In This Edition:
Reservoir Dogs (1992) - d. Quentin Tarantino
True Romance (1993) - d. Tony Scott
Pulp Fiction (1994) - d. Quentin Tarantino
From Dusk 'til Dawn (1996) - d. Robert Rodriguez
Jackie Brown (1997) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) & 2 (2004) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Death Proof (2007) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Inglorious Basterds (2009) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Django Unchained (2012) - d. Quentin Tarantino
The Hateful Eight (2015) - d. Quentin Tarantino
Aaaaand go-go (twist contest!)
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Reservoir Dogs features many of the Tarantino hallmarks, but not all of them (no fetishistic foot shots). You've the climactic shootout, tension-raising extended dialogue sequences, killer soundtrack, prolific use of ethnic and racial slurs, pop-culture references, dark comedy, non-linear timelines and so much more of what we've come to expect from the writer/director/actor* 27 years later, Reservoir Dogs is the minimum viable product for a QT picture, the template for everything that would come later. It's a heist picture that pretty much ignores the heist. It's about sitting around the fringes of the heist, the downtime and the aftereffects. It's exploring how terrible people deal with things gone wrong, and how there's something still relateable even in those terrible people. The gut punch of violence - the infamous ear cutting sequence - was notorious back in the early 1990s, and kept a lot of people away from the film, but that kind of grimness is commonplace on television these days. You see worse on the average episode of CSI or NCIS or whatever acronymed procedural is popular these days. I don't love this movie, but I like it a lot. It's got a brisk pace (one of few QT movies to clock in under 2 hours) and a captivating framework. The budgetary limitations show in the design aesthetic, the movie looks a lot different than every other QT production since, but the dialogue and performance is the show here, and it's pretty good in that regard.
[10:29]
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True Romance is the least memorable of all the Tarantino-scripted movies (though one wishes they could forget Natural Born Killers), because it's not a Tarantino movie, it's a Tony Scott movie with Scott trying to cram a Tarantino movie into a conventional Hollywood narrative.
Christian Slater is miscast (there's no belief or conviction in what he's saying - a Sonny Chiba fan, works at a comics shop, Elvis obsessed - I don't buy it, bub) and you don't get any sense of where this character has obtained such brazenness and confidence. This guy is a geek, but Slater doesn't do geek.
The rest of the cast is on point for a Tarantino joint, though: Patricia Arquette is great as Alabama, (even if she is a manic pixie dream girl prototype), Val Kilmer as Elvis (err..."the Mentor"), Gary Oldman as the lead singer of Korn, Christopher Walken and Dennis hopper being racist. Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini sharing a scene years before The Mexican, Sam Jackson, Bronson Pinchot, Tom Seizmore, Chris Penn.
The direction is all wrong, the edits are all wrong, the musical queues are all wrong... even the usual orgy of violence in the end of nearly every Tarantino movie is sensationalist cheekiness, here Scott tries to play it straight and doesn't understand the absurdity of it all.
This movie has a terribly juvenile sense of love and romance, and it doesn't care to explore the greater emotional depths of the characters or their relationship. The second half of the film gets so sidetracked with its drug deal it forgets about the relationship. But listening to Tarantino's commentary, and hearing about the original structure for the film (which was his usual non-linear construction), it IS more about the drugs and how these lovers got embroiled in with these mobsters and their cocaine. QT says that he loves this film as is and by the time he had name enough to get it made he was beyond it. But I can't help but want his full vision for this. To see Slater pick up Big Kahuna Burgers and for Hopper to ask for a Red Apple instead of a Chesterfield.
There's definitely a theme of rebel lovers in QT's early work...here, the duo in Natural Born Killers and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in Pulp Fiction.
[written while watching the film, so not timed]
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Ahhh, Pulp Fiction. This was my awakening as a wanna be cinephile (it turns out I'm too interested in things like comics, music, comedy, games, and such to really commit to the cinephilic lifestyle) when I was 18 years old. This was a slap in the face, a sudden shock that there's more to the world of film then just what Hollywood dishes out. QT's approach to Pulp Fiction seemed to be assembling a collage of cinematic homages and putting those on top of a twisty, non-linear, multi-story framework. Taking inspiration also from 30's and 40's pulp magazines, where there are multiple tales of gangland crime, detective noir, and all sorts of debauchery, the film doles out a half dozen stories, all interconnected but placed out of order. It's a dense layer cake, but utterly delicious every bite. I watched this thing 6 times in the theatre when it came out and multiple times since. I haven't watched it in a while but most of the script is still committed to memory, as is most of the soundtrack. The entire package remains thrilling to me 25 years later. I'm never bored watching it and when it ends I just kind of want to watch it straight away again. It's kind of a feel-good movie for me. For all its dark themes, and heavyweight aspects (violence, drugs, gangs, rape, racism) it's a hilarious movie, and it's shot so brightly, it's almost like it's without shadows. I love it tremendously. It's a masterpiece.
