Critical Analysis: Quentin Tarantino • Page 2

I've never seen True Romance

 

Dude, get on that!

 

I know I know lol

 

Same. Also haven't seen Jackie Brown.

 

Rewatching Kill Bill 1, I think it's my least favorite Tarantino movie. I can't even explain why in detail TBH. I remember liking 2 a lot more, but haven't seen it since it was in theaters and will be watching it again later. Maybe its how straightforward it is and how more dense Pulp Fiction and JB was and all his stuff starting with IB has been. I just don't care about any of the characters - they feel more cartoony and less interesting. I guess the same could be said of the ones in TR, but they felt more believable, relatable and grounded to me and the quirky humor is there more, I dunno.

 

Reservoir Dogs (along with Dazed and Confused) is the film that got me into watching cinema seriously. My cousin had the VHS lying around one day and I was intrigued by the cover. I must've watched RD 100 times before I hit 8th grade. I bought the soundtrack, forced it upon all of my friends and memorized the dialogue. It's definitely one of the most influential films in my life, and while it might not be his most technically proficient, interesting or tight, it holds a very special place in my heart.

Pulp Fiction is a behemoth, a film that impacted popular culture so much that it's become cliche to gush over it, yet every time it's on, I find myself transfixed with how well the film flows and intertwines the stories of the characters. I'd call this his opus.

Jackie Brown is a wonderful film that gets better with age.
The Kill Bill films are entertaining but not really my bag.
Death Proof is unrightfully maligned and remains an entertaining film, a lot of interesting shots in that one that still stick with me.
Basterds is so good that it can be argued as his best film. So many scenes stick out, so many strong characters, such wonderful writing etc. etc. etc.

Django and H8 are definitely missteps, in my opinion. Django had some interesting moments with DiCaprio's character, but I always find QT tackling racism to be super uncomfortable.
Hateful 8 was way longer than it needed to be with no real payoff. The "dingus" scene could be a lowpoint in Tarantino's career. I was a bit dumbfounded as I left the theater that that was pretty much the staple speech of the entire film. Some late-career Kevin Smith shit there.
It'd be a shame if he keeps going to the Western route, I'd love to see QT tackle "modern" day, so to speak, with whatever genre picture he chooses.

True Romance is a personal favorite of mine as well. I used to wish that Tarantino directed the film, but I think Scott's picture was much more restrained and beautiful compared to what QT would've done, and that works for the film.

 

Jackie Brown is such a great movie, the cast is just about perfect.

 

A couple films I haven't seen mentioned that are favorites of mine besides the obvious choices are Death Proof and From Dusk Til Dawn. A lot of people say they can't get into Death Proof because it's mostly dialogue but it's so well written, and people act like that's not a Quentin Tarantino thing. From Dusk Til Dawn was just straight brutal and gory, I loved it. I was never a big fan of George Clooney, but his role in that movie changed my views on him lol.

 

Did Tarantino write FDtD? I know he starred in it.

 

Yes

 

I really want to re watch Grindhouse. Tarantino and Rodriguez both did a great job imo.

 

Death Proof is great, it's just the lower tier of his films IMO. Just shows how great he is. I enjoyed the theatrical cut better, it was shorter (I guess because it was shown with a another film) but the cut on DVD goes on a little too long.

FDtD is soooo good. Kind of wish he acted a little bit more instead of just his cameos.

 

I agree, he's pretty good at acting and he's a funny dude, especially in FDtD. At least we got to see him star in at least one movie. Who knows, maybe once he's retired from directing he'll act more. We can only hope.

 

I hope that day ever comes though Esp if he does a tv mini series on HBO, Netflix of something like that.

I forgot he also had a cool part that's more than just a cameo in 4 Rooms.

Also your name/pic is so awesome.

 

Jackie Brown is probably the film farthest from Tarantino's style, but it shows a director who is able to fully realize his talent. After the minor success of Reservoir Dogs and enormous success of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was able to do whatever he wanted. He may still have been focusing on crime and a moving timeline, the film has the most three-dimensional characters of any of his films. Tarantino's films are always tied to genre homages, and as a result many of his characters are very broad types. Jackie Brown is the most human of all Tarantino characters; someone who never made anything of herself, struggling to get by, but with enough skill to manipulate the people around her with more formal power but less mental strength. Tarantino underplays the race and gender angle, but it is unmistakable that both society and the characters underestimate her based on gender, race, and even class. How can this black flight attendant be a threat? Even Odell underestimates her based on race and gender. While everyone is hyper-aware of making sure modern films check off as many boxes as possible, Tarantino centered his film around a black actress that no one had thought about for years. It is also the rare adult romance in a Tarantino film.

