip-hop, what with its premium on credibility, freestyling, lyricism and ostentatious display. But hip-hop didn’t invent the diss track. Hardly.

So we rounded up the Overthinking Posse – the Lenza, the Fenza, Ol’ Dirty Perich and Stokesface Killah – to crack the deepest wax on the block. I’m talking deep in the record crate, son. I’m talking old school.

What, Overthinkers, is the Best Diss Track Prior to Hip-Hop? SOUND OFF.

And stay tuned to the end for a verdict from our Surprise Celebrity Guest Judge!

Sort-of spoiler alert: this post deals with a particular scene towards the end of the Inglourious Basterds, so if you haven’t seen it yet and want to go into the theater with a clean slate, you should stop reading now (and get out there and see this movie pronto—it’s a gold mine for overthinking). That being said, I won’t reveal any major plot points, so if you don’t mind losing out a bit on the experience, then plow ahead.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Mark Lee to overthink Inglourious Basterds, welcome Tracey from Chicago, and construct an online dating profile.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Next week will be a listener feedback episode, so get your calls and emails in!

Download Episode 60 (MP3)

So imagine you’re sitting next to someone on the train who’s playing a game on his iPhone. You can’t help but glance out of the corner of your eye, and you’re a bit shocked to see swastikas, copious amounts of blood, dead bodies, dog killing, and…Mecha Adolf Hitler??

Whoa..is this OK to play in public?

Granted, this isn’t the first time a violent video game with possibly objectionable content has been made available for a portable video game system–game makers have been delivering this content ever since portable systems got sophisticated enough to render red pixelated blood. But there’s something special about this unholy combination of Wolfenstein 3D and the iPhone.

Inglourious Basterds, the upcoming Quentin Tarantino World-War II action flick, has fanboys foaming at the mouth with anticipation. Some of this comes naturally from Tarantino’s following, but some of this may be coming from the relief that we’re transitioning away from those serious Oscar-baiting Nazi/WWII movies towards more amusing summer movie fare.

Clearly, Basterds is a different kind of movie than, say, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Take a look at the trailer:

Tarantino is the modern king of exploitation films, and this one is no exception. And part of what gives this trailer that lurid, exploitative feel (besides Brad Pitt’s crazy monologue) is its liberal usage of swastikas. After all, it’s a powerful, offensive, and evocative symbol that communicates a lot of ideas very quickly.

Perfect for a Tarantino Nazi movie trailer, right? But how about all of those “other” World War II movies? Can we use the frequency of swastikas (and other exploitative elements) in movie trailers as some sort of proxy for the degree that a film is Nazi-sploitative or not?

With that in mind, let’s investigate the Swastika-per-Minute (SPM) Rates for the trailers for Basterds as well as some major 2008 World-War II themed movie releases after the jump. Achtung! Schnell!

Critics have certainly contested the merits of Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s historical drama Valkyrie, but everyone can agree that this film has raised historical awareness of the true-life 1944 plot by German high officials to assassinate Hitler and take over the government. Sure, the conspirators failed, but at least they tried. I’m sure many people left Valkyrie wondering, “Wouldn’t it have been great if they’d succeeded and brought an early end to World War II in Europe?” Their actions could have saved countless lives and may have prevented the East/West Germany division that lasted for over forty years.

For those people pondering such history, I say, not so fast. Killing the dictator and taking over the government is far easier said than done, and I have the historical proof AND the accompanying based-on-true-events movie to prove it: the 1979 assassination of South Korean strongman Park Chung-Hee, and the 2005 movie based on the event, The President’s Last Bang (그때 그사람들, for all you OTI Korean speakers out there):

Yup, that’s bubble gum in that guy’s mouth. One of many things that this movie and Valkyrie don’t have in common. Analysis, comparison, and a brief overview of South Korean history after the jump.

Matthew Wrather leads a panel consisting of Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and eventually Matthew Belinkie to overthink:

• Listener Feedback
• One Man’s Pun (see Venn Diagram)
• The Tenets of National Socialism
• Various Attempts to Kill Hitler (one by Tom Cruise, one by the Highlander)
• Anglo-American Relations

Disclaimer: We are all ANTI-Nazi. Nazis are bad.

As always, email us at podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com with your comments, or call 20-EAT-LOG-01 (that’s (203) 285-6401) to leave a voicemail.

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.libsyn.com/media/mwrather/otip026.mp3]

Download Episode 26 (MP3)

[Venn Diagram by Mark Lee]

Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.  Boy, do we Americans ever love Nazis!  Okay, maybe we don’t love them love them, but we sure love watching them in the movies.  And we love rewarding them.  Play a Nazi, shoot a Nazi, be shot by a Nazi.  Oscars for you, my friends!  Oscars all around!

This year might be the year of the Nazis.  We Americans are sick of morally ambiguous wars and complicated world problems like “global warming” and “the economy.”  Give us a good black and white morality tale set in 1940s Germany!  The main character can be a lovable child, a sexy but illiterate concentration camp guard, or even Tom Cruise in an eyepatch.    I don’t care, as long as there’s Nazis!

But the reviewing establishment is getting a little sick of the Holocaust, and I can understand why.  A.O. Scott says recent movies of this sort are just rehashing clichés: emaciated, bald women in showers; evil tow-headed men speaking in clipped German tones as they toss another naked child onto the pile; a single echoing gunshot as the main character meets his doom.  “Remembering” the Holocaust the same way over and over and over, according to Scott, is just another way of forgetting, of replacing historical memory with recycled Hollywood visuals and simplistic themes.  Based on Manohla Dargis’s (rather hilarious) reviews of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Reader, I think she agrees with him.

Hey, I’m nominally Jewish, and I happen to agree, too.  Enough with the Nazis already!   (But then, I was the girl in high school who read Night by Elie Wiesel and, dry-eyed, said, “So the moral is the Holocaust was bad?”  I’ve hardly read every Holocaust movie or book ever written, but Maus is the only one that said something new to me, and I recommend it wholeheartedly if you’ve never read it before.  Otherwise, I can take or leave the genre.)

So we’ll do away with Nazi movies.  Fine.  But what A.O. Scott’s article fails to answer is what we’ll replace them with.  Lucky for you, I have some ideas.