[20:14]
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From Dusk 'til Dawn was a favourite of mine 20-ish years ago. I was into both QT and Robert Rodriguez quite heavily at the time so seeing the two of them married together like this was a big thrill. It also exposed ER's Dr. Hunky George Clooney as a capable action star and badass. The thing is, if I'm being perfectly honest, is I liked the criminals on the run aspect of the film's first half a lot more than the second half of vampire monster killing at the titty bar. The first half has an internal logic at least, one which pokes a little fun at the media's obsession with real-world violence with a news clip of the crime the Gecko brothers commited and a reporter way too enthusiastic about covering the story.
Of course, this is a very, absurdly violent movie, and I have no problem with that, but the inner consistency of the second half, of how the vampires turn their victims, or how they die, or what can kill them, it all falls apart very quickly. Nothing is consistent in the second half and it's just balls to the wall ridiculousness. There's no hint of scares here, it's meant as pure Grindhouse goofiness. I wish it had stuck with the more grounded tone of the first half.
QT gives his best (and perhaps only good) performance here as Richie Gecko, a demented sex offender with violent intentions, barely kept in line by Clooney's Seth Gecko, definitely dangerous, but certainly more level-headed. Richie's interactions with the Fuller family, particularly Juliette Lewis' Katherine is full on ick-inducing, particularly when the film goes into Richie's demented POV that most certainly isn't reality.
There are aspects I like about the second half, Fred Williamson primarily. He's hilarious in the role, particularly when he's telling his absurd 'Nam story. Rodriguez's fast-and-loose doesn't clash with Tarantino's meticulousness all that much, but he certainly seems more at home in the realm of exploding vampires and bloody neck bites than he does with long conversations. Oh and the foot fetishiness is at its apex here. Bleh.
[1:29:10]
(written after Django)
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I didn't like Jackie Brown when it came out. I was extremely excited for it, hotly anticipating it. In the few years since Pulp Fiction I had become a Tarantino devotee (I even watched Destiny Turns On The Radio because he was acting in it). I was reading his screenplays, listening to soundtracks over and over, attempted to following his recommendations via Blockbuster and other video stores in a vain attempt at catching onto his cinematic influences (it's pretty much everything, it's futile), and of course, watching Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction over and over. I thought I knew what I was going to get with Jackie Brown. I was wrong. And I was so disappointed. I didn't think it was a bad movie, but I didn't get it. It didn't have so many of Tarantino's usual flairs that I didn't know how to feel about it. I always meant to get back to it, to try it again, but I never did, so great was my disappointment. I didn't even buy it on DVD when it came out. Me, this Tarantino devotee. That was my first experience with understandings that our idols aren't flawless and that at some point they'll let you down (so many more of these lessons were still to be learned).
Two decades later though, and Jackie Brown makes sense to me now. It's a surprisingly adept portrayal of the disappointments of middle-age. Sure much of that comes from Elmore Leonard's book, Rum Punch, which Tarantino adapted, but QT sure seems to get it. And he holds himself back. I think this is a love letter to his mom and her friends, these strong middle aged women he knew who are constantly pushed down by the world but they won't be beaten and they know how to shrewdly navigate it without letting on that they're in control. Or maybe it's just a fantasy, but it's really, really damn great.
At the time of its release, I was expecting more of a Blacksploitation vibe because of Pam Grier's presence, (probably thinking it would be more like Black Dynamite, something really tongue-in-cheek) but the earnestness is what makes it so great. It really is a fantastic movie, and Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Carlyle, Bridgette Fonda all hit it out of the park. Hell, you've got both Michael Keaton and Robert DeNiro in relatively small support roles (DeNiro barely speaks at all until the third act). It's brilliant casting. There's no big eruption of violence, and QT tempers his grindhouse instincts almost completely, finding a completely different gear that we never see this exact way again, but it certainly influences how he approaches dramatic moments in the future. It's his most mature movie, in more ways than one.