Kill Bill, by contrast, focuses far less on the fact that its protagonist is female. All of the assassins are female except one, and he is portrayed as the most pathetic, likely only getting the job by virtue of being Bill's brother. We never even see a prominent male character fight the Bride. Several older patriarchal characters (Hattori Hanzo, Pai Mei, the male nurse, Esteban) look down on her, but the men who know her and the other female fighters know better. Tarantino does make the point of giving The Bride a more maternal reason for wanting revenge; she is primarily concerned with getting revenge for the death of her baby, and her baby was the reason she wanted to retire from a dangerous life that she never previously worried about. If The Bride was a male character, he would be trying to get revenge for his lover (Django Unchained); The Bride does not seem to even give a second thought to her potential husband's death. Even with this subtext, Kill Bill can be best identified as the beginning of Tarantino committing to making films entirely as a deconstruction of the genre they spring from.

 

Very nice write up! Can't disagree with anything really.

 

If he ever had a series on HBO it would hands down be one of the greatest series to ever appear on that channel.

Thank you! It's funny because a lot of people at first thought I was going to be a troll and were surprised at genuine and real I was lol.

 

@Morrissey has written so much so well about Tarantino that I'm not sure how much I have to add. Inglourious Basterds and Jackie Browne are probably my personal favorites, while Pulp Fiction is the undeniable masterpiece it is.

I think Django Unchained and the Hateful Eight are great films, but films that do suffer some flaws. Much of that might be the loss of Sally Menke, I think that's especially felt in Django. Django might feel like the less tightly paced and focused of all his films, especially towards the end. I thought the Hateful Eight was a marvelous improvement, taking the expectations he built with Kill Bill, Basterds, and Django of revenge thrillers and subverting them with such a bleak and horrible film where there is no moment of triumph, where there is no cathartic victory like the hilarious death of Hitler in Basterds or the explosion of Candie's mansion in Django. Instead, when that film comes to its climax, two hateful, horrible, racist, sexist men are lynching a hateful, horrible, racist white woman, and even they die anyway. I really love that reading of the film, and I even buy the "dingus" speech, I think Hateful Eight is one of our greatest actors greatest performances in Samuel L. Jackson.

While I really, really enjoy Django, the dynamic between Christoph Waltz's character and Django always felt unbalanced to me. If this is really a slave revenge movie, why does Waltz get so much of the triumph? Django sets out to rescue his wife from a cruel and horrible slave owner, and Waltz is the one who actually kills Candie. It might be trying to say something extremely complex and nuanced by having Waltz handle the face of white slave owners, then leaving Django to confront Samuel L. Jackson's character, which might be an attempt at an incredibly touchy and complex statement on different aspects of blackness, with Jackson's character representing the black identity subservient to whiteness, and Django having to deal with that. As said though, the end of that film gets a little messy and I'm not sure Tarantino is qualified to tackle that issue coherently.

 

I think Django might be his weakest film but I do really enjoy the two main characters. Django confronting SLJ was certainly an attempt to portray the disdain many black people have for those they consider "Uncle Toms" (whether or not he should be writing that type of stuff as a white director is another issue). Further, I think Waltz killing Candie served more as a statement to Waltz's character rather than Waltz simply triumphing over Candie. It wasn't really about Waltz winning the day.

Hateful Eight I did find to be a great film. The fact that the "blank dingus" speech makes so many people uncomfortable is great because it highlights racism, homophobia and destroys white machismo, not just within the audience, but with the other characters listening to the speech.

 

Death Proof is a film that was unfairly maligned critically, but it was also hampered by the structure of the theatrical release. The decision to release the film as part of the Grindhouse package ultimately cheapens the film. as Grindhouse is a very different exploitation film than Planet Terror or the fake trailers. The others rely heavily on humor, so it is a bit of a shock sitting in a 2007 movie theater and sitting in over an hour of absurdist humor, only to be dropped into a slow build-up to action. This is made even worse by the structure of Death Proof itself, which is essentially two different stories. After over two hours of sitting in a theater, the characters you had gotten to know are entirely killed off, and it starts all over? This is simply a bad way to move an audience along.

Watching Death Proof years later, cut away from the rest of Grindhouse, reveals much more clearly Tarantino's skills and what he intended to bring to the grindhouse genre. The split of the film becomes wholly effective, deconstructing our pre-conceived notions of plotting and character shields. The cast of women survive long enough that we are led to believe that at least some of them will survive the film, or at the very least the film would end when their survival did. This is how a typical film would work; Stuntman Mike might pick off some unnamed women, or perhaps the blonde woman he takes with him in the car, but the other girls would survive for some period of time. Stuntman Mike would certainly be dangerous and we would worry about the girls, but in the back of our heads we would expect him to fail. By succeeding without consequence, it completely washes away that safety we feel. Too many modern movies telegraph where things are going, but my previously tricking us, Tarantino makes the car chase feel like there authentic stakes. Something rarely talked about is the power of the ending, where the three girls take turns beating Stuntman Mike to death after destroying his car and breaking his arm. In the context of these characters alone, this does not make sense and is cruel. He was already fleeing, he is incapacitated, and he is even lying motionless on the ground before they decide to smash in his skull with a kick. However, as an audience, we do not feel this, as we know him as the murderer who likely has many more victims that we do not know about. The characters that kill him do not know this, but it becomes a symbolic fight back by women against male sexual violence and male dominance.

