A Frenchman houses a family of Jews beneath the floorboards of his house while a smug, oleaginous Nazi grills him about any Jewish families that might have recently fled the area. It’s a long, tense, promising scene. I hit pause, grabbed a bowl of sliced apples, and resumed watching. After I unpaused the scene, within a few seconds, Nazi soldiers entered the house and began shooting up the floorboards. Any semblance of tension, intelligence or historical understanding disappeared — never to return for the remaining two hours and twenty minutes. More disappointing, the camerawork and editing was beautiful. Revenge eye-candy, particularly regarding the Holocaust, is as bogus as it gets.

When it comes time for the bad guys — Hitler, Goebbels, et al — to get theirs, the carnage is so extreme as to be flat-out boring. No character in the movie is real enough to care about, tough enough to frighten you, or funny enough to trigger laughter — although, according to Quentin Tarantino ironists, irony was supposed to be the point.

It’s hard to make a funny movie about the Holocaust. Life is Beautiful tried. In that movie the killing of defenseless of Jews was treated as farce (certainly an unpromising choice). The flip here in “Inglourious Basterds” is that it’s Jews killing defenseless Nazis. And it’s as overwhelmingly stupid as it sounds.

Normally, I wouldn’t give a shit, but the droolfaces who review movies have been raving. 88% favorable on Rotten Tomatoes. Well, that’s democracy for you. It brings to mind the growing  popularity of the Tea Party. Idiocy gathers momentum and now it appears we’ll be sitting through an Academy Awards show in which a garden variety graphic novel/revenge fantasy shares the stage with intelligent, well-written movies like Up in the Air.

Agnieska Winkler, in Europa Europa, was one of the few writer/directors with the necessary taste, compassion, and wit to satirize the Nazis during the Holocaust. The movie is 25 years old. And if QT (who is rumored to have seen more movies than any other director) has ever watched it, he wouldn’t have even messed around with subject matter set in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Unless, of course, he didn’t understand the movie.

Robin Williams, in his not-so-great comeback standup show, “Weapons of Self-Destruction,” did come up with a great line concerning the Holocaust. He told of an interview with a German talk show host. She said to him, “We don’t really have a tradition of comedy in this country.” “No,” he said, “You killed all the funny people.”

Present the Jews as a funny People. That works.

Present them as vengeful scalp-cutting, head-bashing People. No.