(Originally posted at Social Entropy ++ when the subject of Quentin Tarantino was brought up. We now read the post, already in progress.)
I think Resevoir Dogs isn't a great movie, but it shows a kind of enthusiasm and ingenuity which is rare in a first feature film. It shows a lot of potential and even though I think it get a bit talky, it's still really clever.
Pulp Fiction is indesputably great. Even though it is inspired by other films-- as all of his films are-- there aren't any other movies that look and act and move exactly like that one. Plenty have tried, but none are as good as this movie. While I don't think it holds together all that well, it's still really amazing and it's a movie everyone should see.
Jackie Brown is his best film. Period. It mixes all of the clever references and intertexuality that make his movies unique without it only being about how clever he is and about how many references he can cram into one scene (as I'll talk about later). It's a movie with the least Tarantino affectations and I think it's a movie with the most emotion and character development of any of his films. This might sound snide, but it's his most mature film. It's just a shame that nobody saw it.
Kill Bill 1 and 2 are utter bilge. They're silly and I don't think they're as innocent or fun as the movies they're based off of. The Street Fighter is a flawed movie, but it's also forty years old and filmed on a shoe string budget, Kill Bill is basically the same movie but with a much higher budget. They aren't movies without they're moments, but they lack discipline. They go on forever and are really about nothing. All in all, I come back to one thing Mark Kermode said, which is that 2001 goes from the dawn of man to the birth of a new species in two and a half hours, why does Tarantino need four hours for Kill Bill? And as far as that goes, Charles Bronson only needed 90 minutes at a time.
Death Proof is pointless. Writing about that is like writing about a jizz rag. It's him wanking off for 90 minutes, which is fine, but then he went back and added another 30 minutes so it could get put into the film festival circuit. Now that's the only version you can find. It's stupid. All of the movies he's drawing off of didn't last more than 90 minutes a piece and he feels the need to pad out a movie which is almost entirely made out of padding. Great. Apparently a bunch of boring women talk about nothing for ten minutes was such a good idea that it needed to be made longer. Fuck off.
And now, an aside--
I saw Inglourious because it was tacked onto a friend's birthday party. Since I wasn't about to just bone out at midnight for the sake of a movie, I decided I'd give the movie a chance. I have my standards and all, and I really wasn't looking forward to it at all, but, you know, friendship. Now there's the rub.
Anyways, like an idiot I got into an argument as to why I thought Jackie Brown is his best movie and why it was the last worthwhile film he made. I don't know what I was thinking because I got into this debate with a guy I know I don't like and haven't liked for years. As I recall this was back when our relationship was waning between cordial and then, strangely and suddenly dismissive, so I might have tricked myself into thinking that there was a chance this would end up as a cordial conversation.
It didn't.
We talk about this on the way to the movie theater and, at some point, a friend of a friend shows up and I instantly realize I don't want to talk to this guy. It isn't that this second person was a bad dude or smelled or anything, but I more or less "stole" his girlfriend away from him a year or two back and knew that we would have very little to say to each other. Whenever the ex-boyfriend thought his friend scored a coup, he'd chime in with, "Yeah, totally!" demonstrating his mastery of the forensic arts.
So, I end up being stuck between my ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and this other guy who I cannot get along with no matter how many conversations we engage in. Overall the conversation ran like a month in trench warfare. All we did was say things back and forth with no real progress being made on either side. With that said, I stopped listening for an entirely different reason than he did.
I think I gave up because I took umbrage with a few things he said. First off, I was told that I didn't "get" Death Proof. Yes, people actually say that kind of a thing and mean it and this was the level of discourse I was involved in. Then, when I made the point about Kill Bill 1 & 2 being longer and having less substance than 2001: A Space Odyssey-- a point I think we all understand is a somewhat tongue in cheek statement-- he says to me without a tinge of irony "Yeah, but they're completely different kinds of films." As though this needed to be put out there.
The last bit, which was a nice cheery on top, was when he turned to me and said, "You aren't going to be talking to me and saying things to me for the entire movie, are you?"
Well, I was thinking about it, but now that you say it. . .
It wasn't an incredibly fun evening, mostly because I didn't like the movie and I realized I was the only person in the entire theater who felt this way. The whole thing was bizarre and made me feel silly afterwards, because it was a trap I should have been able to see coming and twist out of it, but no, I had to be right.
Now, back to our main feature--
Inglourious is just despicable. It's too long, it's annoying, and it's a morally horrific movie. It basks in the destruction of other people without a single thought or care. I guess there's lots of action movies like that, but at least Charles Bronson never killed someone because they live in the ghetto, where as Inglourious believes that if you're German, you're inherently a war criminal. It's a movie made with the morality of an angry 14 year old and it's about as disciplined as a movie made by an angry 14 year old. It's all over the place and while it does have one or two moments, they're hidden in between these long ass scenes about how clever Tarantino dialogue is, characters we don't give a fuck about, and Eli Roth.
I respect the fact that he doesn't want to do movie after movie that's like Jackie Brown, but at the same time, I wonder why he's doing movie after movie that's like Kill Bill.
Overall my feelings about Tarantino come out of a love of his previous works and an appreciation for his talent. That's what makes it so frustrating when I see him make bad movies. He's better than this, but, like so many artists before him, he's been given a blank check and no one tells him what's a good idea or a bad idea and he's been left to go insane with his own ideas. That's no good. That's not good at all.
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