Tarantino calls Inglourious Basterds his masterpiece through the mouth of Aldo Raine, and he is correct. It is a film that should not have worked, with Brad Pitt and Michael Myers acting so foolishly and Tarantino jumping into the most filmed historical event in history. It is almost pointless to talk about the film at length, as it has been dissected endlessly, but something that should be recognized is the suicidal drive of the protagonists. Tarantino characters are not usually altruistic, preferring to do things only to the benefit of themselves. When Butch and Marcellus decide to leave each other alive at the end of Pulp Fiction, it is more because they are tired of that day than anything else. Here, we see open heroism in the face of overwhelming danger. Shoshanna is passing as a Gentile and could easily be another Vichy cooperator, but she cannot let the carnage go unpunished. Because she is killed in the argument with the soldier, we do not get to see the reality of what would have happened after the theater started burning, where either the guards in the lobby or the guards outside the theater would have grabbed her. The Basterds are even more fatalistic, openly operating as suicide bombers. The Basterds themselves just seem to enjoy killing, but the Bear Jew is plainly driven by his background. Eli Roth is mocked for his acting in the film, and he does deliver some lines really poorly, but there are two moments that make the film a powerful revenge fantasy for the Jewish people: first, when he rhetorically asks the man he beats to death if he likes to kill Jews, and second, when his face loses all humanity as he continues to unload his bullets into Hitler's face. As the plan had changed radically after the theater caught fire and Shoshanna started the fire, he and Omar could have unstrapped their bombs and tried to get out of there, but he is not even thinking about self-preservation at that point. The Bear Jew is his identity in this continent, and his purpose ends with the end of the Third Reich. Tarantino does not give you a lot of time to think about this, as the grotesque vision of Hitler's face ripping from each bullet and people comically flying out of the windows with the Wilhelm Scream come next, but it works because of how revenge-focused we knew Tarantino to be over his last few films.

 

I love the use of The Meters in Jackie Brown. What a great band.

 

The deaths of the girls in Death Proof/Mike's death always stuck with me. I'm unsure why so many people couldn't strip away Planet Terror and enjoy DP as a whole, but whatever

 

I haven't watched Death Proof since it came out, I need to revisit it.

 

There has never been a pressing feeling to watch Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight again, even though the topic has led to me wanting to re-watch every other Tarantino film (and True Romance) despite seeing most of them several times before. They represent the worst of Tarantino excesses; Django Unchained has two endings, The Hateful Eight uses flashbacks that ruin the pace of the main narrative, and both play too loose with racial issues in a time where people are becoming increasingly aware about the ways in which our words and the media can denigrate people. This has been one of those things people have had to put up with for Tarantino's entire career, such as wondering why he decided to cast himself as a minor character who uses a term like "Dead ****** Storage" in front of a black hitman. The typical defense was two-fold: these characters are not supposed to be considered the good guys, and this is the way people talk. It was a small enough part of the films to gloss over, but it comes to a head in the two recent films. The tremendous success of Inglourious Basterds guaranteed enormous budgets for his future movies and the belief that he could take on "big" issues. However, in Django Unchained he uses racist comments as humor rather than a call to action. When you ask people what they remember most about the film, it is the Uncle Tom Samuel L. Jackson character and the open racism of the white characters. Django himself is barely a character, allowing other people to guide him along and then allowing the villains to become the most memorable characters. While Hans Landa was the most riveting character of Inglourious Basterds, Hitler and Goebbels are just minor players for the protagonists to deal with. The Hateful Eight continues this desire to become topical, but people talk about the racial attitudes in much the same way. In both films, Tarantino still knows how to intrigue people, but he does not know where to guide them to. They are better than most films directors put out, but it is a definite low point in his career.

 

As someone who isn't offended or always thinking about political correctness, I just enjoy his fiction as entertainment and I think that's what his goal is, not to start a conversation or call to action. Whether that's wrong of him is a different topic I suppose but I don't think he uses his films to teach people anything or to make a point, just purely as entertainment.

I didn't mean to nitpick your post, this is just the only section I wanted to comment on. Your entire write ups are great and literally bring the "Critical Analysis" into this thread.