A couple months ago I was having a bit of a heated discussion with a local movie rental shop owner about film directors, starting with how I believed that Danny Boyle's become dependably unwatchable (a statement I may have to retract after seeing a live broadcast of his National Theatre stage presentation of Frankenstein) and he countering back about how Tarantino's films bring him little pleasure since all he can see are the references to other films, most of which he's already seen. We went on to discuss other directors and our polarized feeling towards them, including Aronofski and Scorsese settling only upon Robert Rodriguez as neutral territory.
But it was this shop owner's comments about Tarantino that stuck with me. He praised Quentin's writing prowess as close to unrivaled, and his ability to blend music into cinema in a way few other directors adequately comprehend, but his sticking point comes down to his hyper-referential visual style. Scene after scene alluding to a famous scene of another film, or perhaps copping the style of another film director, or appropriating a tone or a song notably used elsewhere. It seemed to be too much for this gentleman I was talking with to truly appreciate the man as an artist. I surmised before the conversation drifted elsewhere that perhaps it is my age and inexperience with cinema prior to the 1980s, or the fact that Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting are the blue pills of my cinematic awakening, that I have such an indelible affection for Tarantino. It's still all so fresh to me.
But it was afterwords that I realized there was another facet of my pop cultured brain that skews me towards Tarantino's films, one that makes me far more sympathetic to those that dislike his work. Quentin Tarantino is a one man hip-hop crew of the highest caliber, unsurpassed. He's perhaps not the greatest emcee, nor the greatest DJ, but as a one-man-show, unrivaled.
It's all metaphorical, of course but I look at it this way... Tarantino's dialogue, when it hit the ground running in Reservoir Dogs, was like little the filmgoing public had seen before. Sure, there have been long-winded conversations in films in the past, but they're generally either mass exposition or meaningless drivel. Tarantino words aren't necessarily always about meaning, but about the moment, as much as its about establishing a voice, for the characters and for the film. Through his direction, he brings the words to life, not as in human life, but like plant life, scenery, atmosphere, setting. The words, in his style, establish a mood, and while what is said can be taken on its own merits it's what's happening between the words, in the character his or herself (via the actor, ultimately via the direction they're given) that matters. He's a cinematic wordsmith uniquely his own, like the greatest rhymesayers in hip-hop, notably the ones with presence. It's not just about saying the most rhymes or drawing the most analogies like some rap battler, it's about tone, inflection, rhythm, cadence... words blend and become one with the cinematic landscape, the same way the rhymes of a rapper can meld with the backing beats, synchronous harmony. A whole. One.
A rapper can freestyle without benefit of anything but the sound of their own voice, but the right DJ, the right beatmaker, can transform lyrics. Tarantino is the visual equivalent of the worlds best DJ. A DJ will take a whole record and find a snippet, a few seconds, sometimes even a fraction of a second of that record and build a loop, a backing beat, a sample that becomes the foundation of a song. Did he create the initial work? No, but he's recontextualizing that, he's making it something new, like a phoenix rising from the ashes: what was old is new again. But it doesn't stop there, one sample begets another, and another, until a song is built, sometimes it's frivolous, sometimes pulpy, sometimes energizing, sometimes a failure. Tarantino in the same way builds his films out of samples of other films. His mind is the record collection and in that collection are the thousands of films he's seen and the moments he's loved indelibly flagged, and as he's directing, he will pull out the sample that captures the moment best... and like any good DJ if there isn't a sample that will do he will make his own.
I happen to love DJ music, and part of the fun of the culture is hearing within a song something familiar, but in a way you're not familiar with it. It also works in reverse, where I can hear a classic song and for the first time recognize a familiar sample that had been removed from it. It rarely lessens the original's work, and sometimes bolsters it. Tarantino's films are the same way. As DJ doesn't use a sample unless he likes it, with no disrespect intended, nothing Tarantino does is out of irony, so a copped di Palma split screen done so out of affection. At the same time the sample is placed precisely as it should be. The Tarantino copycats who started flooding the direct-to-video shelves after Pulp Fiction don't understand that there is a time and a place for everything, and it takes a certain level of skill, nay genius, to use the samples judiciously for the proper time and scene.
Some people wouldn't call DJ's musicians, just as some hesitate to call Tarantino a filmmaker. Regardless of what one thinks of the output, DJ's make music, just as Tarantino makes films, they're just using tools and techniques that perhaps you don't like or just can't find room to appreciate. Fair enough. I get it now.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query tarantino. Sort by date Show all posts
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Friday, April 1, 2011
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
The Hateful Eight
(2015, d.Quentin Tarantino) - in 70mm
I'd been watching little else than Star Wars movies and TV shows in the 6 days prior, so I needed an adjustment to my brain, and figured a 3-hour, closed room, experimental western would do it quite rapidly. It's definitely a shock to the system, but then, regardless of the situation, a Tarantino film always is.
Tarantino single-handedly made me a cinephile with one movie. Pulp Fiction exploded my brain out of an adolescence of consuming little other cinema than '80's science fiction, comedies and kidflicks. With one film I was introduced not just to one new language on screen, but hundreds. I owe the man a great deal of thanks.
In recent years I've sort of receded into my comfort zone once again, my cinematic consumption little else than modern blockbusters and sci-fi and kid-related pictures (to tell the truth, this golden age of television we're in has taken most of my movie-watching time away), and I was kind of hoping a new Tarantino picture would once again explode my brain and kickstart a desire to love the languages of film again.
So, yes, I give Tarantino a lot of latitude when making a film, but I also have expectations, not necessarily in what it will be, but in how it will impact me...how I will feel after.
The Hateful Eight is an experience picture by design. It was shot in now obsolete Cinemascope 70mm, and for the die hards, screened as such. If a city didn't have a 70mm theatre capable of projecting it, well the Weinsteins have put on a road show (of course the film is competing for 70mm screens with The Force Awakens right now). Living in Toronto, a filmgoers mecca at this point, we assuredly have at least a few 70mm screens, but only one of them is showing the film.
The structure of the presentation borrows from epics past, with an introductory overture, (allowing Ennio Morricone's Oscar-worthy score it's solo moment to shine) and an intermission between acts. This really demands and old school single-screen cinemahouse setting, somewhere where the score kicking back in will signal the audience to return to their seats (I have to admit that the break period was definitely welcome ... it's the demands of big cineplexes in the recent past to cram as many showings in a day that has forced lengthy movies to be bladder endurance tests...but with all the home video/VOD alternatives, perhaps the intermission will make a comeback as a unique aspect in cinema).