[33:32]
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QT has always said Kill Bill was intended to be one movie, and it was a greedy Weinstein decision to split them up into two pictures. I've been waiting a decade and a half for a complete Kill Bill, to see it the way its creator intended, and though it keeps getting teased, it never gets released. So, for the purpose of this recap, I just watched them back to back, literally skipping the credits on volume 1 and jumping direct into Volume 2. The only thing that seems out of place in doing so is the brief recap at the start of Volume 2 that seems out of sync with the rest of the film. Otherwise, I don't know that there's much else missing or added to the proceedings.
The wife (that would be my wife, not The Bride) had said that she didn't think the films held up, but I was rapt watching these two again. More than any other film that QT had done before, or has done since, Kill Bill smashes together so many of his cinematic loves. There should be tonal whiplash, but the chaptering of the film helps contain each segment to its own genre. There's obviously different inferences of kung-fu and martial arts films. There's an anime sequence. There's so many hard boiled asian action tropes. Hell, it opens with a Shaw Brothers title card. The first half really steeps itself in Chinese cinema of the 70's and 80's, while thoroughly digging its heels (so many feet shots) in its 70's exploitation revenge drama. The second half toys around with noir and western revenge cinema (it really is laced with all different genres of revenge), while still keeping its toes (so many feet shots) in Chinese cinema.
The action in the film is ridiculous. Master fight choreographer Yeun Woo-Ping outdoes himself with so much of what QT asks for here. What we see in the big Crazy 88s fight is often relegated to animated form because it'd be so difficult to pull off in reality, but here it is. It's visceral and scintillating. The climax of Vol. 1, the showdown with O-Ren Ishii is stunning, a majestic and magical sequence that comes more from Samurai cinema than Chinese wuxia. The opening kitchen fight combines John Woo with wuxia, while the later fight in the trailer is incredible for acknowledging the obstacles and challenge of fighting in close quarters.
What I disliked originally in the theatre was the slow burn of the finale, but watch as a whole, there's total resonance, with The Bride finding out her daughter lives, and is beautiful. How she handles Bill in this sequence comes back to the maturity QT found in Jackie Brown, and it's beautiful, well-acted, and heartfelt.
As a whole, Kill Bill is a lot, but it shouldn't really be anything less than what it is. Not totally perfect, not without its flaws (or controvercies) but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless.
[51:34]
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I saw Death Proof originally as part of the Grindhouse presentation, a lenghty double-feature viewing experience that kicked off with Robert Rodgriguez's Planet Terror. A gross, yet giddy dive off the deep end of exploitation tropes. Where a true grindhouse movie has to pace out its shocks and gags, with his budget Rodriguez could dole out multiples per minute. In comparison, QT's Death Proof was meandering and leisurely, with a very extensive amount of time given to following a quartet of liberated women as they have an evening out at a dive bar. The promised murder machine driven by Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike only appears for a few minutes in the entire film, and the menace of Stuntman Mike's presence in the bar actually waffles between creepy and charming. When the kill(s) actually happen, well, it's almost over before it began, but really you didn't want it to overstay its welcome to begin with. And then there's a whole other half, where the tone shifts from ominous, slasher film to stunt spectacular. It's almost two different projects altogether. So tonally it's a bit all over the place, and yet, QT seems to have everything right where he wants it. If he's going to do straight up grindhouse, he's going to do it true to straight up grindhouse...complete with the meandering dialogue, the titillation, the drinking and drugs, the menace, the kills, the janky editing and extreme camera angles. And he's not going to do just one straight up grindhouse, but two. So you get in a 2 hour span both a relatively uninspired horror with a big spectacular kill, and then a stunt show with a dash of revenge thrown in.
Back in the day, watching all of Grindhouse, I wasn't in the mood for QT's slow amble after Rodriguez's amped-up visceral experience (not to mention those hilarious, gross and densely packed mock grindhouse trailers from the likes of Eli Roth and Edgar Wright). But as its own production, as an experiment to make authentically styled grindhouse, but on a bigger budget, I think QT nailed it. He has such an appreciation for the style of low budget exploitation cinema that it influences all his work, but in replicating it he know exactly what's going on. At the same time, he makes it his own, as one would expect, and the dialogue and soundtrack are on point for QT. The first half is good, the second half is delightful (Rosario Dawson, Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms and Mary Elizabeth Winstead make a wonderful quartet). QT giving Bell a real spotlight to show off her formidable stunt skills is pretty much the entire point of Death Proof in my mind. But then there's also the great turnaround where Stuntman Mike becomes a wimpering, simpering fool as he's not used to women fighting back.
