I’ve been meaning to post about Tarantino for a while and today’s news that he is going to make a movie about the Manson murders prompts me. Surely a topic he can do well, though the opportunities for black humour currently escape me.
He’s a bit of a marmite figure, old Quentin. The first of his films that I saw was “Reservoir Dogs” though at the time I just thought it was just a pretty good, violent, caper movie. Then “Pulp Fiction” made me realise he’s a bit special. I think I saw “Four rooms” but can’t remember a thing about it. “Jackie Brown” was a real switch but again I was impressed, not least by the soundtrack. This is a guy who knows his music in a film context. The hoopla around the Kill Bills (sword noises sourced from 70s kung foo movies etc etc) raised a few alarm bells….was he un peu up himself? Mind you, the films were good. On to “Sin City” – amazing visually, though I have a vague feeling it dragged a bit….need to watch it again. Never saw “Dance me to the end of love”.
Then I lost interest…not anti, just not excited when I heard he had a film coming out. Why? Don’t know really, and there seemed to be a bit of a backlash at his presumptuousness or so perceived.
Recently I caught up on the Grindhouse set – notably his film – and guess what – it’s fucking brilliant. The car chase at the end is the most exciting thing I think I’ve seen for ages, and Zoe Bell (previously a stunt body double for Uma Thurman in the Bills) is an inspired piece of casting. Incredibly she’d never “acted” before. It came as a deal from Dodgers with “Django Unchained” which I watched with some anticipation – it’s a bit painful to experience in a Tarantino kind of way – the racism is horrendous (gratuitous?) – but staggering nonetheless.
“The Hateful 8” sits by the telly for later. Then I only have “Inglorious basterds” to complete the set. I was put off by the wilful misspelling. I’m shallow like that.
Overall I think he’s quite brilliant, though possibly not as brilliant as he thinks he is. I can see why he irritates people – TBH he still slightly irritates me – but trusting the art rather than the artist I have to say his standard is remarkably high and he’s never made a dud film. Certainly not for the faint hearted, but watchable and you can’t ignore them!
Bonus ball – 5 extra points if you can tell me the chronologically correct final scene of “Pulp Fiction”. No looking!
‘Who is Zed?’
‘Zed’s dead baby. Zed’s dead’.
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were so relentlessly entertaining (even if we must now admit the Butch* section of PP drags a bit) that later films couldn’t help but lose something by comparison, and if he’s carried on making exactly the same type of film he would quickly have become a parody of himself. I always enjoy his films, even if I do find myself aware of him trying to preempt his own criticism on occasion.
The last chronological line of Pulp Fiction? Butch saying, ‘Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.’
Edit – Should just have gone straight to the last line. Gary beat me to the punch on that one while I was typing.
Of the ones I’ve seen I think Death Proof is his dud. I didn’t like it at all.
Everything else, pretty brilliant. Yes, there’s too much dialogue, but in the plus column there’s so much that he does differently and/or better than others, music being one, casting being another. He seems to coax really memorable performances from actors you rarely see elsewhere. I’m thinking of the sexy taxi driver in Pulp Fiction, the cinema owner in Inglourious Basterds, Bruce Willis…
Bad boy for smashing that guitar though.
‘I’m thinking of the sexy taxi driver in Pulp Fiction’
If you like that taxi scene then you might like Night on Earth (1991). It’s basically five versions of that one scene but better (it’s a dud scene in Pulp Fiction in my opinion).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102536/
It happens that I finally got around to watching Inglorious Basterds on the box last night, and thought it was awful. It reflected what I’ve found is a common characteristic in his films; he’s obsessed with set pieces, usually violent, and clever dialogue but allows the narrative to go all over the place.
I still rate Reservoir Dogs as brilliant, but thought Pulp Fiction was messy and didn’t pay much attention for a long time. About 18 months back caught Django Unchained on TV and thought it was dull, then went to the cinema to see The Hateful Eight. That was a good 90 minute movie stretched out to nearly three hours.
All a bit ‘meh’.
The phrase “wildly inconsistent” could’ve been coined for ol’ QT, couldn’t it?
RD is a great film – essentially a one-room character study along Greek drama lines (almost-unity of time/action/place etc). But I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted just what a huge technicolor burst of aceness was to follow, could they? I’ve seen a bit of revisionist “meh”-ing about Pulp Fiction in recent years, but I feel like that’s really misplaced. It’s bloody brilliant. Messing about with timelines, that none-more-QT stylised dialogue, resurrecting dead careers all over the place, soundtracks in which every note is perfect. It’s almost too good.