We suffered our coldest day in Toronto this day in which I saw the film (a suddenly blistering -24 degrees Celsius in the wind) which made for a fairly immersive viewing experience of a film in which many travelers of questionable origins are trapped together in a drafty and remote Wyoming haberdashery, a raging blizzard outside. The audience (quite sizable for a Monday matinee, post-holidays) largely kept some of their protective outdoor gear on...a hat, a scarf, a coat over the legs. If the gusts of cool circulating air in the theatre were intentional as part of the screening, it's both cruel and brilliant (though I doubt it).
The film, as noted, largely takes place indoors, but its use of exteriors really hit home the glory of 70mm... unfortunately the format tends to get lost, or even prove itself excessive and extraneous with the majority of indoor sequences. It's hard to really pick out what it actually contributes to most shots. It seems like a joke, to shoot a film in ultra widescreen just to do so in one singular, very confined setting, but I bet from a creative standpoint the director enjoyed the challenges thereof... though that creative enthusiasm does not necessarily translate into something much meaningful for the audience. Some of Tarantino's other enthusiasms, like his love for Morricone and letting his stars show off a little (like Jennifer Jason Leigh strumming a morose tune on a guitar) translate a lot more effectively.
Tarantino is most widely known for his dialogue, and while the conversation here is quite endless, the dialogue at times feels weak (or, rather, plain). At other times, it's quite the opposite, hitting too extensive heights of floridness, providing too much casual profanity and racial epithets. Being sensitive to such things in a Tarantino movie seems like a "well, what did you expect?" situation, but I honestly felt certain exchanges bandying about the n-word ad nauseum were done so just as a middle finger from Tarantino to the people who keep telling him he shouldn't use it (or isn't allowed to use it). I honestly find his use in many instances character or scene-accurate (not just here but in many of his films) but also I see many uses of it as weirdly self-indulgent and he hits all sorts of uneasy lows here.
As for the story at large, it's decent, a slow burn introduction to a cast of unsavory characters, no real idiots among them, all with a potential stake in the Maguffin... that Maguffin being Leigh, whom Kurt Russell's impressively mustachioed bounty hunter is in the process of dragging in for a $10,000 reward, of which he does not want to share. Everyone he views as either a co-conspirator with Leigh or against him for the bounty. As each cast member comes in, the stakes are raised a little more, but who is who, and what's their motivation?
Through 90-plus minutes leading into the intermission it gets tense, right up until the intermission when that tension snaps. After the intermission things go off the rails... not quite to the same extent as From Dusk 'Til Dawn, but that's a fairly apt comparison for how two distinctive acts of a Tarantino-infused movie can go. I don't object to the violence, it's kind of expected...but perhaps that's just it...it's Tarantino formula to go there, in that way. I wonder why gore, not syrupy red spaghetti western blood spatter?
There are elements here that feel like a first draft put to screen, clever aspects like second-act narration (from the director) that feel like they belonged in more spots, or even certain stretches of dialog which just don't sound polished to Tarantino's usual standards. Even the length feels excessive. This is really a 2.5 hour movie (less overture and intermission) that could've been pared back at least another 20 minutes, but Tarantino had something he was going for, a feeling, an experience, which I agree he accomplished, but not to its utmost effect.
If I sound disappointed it's because this is a Tarantino film that delivers little more than a Tarantino film. One always expects gratuitous and shocking violence, provocative dialogue, top notch acting, and snappy banter out of his efforts, but usually there's something more, the truly unexpected. It is a solidly enjoyable motion picture but beyond Morricone's tremendous score, there's little here truly unexpected.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Django Unchained
2012, Quentin Tarantino -- in theatre
I don't know where to start talking about Django Unchained. With the voluminous discussion surrounding it, it's evident Tarantino has created yet another intensely provocative and divisive piece of art/trash. It is a complex film that challenges and entertains continually and consistently. It's not a perfect movie, and it's not the best movie ever made, or of the year, or even of Tarantino's oeuvre, but it's very likely the most interesting film of 2012 and of Tarantino's career, and as such will no doubt have a longevity (both in watchability and in spawning conversation/debate) that will surpass all but one percent of one percent of films made.
The subject of slavery is a largely avoided one in cinema. It's a shameful and horrifying aspect of America's past, and the resonance of its ill effects still permeates Western culture to this day. It's a part of the conversation on the systemic racism that America (but not America alone) was built upon and in many regards still carries with it. It's not deemed a marketable or bankable subject, so it gets tiptoed around or sidestepped entirely, particularly in Western entertainment. I can think of only a few pieces of modern cinema or television that deal with it in any regard (Color Purple, Amistad, Roots, Mandingo, Lincoln I guess). Quentin Tarantino isn't out to make a commentary piece, he's out to make entertainment. At the same time, he's going to confront you with the evils of oppression and people trafficking and racism, flat out. It's the backdrop of the film. Django Unchained couldn't exist without a whole lot of racists getting all worked up about a black man on a horse.
I don't know that the audience is ever supposed to feel comfortable with the word "nigger" bandied about so prolifically, but Tarantino is well aware the power of the word, and as it's bandied about around a thousand times in the film's near 3-hour run-time I'm wondering if it's more charged or diffused. Either way, it's just another uncomfortable and necessary part of the portrait of the racist old South that Django resides in. Tarantino uses that racism is used in a variety of ways. It's used for comedic effect as often as it's used for dramatic effect. It's used for suspense and body horror, it's used to provoke the audience, to offend, anger and entertain. Tarantino flexes racism around every genre convention in such a way as to dilute or amplify its potency depending on the needs of the script.
As typical for a Tarantino film, the script is fresh in its outlook, marrying the conventions of spaghetti westerns, exploitation, and revenge drama with his gifted flair for dialogue, taking what's old and making it vital again. The visual queues are a collage of other cinematic moments and homages, but largely left to those die-hard cinephiles to point out. Regardless, it's a great looking film. The structure of the script plays out in four acts, though from what I've heard, it's even been edited down despite it's current lengthy status. The first act is the liberation of Django by Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter. The second is the education and emancipation of Django, as Dr. Schultz teaches him his trade, and plays semantics with Big Daddy Bennett at his plantation. The third act is Django's empowerment, as he takes control of the grift he and Dr. Schultz set to play on Calvin Candie. The fourth act is straight up Django unleashing his fury, straight up revenge fulfillment.