This is not a great movie, and there's not much here to think about past what it is, but it is pretty fun.
[1:08:25]
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Whoops, I forgot to write about Inglorious Basterds. There are some flat out incredible scenes in this film. The opening sequence is breathtaking in both its beautiful cinematography and its intensity. QT has always liked tension building but this is almost exclusively built around tension building. People trying to hide who they are from other people, the stakes always so high, yeah, it's best avoided by anyone with anxiety issues.
The titular Basterds of the film are kind of the least appealing aspect of it, however. Their ruthless, revenge-tinged scalphunting is uneasy and speaks too much to "rah-rah 'merica" in its revisionist retelling of how World War II went down. I can't tell whether it's QT playing to his grindhouse fanaticism or if it's satire of "We're No. 1, U.S.A! U.S.A!" WWII movies that make it seem like there was no war without America's involvement. There's just uncomfortable problems here.
That said, it's a pretty exciting feature overall, with an absolutely epic, now infamous climax which was a very bold choice on QTs part. In any other director's hands it would feel like an unearned twist, in QT's hands, it feels like logical extension of the storytelling, and the director. I like this one...just a little less than I did before.
[1:45:49]
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[1:17:26]
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And back to The Hateful Eight. Honestly, I didn't particularly like this movie the first time around, and of all of QT's movies this is the one I had the least desire to revisit. Upon revisiting most of my initial apprehentions about the film still hold -- it's too long, it squanders its panavision, it's use of narrator is annoyingly inconsistent -- but at the same time, watching it at home made it a more inviting experience. It may not be the way QT originally intended but I liked it more.Cutting out the overture and the intermission trims the experience down quite a bit, which makes it feel less padded. In fact, taking out those elements (as great as Ennio Morricone is) leads the film back to being more character focused. The first time we hear the narrator (QT himself) is after the intermission, an intermission which the narrator references, so on home release, if you weren't familiar with the theatrical experience, would seem a bit odd.
I was actually hoping to watch this as part of the multi-part "Extended Edition" that QT recut for Netflix. I was curious to see how the experience of the film worked broken down into episodes (the film is already carved out into chapters) with material added in. There are parts within the current cut which seem like they were abruptly edited, so I could see at least some of the points where more would go. It's not that the film needs more, but operating as a TV series, I could see this working even better. There's a mystery at play and the way it executes and unfurls that mystery is quite well done, but I think would be even better in episodic form. Alas, with the release of Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood I think the extended edition got pulled from netflix, at least for now. That said, I'm in for another rewatch of that version, or even just the film again at some point in the future. It's kind of fun. Also, no gratuitous fee shots.
[1:38:14]
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And that's the QT recap. Nope, no Natural Born Killers and no Four Rooms (neither are available on streaming at the moment) but let's be fair, both of those are bottom-of-the-list dwelling features anyway.
As for ranking...I had done one before it turns out, after viewing The Hateful Eight but at that time I hadn't seen most of QT's films for years. So this one is more true, since everything is fresh (to be fair I should probably see Once Upon A Time... again before ranking it but fuck it...)
So here it is, hot, fresh, and rank...er, rankings (with movement from my last rankings in brackets):
- Pulp Fiction - of course [-]
- Kill Bill - I think I liked both "volumes" even more on rewatch [-]
- Jackie Brown - what a difference two decades make. A new favourite [+3]
- Inglorious Basterds - holding strong [-]
- The Hateful Eight - something works better watching it at home [+2]
- Death Proof - in some ways, it's the most fun QT [+2]
- Reservoir Dogs - still a pretty taut movie, but feels prototypical [-2]
- Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood - I'm not sure about this one yet [new]
- Django Unchained - I also can't believe it's fallen all the way down here, but there you go. It misses the mark in some ways. [-6]
- True Romance - bleh [-2.5]
- From Dusk 'Til Dawn - I've moved past it [-4.5]
- Four Rooms - why? [n/a]
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