Jackie Brown I genuinely like. Pulp Fiction it ain’t, and Samuel L. Jackson is a little closer to gangsta caricature than I’m really comfortable with, but Robert Forster is wonderful and Pam Grier more so. Worth watching just for them.
And then there’s… sigh. Kill Bill. The fact is, I sort of love Kill Bill. It’s absolutely daft as a brush, and it’s sprawling and a bit incoherent, and the whole “love letter to cinema” shtick is definitely wearing thin. But I really enjoy it anyway. A RZA score, THAT fight in the Japanese bar, Michael Parks’s star turn as Esteban and the way he says “poossy”. The by-now-standard rehabilitation of David Carradine. I can’t really defend it as a film in a lot of ways, but I do still kind of love it.
Death Proof. No thank you.
I really like Inglourious Basterds. It’s CRACKERS. It’s tremendous fun. Christoph Waltz is genuinely scary in it, which rather begs the question “why couldn’t you do this in SPECTRE”?
Django. Again, like Kill Bill, I enjoy it in spite of myself. There are times when QT’s making free with Blaxploitation tropes doesn’t feel that wrong, and then there’s Django Unchained. Eesh. As much as I enjoy it, I wonder if I’m not colluding in something icky by doing so. I remember SLJ once saying in an interview that he had to teach Tarantino about the word “nigga” (with an a), because Tarantino uses it a lot in his scripts, and in his speech, cheerfully appropriating the black experience in a sort of “reclaimy” way – at least, that’s the assumed intention. Unfortunately, according to Jackson, QT tended to say “nigger” (with an r), which meant he had to be given quite the talking-to. I suppose the point of the story is that QT thinks that he’s so clearly on the side of the good guys, he can be careless with this stuff. But he’s not as good as he thinks he is, nor as infallible, and so… icky.
I haven’t seen the Hateful Eight all the way through. I started it. I got bored. I stopped.
And finally – the Manson murders? Oh god. A real bete noire of mine: I hate that these awful crimes get showbizzed; I hate the glamorisation of murder. And QT, for similar reasons to my Blaxploitation ickiness above, is hardly the most sensitive pair of hands. Yuck.
Agree totally in most part, Bob, but I do think film on Manson capturing the dark maniacal mayhem let loose amidst the bells and weed of late 60s LA, and the ghastly misjudgment of the likes of stoned rock royalty such as Dennis Wilson etc who briefly clasped Manson to their beaded bosom, could be made. I just don’t think QT is the fellow to do it. Have you seen ‘Zodiac’? I thought that was fantastic – depicted the horror of the events, and the people caught up in them, perfectly.
There’s that one “Aquarius” on Netflix too. Pretty good. Got me looking into the story – of course I know the general facts but the whole thing is ghastly. There are loads of documentaries on YT of course.
Yeah, it’s not so much true crime films in general that I dislike (which can be fine if handled right) – it’s more specifically the glam aspects of the Manson thing: people covering his songs, the idiot cachet that still seems to exist around the whole thing. Manson himself will bloody love it, which is reason enough to wait until the fucker’s dead, if you ask me.
Interesting one for me. I have always thought of Tarantino as the Elmore Leonard of films. Interesting then that he took Leonard’s Rum Punch and turned it into Jackie Brown. He made a better fist of it than any other director had made of Leonard films, I think because he got the dialogue that Elmore employed so well in all of his novels.
Like Leonard not everything he does is magical, Kill Bill didn’t appeal to me at all. I love The Hateful 8 though. Don’t leave it unwatched for a long time @Twang.
If, as appears to be the case, you’re planning to watch them in chronological order then you’ll need to leave Hateful 8 until after …Basterds (which should have been watched before Django).
I’m not sure I’d consider myself an enormous Tarantino fan (I consider him the Kanye West of modern Hollywood, so mixed feelings), but he has done a lot of great stuff.
Reservoir Dogs was an explosive moment in cinema, but hasn’t aged that well as a film. I can’t say I go back to it often. Great script though.
Pulp Fiction remains the masterpiece. It’s an incredibly smart, accomplished piece of work, and it changed Hollywood in myriad ways. I happily rewatch it every couple of years, and it holds up.
Jackie Brown… not for me. Just never got on with it.
Kill Bill – volume one was enormous fun, and probably the most I’ve enjoyed a Tarantino movie. He was at his most freewheeling at that stage, and the sense that he could go anywhere and do anything was intoxicating. Volume two a bit of a damp squib in comparison.
Death Proof was OK, but – along with KB vol 2, seemed to confirm that he was slowing down a bit. There was just that little less joy about it.
Inglorious Basterds – not a fan. Obviously, a great performance from Christoph Waltz, but not a lot else of interest.