Each act allows for a key scene for an actor to take over. Christoph Waltz is brilliant, and Tarantino's dialogue dances off his tongue, he controls every scene in the first act effortlessly, with a refined charm and such absence of menace that his violent actions always come as a surprise. The second act gives, oddly, Don Johnson the spotlight as the cartoonish Colonel Sanders-like Big Daddy. The act culminates in a halting, yet uproariously (and still uncomfortably) entertaining sequence about hoods and eye holes. Big Daddy is the cartoonish opposite to whom we meet in the third act. It's owned by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor whom I have little reverence for. It's a testament to Tarantino's script writing as well as directing that he finally provided a DiCaprio performance I didn't just tolerate, but actively admired. DiCaprio is filled with menace masked by a congeniality that makes him all the more evil. The final act gives over completely to Jamie Foxx who takes Django on his arduous journey. He largely services the actors and the sequences throughout much of the first three acts. He provides a presence for them to discuss, to act around, but the third act it's all Foxx, as he is gifted one BAMF (think Jules' wallet from Pulp Fiction for that acronym) moment after another. Special recognition naturally goes to Sam Jackson for his comical but viciously evil performance as Candie's longest serving slave, the reprehensible "house nigger", as Django details, who subjugates his own people for the betterment of himself and his masters. Somewhere within Jackson's performance are other, earnest emotions that defy explanation (Stockholm syndrome seems to underplay it) yet are deeply rooted in his brilliantly complex character work.
The film is as raw and violent as any of Tarantino's pictures. That should come to no surprise to anyone who's followed the director's career. He has a thing for Grindhouse sensationalism, and he employs it as deftly here as he does in every other film he's done. The mandingo fighting sequence is particularly the most shocking (out of a bevvy of shocking sequences), the casualness of the observers giving it more potency in the same vein as the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs or the Gimp sequence of Pulp Fiction. Horrible people doing horrible things with little reverence for how horrible they are.
After a few weeks of reflection, I have to say that I loved Django Unchained. There's a raw nerve exposed all throughout the lengthy run-time of the film, one that's tweaked equally with sugar and with a bracing blast of cold water. It's an experience that left me remarkably uncomfortable in how entertained I was. Others will fall further down the uncomfortable side, while others still will just be outright offended. What I was left wondering was how many were going to be entertained but for the wrong reason. How many would identify not with the protagonist, but with his oppressors. It's the most unsettling part to me, knowing that they're out there. But I like a film tremendously that can challenge and spark up a lot of intelligent discussion and debate, whether about serious stuff like violence, or racism, or less immediate topics like art and cinema. If a film can truly inspire this much smart discussion, there must be something smart about it, n'est pas?
I don't know where to start talking about Django Unchained. With the voluminous discussion surrounding it, it's evident Tarantino has created yet another intensely provocative and divisive piece of art/trash. It is a complex film that challenges and entertains continually and consistently. It's not a perfect movie, and it's not the best movie ever made, or of the year, or even of Tarantino's oeuvre, but it's very likely the most interesting film of 2012 and of Tarantino's career, and as such will no doubt have a longevity (both in watchability and in spawning conversation/debate) that will surpass all but one percent of one percent of films made.The subject of slavery is a largely avoided one in cinema. It's a shameful and horrifying aspect of America's past, and the resonance of its ill effects still permeates Western culture to this day. It's a part of the conversation on the systemic racism that America (but not America alone) was built upon and in many regards still carries with it. It's not deemed a marketable or bankable subject, so it gets tiptoed around or sidestepped entirely, particularly in Western entertainment. I can think of only a few pieces of modern cinema or television that deal with it in any regard (Color Purple, Amistad, Roots, Mandingo, Lincoln I guess). Quentin Tarantino isn't out to make a commentary piece, he's out to make entertainment. At the same time, he's going to confront you with the evils of oppression and people trafficking and racism, flat out. It's the backdrop of the film. Django Unchained couldn't exist without a whole lot of racists getting all worked up about a black man on a horse.
I don't know that the audience is ever supposed to feel comfortable with the word "nigger" bandied about so prolifically, but Tarantino is well aware the power of the word, and as it's bandied about around a thousand times in the film's near 3-hour run-time I'm wondering if it's more charged or diffused. Either way, it's just another uncomfortable and necessary part of the portrait of the racist old South that Django resides in. Tarantino uses that racism is used in a variety of ways. It's used for comedic effect as often as it's used for dramatic effect. It's used for suspense and body horror, it's used to provoke the audience, to offend, anger and entertain. Tarantino flexes racism around every genre convention in such a way as to dilute or amplify its potency depending on the needs of the script.
As typical for a Tarantino film, the script is fresh in its outlook, marrying the conventions of spaghetti westerns, exploitation, and revenge drama with his gifted flair for dialogue, taking what's old and making it vital again. The visual queues are a collage of other cinematic moments and homages, but largely left to those die-hard cinephiles to point out. Regardless, it's a great looking film. The structure of the script plays out in four acts, though from what I've heard, it's even been edited down despite it's current lengthy status. The first act is the liberation of Django by Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter. The second is the education and emancipation of Django, as Dr. Schultz teaches him his trade, and plays semantics with Big Daddy Bennett at his plantation. The third act is Django's empowerment, as he takes control of the grift he and Dr. Schultz set to play on Calvin Candie. The fourth act is straight up Django unleashing his fury, straight up revenge fulfillment.
Each act allows for a key scene for an actor to take over. Christoph Waltz is brilliant, and Tarantino's dialogue dances off his tongue, he controls every scene in the first act effortlessly, with a refined charm and such absence of menace that his violent actions always come as a surprise. The second act gives, oddly, Don Johnson the spotlight as the cartoonish Colonel Sanders-like Big Daddy. The act culminates in a halting, yet uproariously (and still uncomfortably) entertaining sequence about hoods and eye holes. Big Daddy is the cartoonish opposite to whom we meet in the third act. It's owned by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor whom I have little reverence for. It's a testament to Tarantino's script writing as well as directing that he finally provided a DiCaprio performance I didn't just tolerate, but actively admired. DiCaprio is filled with menace masked by a congeniality that makes him all the more evil. The final act gives over completely to Jamie Foxx who takes Django on his arduous journey. He largely services the actors and the sequences throughout much of the first three acts. He provides a presence for them to discuss, to act around, but the third act it's all Foxx, as he is gifted one BAMF (think Jules' wallet from Pulp Fiction for that acronym) moment after another. Special recognition naturally goes to Sam Jackson for his comical but viciously evil performance as Candie's longest serving slave, the reprehensible "house nigger", as Django details, who subjugates his own people for the betterment of himself and his masters. Somewhere within Jackson's performance are other, earnest emotions that defy explanation (Stockholm syndrome seems to underplay it) yet are deeply rooted in his brilliantly complex character work.
The film is as raw and violent as any of Tarantino's pictures. That should come to no surprise to anyone who's followed the director's career. He has a thing for Grindhouse sensationalism, and he employs it as deftly here as he does in every other film he's done. The mandingo fighting sequence is particularly the most shocking (out of a bevvy of shocking sequences), the casualness of the observers giving it more potency in the same vein as the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs or the Gimp sequence of Pulp Fiction. Horrible people doing horrible things with little reverence for how horrible they are.
After a few weeks of reflection, I have to say that I loved Django Unchained. There's a raw nerve exposed all throughout the lengthy run-time of the film, one that's tweaked equally with sugar and with a bracing blast of cold water. It's an experience that left me remarkably uncomfortable in how entertained I was. Others will fall further down the uncomfortable side, while others still will just be outright offended. What I was left wondering was how many were going to be entertained but for the wrong reason. How many would identify not with the protagonist, but with his oppressors. It's the most unsettling part to me, knowing that they're out there. But I like a film tremendously that can challenge and spark up a lot of intelligent discussion and debate, whether about serious stuff like violence, or racism, or less immediate topics like art and cinema. If a film can truly inspire this much smart discussion, there must be something smart about it, n'est pas?
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
I Want My MTB: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
[NEW FEATURE: Of the two, Toast is the book reader, but as he notes "I read slower than GRR Martin can write books". Kent, on the other hand, just "gets bored reading" so he mostly reads comics. It's the reason this blog mostly covers Movies and TV shows. We cover a lot of "Comic-to-movies/TV" or "Book-to-movie/TV" but "I Want My MTB" is for the rare "Media-to-Book" (MTB) ...for when we actually get around to reading something.]
2021 - Harper Perennial Paperback
As a late-teen I had a copy of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay for Pulp Fiction, which was maybe my all-time favourite film for a number of years (still my favourite Tarantino). As much as I don't read, I read and re-read that screenplay many, many times. The dialogue flowed so easily, reading it was effortless. It helped that I had seen the film a half-dozen times in the theatre and listened to the soundtrack regularly (fun fact, my dad asked me to make a tape of the soundtrack for him to play in his truck, the ONLY time that's ever happened). Tarantino once cited Elmore Leonard as one of his main inspirations for writing dialogue, and I've read a few Leonard novels in the many years since discovering Tarantino and can totally see the influence.
I've never read another Tarantino screenplay, mainly because I haven't connected with any of the other films in the same obsessive way. I probably should though, if only to get myself into the mindset of script writing again. But I digress...
I was listening to a recent installment of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron in which Maron was interviewing Tarantino. The episode debuted a week before Tarantino's novelization of Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood would hit the stands. Maron had read the novel...more to the point he kind of absorbed it, in a very short span of time, and was praising it as not so much an adaptation of the movie, but an extension of it, totally different than the movie, and totally entertaining. They get into the book a bit in the podcast but I was already sold from Maron's preamble. I liked but didn't love the movie...but if the book was a completely different experience than the movie, I was in. Even if it's something I'm not into, any kind of extended/alternate versions of movies/media is always intriguing to me.
Book pre-ordered. Book arrived. Book consumed rapidly (well,over a few weeks, but for me, that's really, really fast).
First, the book we're talking about is an old-school paperback, set up like a 60's or 70's-styled film adaptation novel, 400 pages, and about the size of a grown man's hand... rather than describe it, here's a picture:
Most of the books I've read over the past two decades have been in hardcover, or else an oversized paperback. I've forgotten how maneuverable a traditional paperback back book is, how easy it is to hold in one hand. It was already tweaking nostalgia buttons in so many different way before I ever read the first line.
The book is such a Tarantino production. It jumps around in time in a non-linear fashion from chapter to chapter, and has single-chapter connected asides which focus on tertiary characters, much as his films often do.
The opening chapter is 24 pages of actor Rick Dalton in his agent's office, most of which is the two men talking about movies (real and Rick's in-world films) and tough-guy action and western TV and movie stars of the era and how they compare to Rick. The second chapter follows Rick's stunt double/personal assistant Cliff Booth for 24 pages, but is mostly about his interest in films, how they differ from Rick's. There's a lot of talk about Kurasawa films and Tohsiro Mifune. It may sound laborious but it's a test of whether you're in or out.
The film doesn't labor on so profusely about movies following these two chapters, but it's living in Hollywood circa 1969, following a professional actor whose star is on the wane, and is ultimately concerned with such things as people's opinions on movies, television, music and pop culture as a guideline for who their characters are. One has to think that QT himself engages with people on this basis if this is how he engages with -- and defines -- his characters.
Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood as a film was often described as an ode to the tough guys of old that just don't exist anymore, as well as a love letter to a Hollywood long gone (both as town, and as a movie production center), its innocence shattered after what the Manson family did in 1969. It's also, in its production, an homage to so much TV and film of the 60's, as all of QT's films are, full of pastiche and reverence for so many films and filmmaking styles (and stars).
QT worked on the story for Once Upon A Time... for the better part of a decade, apparently as a novel first, not a screenplay. He built out both the world that actually was as well as inserting his own voice into it via Rick and Cliff, and their work. There were spaghetti westerns, TV shows and advertisements all featuring Rick that, it's been reported, Tarantino fully scripted out, all for what winds up as seconds in the film. There's also, apparently, hours of footage left on the floor, for as long as the film is, QT didn't want to be too over-indulgent as to lose focus on the main characters: Cliff, Rick and Sharon Tate.
But the film left a lot of questions on the table about the nature of its characters and their portrayal. Was Cliff Booth (as played by Brad Pitt) a murderer? I mean there were rumours in the film that he murdered his wife (along with the briefest of "cut-to" scenes that perhaps showed him doing the deed). But it wasn't clear cut. Certainly the controversial Grand Guignal of a finale very uncomfortably shows Cliff's aggression towards women.
There was controversy surrounding the use of Bruce Lee in the film, in a flashback scene where Rick beats up Lee in a head-to-head fight, something that family and fans (and beyond) found disrespectful to the late martial arts master and performer. Did QT intend to besmirch the Dragon just to elevate his character?
There was certainly some discourse about Tarantino's use of Sharon Tate (as played by Margot Robbie) but only receiving around a dozen lines of dialogue. Did he think so little of her?
The book, by nature of the format of storytelling, is allowed to get in the heads of these characters, to tell their stories from a far more intimate perspective. Cliff, if you remove the sexy gloss of Brad Pitt, is a disgusting, violent, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, murderous human being (and yes, he most definitely killed his wife). That he is so adoring and loyal of his friend Rick, who acts in movies like Cliff behaves in real life, but is otherwise fairly soft, full of self-doubt, and prone to fits of vulnerability and crying is a stark counterpoint. It leads to the question, does Tarantino adore these type of men, or just the cinematic representation of them? Is this story a tribute to them or a damnation? Or does it fail to take a standpoint, because QT can't separate his love for the product from the complex, often repulsive nature of these men.