Django – I find it quite difficult to rate, because it was incredibly uncomfortable viewing. I know there’s a tradition of it, but I’m not sure slavery is fertile ground for this sort of pulpy treatment. A misstep, as far as I’m concerned.
Hateful 8 – I thought it was absolutely bloody brilliant. Possibly the most mature and controlled film he’s made to date, despite its extraordinary length. Less directorial grandstanding. Came as a real surprise, as I thought he was fading out, but left me really intrigued as to what he’ll do next.
All of that said, my favourite work by Tarantino is without a shadow of a doubt the script for True Romance. We all know he can write, and probably that he writes better than he directs. The whole of True Romance is just total gold, and I honestly don’t think he’s ever written anything better than this scene…
Great film, but I hate that scene, with its presentation of racism as a virtue.
(And Scott’s second use of the music from Lakme, the same piece that he used to much better effect in The Hunger.)
Weird. The whole racism as a virtue thing is exactly what I like about it.
That’s EXACTLY… etc.
Agree with Bingo – I already mentioned my love of Hateful 8 but forgot to mention True Romance. Agree it is Tarantino at the top of his game.
I’m not really going chronologically – I’ll do the H8 then catch IB when it next appears on TV or Netflix. I think it was on recently so it may be a while. However this has prompted me to get the earlier ones on DVD – 10 squid is a steal. So I’ll rewatch them too.
The thing about QT for me is I really did love the first two, but literally all the others could benefit from some judicious snipping. He really is awfully indulged, but no one does a set piece quite as good as he does.
It’s just his set pieces don’t always make for a good movie as such.
This
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2VgPdS7UOM
I’m sure that QT has his copy of of Any Gun Can Play signed by Franco – like me.
I agree with most of the above. Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Django are QT’s best works to date.
I also like his collaborations with Robert Rodriguez, especially Dusk ’til Dawn and Desperado, in scenes like this.
I loved the hateful eight. His best film I think. Is anybody else pushing it? I keep hearing and reading about ‘Baby Driver’. Gotta go see soon .
The question with Tarantino is do we want him to grow up and start making adult films and not his hugely entertaining morally empty cartoons. His attitude to history and to some pretty weighty themes (e.g. slavery, Holocaust) is to treat them as fodder for showing off his technical brilliance with the camera and dialogue. Pulp Fiction was indeed his masterpiece and he has not come close to bettering it even though I thoroughly enjoyed Hateful Eight and Django and the first scene in Inglorious Basterds is wonderfully tense.
Still haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs. Pulp Fiction was great at the time, but Jackie Brown is a better film. Started watching the first Kill Bill, but stopped after an early scene of incredible violence witnessed by a 5 or 6 yr old girl. Gratuitous, empty headed and senseless and I haven’t watched anything since.
Re gratuitous etc – it is horrendous bit it is essential to the plot so in that sense it fits. Very unpleasant though I’ll agree. Is murder ever not?
Not really, I felt it crossed a line though.
I haven’t seen it for a while, but if it’s the one I’m thinking of isn’t it shown in cartoon/Manga form? I appreciate that may not make any difference or a scenario which is fictional anyway
I’ll let you know shortly. I’ve just received my box so commencing a rewatch. Tonight – Les Dogs.
I sat down to watch Hateful 8 with more trepidation than anticipation. The length didn’t bother me, I felt the tension was very well paced throughout. The problem as always was the dialogue. I said to Mrs E somthing like “I really hope we don’t have each character introduced by ‘are you the [insert nickname] who did the [insert intriguing act that defines the blah blah blah] in Houston?'” thing. Alas the entire first scene was basically doing that for every new character.
Furthermore – People Don’t Speak Like That, Quentin. In his films they speak like how a literate film nerd imagines bad guys speak and it’s fucking annoying. IRL most of them can barely string a sentence together.
Sure he can make terrifically exciting scenes and sure knows how to direct, but he really does need to grow up now and to stop trying to convince us how “street” he is.
But why does dialogue have a responsibility to be realistic/naturalistic? You don’t see a Tarantino film for the kitchen sink verité. Heavily stylised dialogue is his thing; it’s a feature, not a bug. It’s a bit like complaining at Mondrian’s crappy way with a landscape.
But I’m sure he thinks it’s realistic, that’s the problem I have. Maybe I’ve just run out of patience.
How do you know what he thinks? Just interested.
Because I’m his psychoanalyst.
Of course I don’t know, really, what he thinks. Guess it’s just me, then.
Surely, as you say, his dialogue is stylised, not IRL. In which case he is not trying to be street at all. He’s being arty. Soon as you do that it comes down to taste.