Case in point, QT spends an entire chapter on real-life actor James Stacy (in the story, Rick is guest starring as the heavy in the pilot for Stacy's real-world TV show, Lancer). There is a sense of admiration that QT has for Stacy, as he notes that he would have been a better choice for certain roles, and glowingly descriptive of Stacy's handsomeness, yet, it also dives into a pettiness and there's a number of points where the author notes the presence of the child actor sitting on Stacy's lap. A quick google entry finds that - skipping past Stacy's dismembement in a motorcycle collision with a drunk driver - Stacy was prosecuted for doing bad things with kids in the early 90s. Stacy's a real piece of shit. That QT both admires him as a performer yet doesn't paint him as a great guy (though never addresses his criminal behavior head on despite jumping forward in time through others careers) is part of the confounding depth of the story of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (both book and film). He clearly loves the era, but is also not completely ignorant of the real nature of the men involved, and yet isn't directly addressing these behaviors either.
It's the complexity of being a QT fan. He's able to write these awful lines of dialogue (it's hard to forget his troublesome penchant for using the n-word), there's often a thread of misogyny, homophobia and/or racism to many of his central characters. In prose, that he's able to put his head inside someone like Cliff makes it hard to separate the thinking and thought patterns of the character from those of the author. It makes it challenging to
Sharon Tate spills out as a kind, generous, loving, upbeat, intelligent woman in the book. You actually can gather that from the film, but it's very spelled out in the novel. Tarantino clearly adores her. He shows Tate's presence in the lives of the people she knew meant their lives were better. She was aware of Hollywood's desire to portray her as sexy, and she would use that to advance herself. The scene where she goes to watch her own performance in a Matt Helm movie, in the film, has its own layers as it's Margot Robbie watching the Real Sharon Tate, a sure signifier of the artificial edifice of the film, but in the book it's in Tate's mind as she wants to get a true gauge of how her comedic performance - an extension of her acting ability she has the least confidence in - goes over in an average crowd. One of QTs mandates for the story (in both forms) was to cover over the label of victim that has defined Tate for decades, instead showing people an actress on-the-rise who was Hollywood beautiful but versaitile, and also that she was genuinely a good person, the kind the world needs to be a better place. Her kindness and good nature is in stark opposition to men like Rick and Cliff.
The infamous murder of Tate, Jay Sebring and the other visitors to her home is retconned in Tarantino's representation of 1969 Hollywood, as the "Manson family" members get the wrong house and wind up facing Cliff Booth instead, with a much different result. In the film, this is an aggressively violent sequence of Brad Pitt beating the living tar out of the intruders in a scene which ogles the violence with the same fascination of an 1970's grindhouse or Giallo. In the book this sequence -- which is the climax of the film -- is reduced to a half-paragraph jump-forward mention partway through an early chapter of the novel, another key sign early on the book experience was to be drastically different from the cinematic one.
That Bruce Lee incident gets completely recontextualized, and in its telling, having the luxury of observing from both Cliff and Lee's perspectives, notes that the reason Lee appears to have lost the fight was because he didn't want to hurt Cliff (or rather that he couldn't hurt Cliff or he may have been fired from The Green Hornet), but that Cliff had absolutely zero compunction about hurting Lee. As well QT gets into how Cliff suckered Lee, and Lee knew it, only too late. It acquits Lee in the loss, but also serves to re-up Cliff's awful nature. It's nuance the film isn't able to cover (and perhaps shouldn't have even been in the film at all?).
Charles Manson is more of a spectre that haunts the film, but has much more of a presence in the novel. QT is of the generation to have a perverse fascination with the cult leader, and did the research to get in his head. The boogeyman that only scared people after being put away is very much demystified here, as a small man with big ambitions as a musician only to fail and fumble his way into leading lost and wayward teens. He would trick them out in his quest to advance his career,and keeping them pliable via a steady diet of drugs and philosophical platitudes. Under the guise of free love and anti-establishment counter-culture, he was a true predator who preyed on the people whom he then taught how to prey upon others. There are sequences here that further integrate Manson into the story QT is telling, sequences that flesh out the events of the film even more. The intonation of the story seems to be that for all the disgusting things Cliff is, at least he's not Charlie Manson.
As well, QT gets into the actual story of the pilot of that Lancer television series, obviously a fictional pilot versus the one that got made, but it equates for two full chapters, told as a narrative rather than relayed as a meta narrative (in the final chapter of the novel, QT writes Rick as Rick as well as his Lancer character, exemplifying how actors dissappear into their roles). It's actually one of the most engaging aspects of the books, these sudden divergences into a very pulpy 60's western. I won't be surprised if there's a completed 90-minute Lancer screenplay that QT has written, ready to take this forgotten series and rebirth it. The only thing he's missing is the stars of the 60's. These Lancer chapters may be the least Tarantino-esque things Tarantino has ever written since he has to adhere to 60's network TV storytelling norms.
The oddest aspect of the book is QT's decision to insert himself into it, twice within the last 50 pages. In the same chapter, he makes reference to a character's future acting career, and inserts that character into three fictional movies from real directors, including "Quentin Tarantino's 1999 remake of the John Sayles script for the gangster epic The Lady In Red" (another Google search reveals Sayles wrote the screenplay for the 1979 Lewis Teague movie The Lady In Red). Later that same chapter, Cliff, Rick and Lancer star Jim Stacy go out for drinks and meet Quentin's real-life stepfather who then gets Rick to sign an autograph for his son "Quint...Quentin". Unpacking this crossover of reality into fiction (which ostensibly is the whole Once Upon A Time In Hollywood story) seems cute, but is this just a sign of Quentin's desire to be a part of the late-60's Hollywood story? Is the intonation that Hollywood would have been different had the Manson Family murders been prevented destroyed by noting that The Lady In Red is still a screenplay, and that various other films like Melvin and Howard, Prizzi's Honor and Boys Don't Cry all still exist? This kind of cheeky Stephen King-ish metatext only confuses things. Then again, QT often would insert himself into his own films as a character, maybe to the detriment of those films, so is this less egregious?
I found Once Upon A Time In Hollywood to be an effortless read, challenged only by the ugly thoughts of 1960's-era men and the perpetual need to see whether what QT is writing about is real or made up (so many Google searches performed in the reading of this book). QT's dialogue is as deft as ever, but his prose is equally fluid. There's always a sense that the writer is fully engaged at all times with what is being written. Nothing feels labored over here, surprisingly, given the novel's gestation period. I don't know that it satisfies as a stand-alone novel (having seen the film already, it's too hard to judge) but as a companion to the film, it fleshes it out even further, deepens and adds context to sequences that played differently without it. It's perhaps best described as a novel of deleted and extended scenes.
The more I think about it, however, the more I wonder what QT is actually trying to say about Hollywood 1969, beyond the fact that he wishes he were a part of it. I don't think he's lamenting its loss, or trying to damn it... I even hesitate to say he's trying to come to some sort of understanding about his fascination with - or relationship to - the era. The fact that he has Roman Polansky and Jim Stacy as two lauded characters in his book, but with their future criminal lives as predators of children left out, (not to mention a strip tease from an underage girl in the car with Cliff) makes for complicated consideration of just what is QT trying to say.
I get the sense that there's more Once Upon A Time In Hollywood material for QT to flesh out, more that he could do with it, that there's still other avenues for facets of the story or the setting to appear. Time will tell.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
10 for 10: Rewatching Tarantino [and then a ranking]
[10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes
apiece to write about. Part of our problem is we don't often have the
spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie
--or TV show-- we watch. How about a 10-minute non-review full of
half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]
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!)
---
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]
---
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]
---
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)
---
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]
---
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]
---
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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With Django Unchained we enter the realm of QT films I've already written about on this site. But the purpose here isn't to reiterate what I've said before, but to measure my impressions now, in a quick 10 minute writing session. And so, to be perfectly honest, I was a bit disappointed with this rewatch. Django as a character has an almost legendary status now... the film ends with him triumphant in killing all the southern degens and rescuing his true love, and he feels epic at the end, but the rest of the film is only marginally about him. It's three acts of exploits, first with Christoph Waltz's King rescuing Django and taking him under his tutelage in the craft of bounty hunting, then venturing out to mess with Don Johnson's southern fried estate, and finally winding up at Candy Land where Django and King square off against Leonardo DiCaprio's vile Candy. In these exploits you can see the legend of Django building, but it's still not his show. It's not until the fourth act where Django frees himself and gets his revenge that the real legend of a true badass mofo is born. It's an origin story. QT has said he will never do a superhero movie but here, he's basically done it already. I mean, QT has already plotted a Django/Zorro team-up comic which may come to fruition as a film soon enough, but we really need a Django movie that immortalizes the character into grand status. This underbakes the legend, leaving it a little soft in the middle. It's also really self-indulgent, as I think we've gathered QT's movies all are.
[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):
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!)
---
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]
---
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]
Thursday, August 13, 2026
KWIF: a grab bag of film across decades
KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. I suppose the big watch of this week is the long-awaited release of Kill Bill as a single feature, but, well, we'll get into it. The best watch this week was certainly The Outfit, but I think I may have been one of very few who were eager to get the new Arrow blu-ray in my grubby little hands.
This Week:
In the Blink of an Eye (2026, d. Andrew Stanton - disney+)Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2004, d. Quentin Tarantino - blu-ray)
Mars Attacks! (1996, d. Tim Burton - tubi)
Def-Con 4 (1985, d. Paul Donovan, Digby Cook - tubi)
Def-Con 4 (1985, d. Paul Donovan, Digby Cook - tubi)
The Outfit (1973, d. John Flynn - blu-ray)
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This film takes place in three different time periods. The first is in 47,000 BC, which follows the life of neanderthal Thorn (Jorge Vargas), his pregnant mate Hera (Tanaya Beatty), and his children Lark (Skywalker Hughes, real name) and Ebb. The second tracks the life of anthropology grad student Claire Robertson (Rashida Jones) and her relationship with stats major Greg (Daveed Diggs) in modern times. The third takes place aboard a space ship in the 2400s with Coakley (Kate McKinnon) making a centuries-long trip to a new planet with the fate of humanity at stake, her only companion the onboard AI Rosco (also Rashida Jones...I think?).
There's not a specific storyline being told across these three eras, but more exploring all the elements of what it means to live, to be human. There family bonds, and romantic bonds, and friendship. There's fear and anxiety, there's pain, physical and emotional. There's sex and pleasure and awkwarness. There's birth, and death, there's disease and healing, there's community and evolution, support and trade, and so much more.
The film presents this journey through these moments of existence without any specific linear narrative to them as a whole, thought there are arcs for the characters, each whose stories span decades. Stanton and screenwriter Colby Day present parallels across the three different eras such that what one character is going through in one era, another is dealing with something similar in a different era. The point obviously being that these human conditions are eternal and not unique to any specific time or reality.
These jumps across time aren't always the cleanest or clearest (for instance, I didn't pick up on the fact that Claire and Greg were supposed to be students, not professors or researchers or whatever, basically playing about 20 years younger when we first meet them), but even if some of the nuance is lost, it's not hard to track the emotional storytelling Stanton is working towards.
It's all underpinned by a Thomas Newmann score which is ever present and would be just as suitable for a relaxing massage or a yoga session. It's truly a vibes based movie, there's no heighted drama nor any specific action to raise the blood pressure. It's rapid journey through time across eras is meant to be reflective, not impactful, and at times I was genuinely moved by what I was feeling. That said, I was also bored at times. Both can be true.
It's so specifically constructed that it seems that Stanton achieved exactly what he wanted with this, but it's no WALL-E or Finding Nemo.
In the Blink of an Eye has not been a warmly received movie critically and it's already been buried in the Disney+ streaming catalogue to the point that it seems the only way to find it is to search for it directly. I don't know that it deserves to be so quickly dismissed, but it's also such a specific mood piece that I find it hard to recommend.
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And now, after a brief theatrical run (which I missed due to life's poor timing), The Whole Bloody Affair is here on 4k/Blu-ray and...it really doesn't feel that different than watching Kill Bill as two separate movies.
This home video release still breaks the film up across two discs, but instead of there being closing credits after the Bride's wintery duel with O-ren Ishii, it cuts to an intermission title card and song. Unlike back in the laserdisc days where a screen caption would instruct you to flip the disc or insert the next one, here, after the intermission ends the disc cuts back to the menu screen. Sub-optimal. Disc two then autoplays on its own jumping right into the longer portion of the film.
I've always enjoyed the first "volume" of Kill Bill more than the second. The first 110 minutes are so propulsive, energetic and dazzling, with incredible choreographed fight sequences and a flashy anime sequence exploring O-Ren's backstory (what became readily apparent in the recompiling of the two volumes is that this whole bloody affair winds up being a 4-hour-plus movie. None of the other characters get such a detailed back story as O-Ren, not even Beatrix Kiddo, so the whole anime backstory feels utterly extraneous when presented as a single unit).
The next 140 minutes (credits are 20 minutes of that, including both end credit sequences from Volumes 1 & 2) are much, much slower paced, all leading the the final hour where The Bride finally finds Bill, spends time with the child she didn't know survived, and then, fulfills the title contract. There are some excellent moments in this. The Bride's flashback to her 1-inch-punch training and her escape from her buried coffin, her fight with Elle Driver in that trailer home, and Thurman's excellent performance upon seeing her child for the first time. But when there's a four-hour run-time Budd's sorry life at the strip club or Bill's extended speechifying (especially his whole "Superman" speech) feels like unnecessary indulgence from the director.
I still really like Kill Bill generally, but somehow, for me, it worked better as two films than one. Two films feels like it has the appropriate room to breathe. As one, I start checking the clock and contemplating what seems unnecessary.
I have covered Tarantino a fair amount on this blog, including a full rewatch and ranking back in 2019 (just after Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood premiered) where I ranked Vol 1&2 as a whole in second place of Tarantino's works. I'm not sure I would put it in that same position now (probably bumped down to 4th).
I don't think I've watched a Tarantino movie since I wrote that rewatch and ranking post (though I read his books, and I did listen to his podcast until it went up behind a paywall). Part of it is I've been more focused on new experiences with my film watching this decade, and the other part is, I think, maybe my fandom has tempered in my middle age. Perhaps Tarantino's shift from filmmaker to film critic/podcaster (aka the Kevin Smith track) lessens the allure. Perhaps his lack of new features lessens my interest to revisit the old ones. Perhaps I was sated with 25 years of fandom and I've moved on. Perhaps I've seen roughly a thousand movies since I did that rewatch and ranking and I'm more versed in Tarantino's influences and I'm starting to see the seams. We'll see how I feel about the Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood pseudo-sequel Cliff Booth Tarantino wrote and David Fincher directed this fall.
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There was only so much story to tell in adapting a series of trading cards into a movie, but Burton's enthusiasm for this production seems to rival his earliest efforts like Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice.
I only have a passing familiarity with the trading cards, but it seems evident by the film's lack of direct narrative coherence that Burton was using the imagery from the cards as his guide in constructing the project.
While it flirts with the idea of being a Dr. Strangelove-esque political/social satire, it doesn't commit that hard to the bit. It wants to have too much fun with the "Ack-ack"-ing aliens (watching with the subtitles on and reading along is great!) and their giddy bloodlust for the destruction of the human race, alongside their many institutions and totems.
The digital effects, still pretty new at rapidly evolving the time, have a clumsiness to them that, I'm sure in 1996 and 2006 and probably 2016 seemed kind of atrocious compared to the advances in the technology that would follow, but in 2026 the clumsiness of the digital effects is part of the charm. Just as the film itself was throwing back to the 1950's, now it feels like the effects are a part of the intentional throwback charm.
There's a rich celebrity roster here, with Jack Nicholson taking the forefront in two roles, one as the president of America, the other as a rich Texan looking to get into the casino game in Vegas. Glenn Close plays the wife of the former, while Annette Benning is the partner of the latter. Natalie Portman is the First Daughter, while Michael J Fox and Sarah Jessica Parker play a couple who are also competing news reporters. Lucas Haas is a sweet rural kid who loves his grandma with dementia, while his 'Murica-loving trailer-park parents played by Joe Don Baker and O-Lan Jones disapprove of his sweetness and wish he was more like his jarhead brother, played by very young Jack Black (Christina Applegate plays Jack Black's girlfriend in pretty much an unspeaking role). Legends Jim Brown and Pam Grier play an estranged couple, Rod Steiger is a pro-war military general, Pierce Brosnan is a peace-loving scientist, Danny DeVito, Tom Jones, Martin Short, Salma Hayak and more also appear. It's just a ridiculously stacked cast playing characters who have no real ark, almost all serving the purpose as being laser-fire fodder for the aliens (voiced by Frank Welker).
The joy of Mars Attacks! is the unfettered glee of the ultra silly aliens joyously destroying humanity (they're proto-Minions in their comically violent antics), and then conversely the icky fun of seeing these nuisance creatures heads get squishe or splattered into a spray of green goo.
It's pure ridiculousness, right up until the notorious finale when it's discovered that Slim Whitman's warble is the alien's surprise weakness (it's a delightful play on War of the Worlds mundane fix for the invasion, and a far better turn than, say, Signs). Don't think too hard about anything, in fact don't think at all.
This thing should be in the Criterion Collection and I should have it in the binders.
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The box art for Def-Con 4 was a staple in every video store I can remember going to (were Canadian video shops mandated to have this as part of their Canadian Content?) That image of the downed satellite looming large in the background and a space suit with a skeleton inside in the foreground I'm sure was responsible for thousands of thousands of rentals. I never did get to it though. Perhaps the reputation that the movie didn't live up to the box art spread across playground and high school hallways?
Def-Con 4 was brought up recently in an interview with Blackberry/Nirvanna The Band The etc... director Matt Johnson and that image immediately flooded my mind. In my (unfortunately only) recent interest in Canadian film I put it on the to-watch list.
It's a garbage nonsense movie about the end of civilization as we know it. It starts in space as a crew aboard a defence satellite catch word that Libya has hijacked a US ship armed with nuke and are setting them off. Or something. They eventually respond unleashing their payload. Humanity is decaying rapidly under the fallout, or, at least, TV has gone off the air (same thing).
This opening sequence which simultaneously moves too quickly and drags on far too long, seems like its setting up the film's trio of astronaut protagonists, and trying to give us something akin to insight into their motivations for being on this mission in space and hints as to their life back home, but it's so awkwardly written, we're not ever sure what we're supposed to take from all this jumbled info. One of the crew, Commander Cecil Howe, wants to return back to his wife (even though she's been quarantined for some illness and the baby is dead and the radiation is going to kill everyone anyway). But after re-entry they crash land off-course and on a beach. One of them is taken immediately by cannibals, J.J. is left inside unconscious and concussed while Howe looks for help.
Howe is immediately captured by Vinny McKinnon (Maury Chaykin) who threatens to kill him, but he decides to make a trade for supplies on his capsule. Vinny has also kidnapped Alice (Donna King) , and now we have our trio of protagonists who... oh, nevermind. They get kidnapped by a military regime led by a petty, preppy high school student (Kevin King) who is mostly just upset his girlfiend (Alice) left him.
This post-apocalyptic wasteland is so, so pathetic as to be far more banal than scary. The rhythms of this are so familiar (it's somehow not all that different than, like, 28 Days Later) and yet it's so underbaked as to basically be raw elements with little to no investment in the characters. The only real drama is the tension between teenagers Gideon Hayes and Alice and they're like the fourth and fifth leads of this film.
Its Canadianness shines through in, mostly, the worst ways possible, mostly in production value, but also scripting and performance and editing where it feels like multiple takes were just not possible within the budget so they had to deal with what one or two takes got them (I don't know this for sure, but that's sure what it seems like).
The only redeeming quality of this is one absolutely out of place scene where Howe catches some bad guys by surprise and tells them at gunpoint to get off the boat, and then the guys keep reaching for their guns and Howe keeps telling them to stop reaching for the guns. It's a silly farce that seems straight out of The Naked Gun, and I can only imagine how entertaining this would have been had they leaned into this type of humour throughout. Alas.
That poster, though, remains incredible.
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There are a few adaptations that are just out there, readily available, from the two versions of Payback, the awful Jason Statham film, to the stone cold classic Lee Marvin joint Point Blank ,to the most recent attempt I can't bring myself to watch (yet). Then there's the ones you have to deep dive for, like Slayground, Made in the USA, Pillaged, The Split and this one, The Outfit.
Robert Duvall isn't exactly the mind's eye perfect Parker (or Parker analog). The character is described as a big, broad beast of a man, shaggy and expressionless. The only actor who has portrayed him that really fits the description is Lee Marvin, but even then, he's maybe not as dangerous looking as Westlake described him. I'm not exceptionally experienced with Duvall's filmography, but everything I have seen him in, he's been incredible. I don't think he could take a wrong step if he tried. He's a true character actor, disappearing into a role. There's no specific type for Duvall, as such, despite lacking height or width or the big block fists described on the page, Duvall's Eddie Macklin kind of makes for the most screen accurate Parker in every other context.
Macklin is so, so cold in this film, but for the briefest moments of fleeting humanity, where an errant emotion flashes on his face but then disappears. We meet Macklin coming out of jail, being picked up by a former lover, Bett (Karen Black), who informs him that his brother's been murdered. She was responsible for giving him up after being tortured. The Outfit, it turns out, was not happy with the fact that Macklin, his brother and their accomplice Cody (Joe Don Baker) hit one of their crooked banks. They're sending a message to everyone.
But Macklin has his own sense of propriety and justice. After getting the jump on some outfit goons he sends a message back. Either they pay up 250K for murdering his brother, or else he keeps hitting them, and hitting them hard, doing what no right-minded thief would do. A joint is a joint, and they all can be hit up. All's fair as far as Macklin's concerned. The heat bears down on him, Cody and Bett, but if he feels it he doesn't let on, and while Bett wants to get out, Cody is ride-or-die. It's not that he's a tactical genius or that shrewd in his calculating. He's just determined to get what he wants, his drive and motivation trump anything else.
While not the most elegantly directed movie, nor the prettiest, Duvall leads a pretty exceptional cast on a an uncommon journey. Knowing that Macklin doesn't have a plan gives the story an anything-can-happen vibe and you're never quite sure what's next on the agenda, or at times, exactly how Macklin is going to get out of a situation. Whatever the code is that he operates by has an internal logic in the film, and it creates ample surprises and unique moments.
I've been searching for The Outfit for some time, and the new Arrow Video release, full of special features diving into Westlake's history as well as the film's history makes for a very welcome release. It's maybe not a "classic" in the strictest sense but it's certainly a forgotten gem worthy of rediscovery.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Rewatch: Inglorious Basterds
2009, Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) -- Netflix
I was compelled to rewatch the movie after we (Marmy and me, not Kent and me) semi-binged the British show SAS Rogue Heroes on Amazon. The show is about the formation and deployment of the British 1st Special Air Services (SAS), first in Africa, and then in Italy. The 1st SAS, according to the show, were an infamous group of commandoes tasked with, at first, the destruction of German air bases and equipment, and later as a raiding force ahead of the main forces in Europe. The shows depicts them as reckless, insubordinate and... mad as hatters. It was their distain for authority and normal British warfare style that made them so effective, so much so that Hitler himself learned of them and demanded the Geneva Conventions not apply to them -- they were to be executed on sight, surrender or not.
The "Inglorious Basterds" of the Tarantino movie were an American commando squad made up of Jewish soldiers, and a few German traitors, who were also dropped behind enemy lines to sow chaos and terror among the German forces. Except, and I recall this being a disappointment to me during my first watch, the movie is not really about the actions they perform to gain that reputation. Its about a singular rewrite of history that ends the war, and gets most of them killed.
Tarantino movies are all about conversations, usually across tables, usually about people not fond of each other. There is always at least one scene where someone monologues, in a self-satisfactorily manner, to other people. In my early Tarantino-fan days, it was exactly this that made me love his movies. Dialogue! Words! People with some thoughts between their ears! And the joy of the actor getting into the scene. Col Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, Spectre) was a horrible person, utterly reprehensible, but this movie put Waltz on the map for English audiences. He was a "joy" to listen to.
But I would almost say that too much of this movie is about these conversations. Maybe my tastes have changed, but I did get the repeat of disappointment that the actual Basterds played such a small part in the movie, and some die far too early before we get to have fun with them. Its almost unfair to them, as long as you ignore that their final mission ends the war and burns down much of the evil with it.
I find myself struggling, almost on the side of being entirely unsatisfied with the movie. I fear my tastes have become more pedestrian, but I am not sure I liked the overall. The individual parts of the movie, the dialogues and the other conversational set pieces are brilliant unto themselves, but the whole is... lacking. The movie is all about the ending, the re-writing of history, a fictional final conflagration that takes down Hitler and all his key leadership, with glorious ultra-violence. The build-up almost seems... incidental. I find much of the movie, and this seems harsh coming from my brain, wasteful and indulgent.
For example, the French basement pub scene. Its a wonderful scene of taught worry and subterfuge. Even when the British spies are caught, there is a lovely tension of, "will they, won't they...." and we wonder who will come out of it all. Well, nobody does. Sure, Bridget von Hammersmark (Dianne Kruger, The Bridge) crawls away with a single leg wound, but then she later dies ignobly at the hands of Landa. And yet the plans, seemingly going awry, carry off as intended. All of Lt Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt, Fury) men die sacrificial deaths, but he gets away, with Landa, purely so he can disfigure Landa, participating very little in the final acts of the operation. And I am left being not sure why, on many levels.
At a first-experience, a viewing in the cinema, it was a well-executed, beautifully shot, well-spoken Tarantino example. But it didn't hold up to rewatch scrutiny.
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