FILMOGRAPHY
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)
Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)
Death Proof (2007)
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Django Unchained (2012)
The Hateful Eight (2015)
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
FILMOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Quentin Tarantino, born in 1963 in Knoxville, TN but raised in a 1970s Los Angeles teeming with new cinematic energies, became the most famous director of his generation by becoming its profoundest recombinator. He proved more than anyone that, like books are made out of books, movies are made out of movies. Instead of the “Anxiety of Influence,” Tarantino films were the “Ecstasy of Influence”. He cribbed from everything he loved, and he loved everything. Well, almost everything. The more outré the material, the more he revered it, which means he frequently excavated films that were rightly relegated to the trash heap and threw their provocations back in our face. And he did so with an inventiveness and ecstatic fervor for the possibilities of cinema that was so childlike in its glee that it was possible (necessary, even) to forgive him for his vulgarities.
This is not to say he was not also anxious. His films had an innate aesthetic attention deficit disorder that frequently betrayed his best material. They were fussy. They visibly and very audibly strove to be “the best” at whatever they were trying to be. But Tarantino, ironically, seemed most suited for a different kind of theater. His real wit was almost always verbal. In his best material, his dialogues were elaborate and idiosyncratic, but almost never ornamental. They were myth-making and characterizing. Because he never left the movies, his self-delighted screenplays never needed more than movie characters with movie characterizations, and never more than movie diction:
A Samurai sword. It hangs in its hand-carved wood sheath from a nail on the wall, next to a neon “DAD’S OLD-FASHIONED ROOT BEER” sign. Butch takes the sword off the wall, removing it from its sheath. It’s a magnificent piece of steel. It seems to glisten in the low-wattage light of the pawnshop. Butch touches his thumb to the blade to see if the sword is just for show. Not on your life. It’s as sharp as it gets. This weapon seems made to order for the Brothers Grimm downstairs. Holding the sword pointed downward, Takakura Ken- style, he disappears through the red curtains to take care of business.
He began his career by writing and– shockingly prolific at such a young age– had amassed a veritable pile of completed screenplays before he ever (at 27) called “action” as a director, so that shortly after his debut, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s name seemed to be everywhere: on Tony Scott’s True Romance, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. They were each, like the man himself, idiosyncratic and provocative. The myth was that much of these were formulated– perhaps even written– while Tarantino seemingly frittered away the hours at a video store in Manhattan Beach. “Video Archives is like LA.’s answer to the Cahiers du Cinéma,” he explained in a 1994 interview. If he worked full time for those five years, his 10,400 hours behind the cash register, watching and arguing movies, perhaps go some way in redefining the very notion of film school, as much as his films redefined American notions of taste.
What was Tarantino’s cinematic vocabulary? It was, apropos of the history (or mythology?) above, that of the cinematic dictionary– the whole thing. It is easier to find what visual words and phrases Tarantino didn’t use. Who were his influences? He was endlessly enthusiastic about them. Perhaps those he verbally shunned are even more telling. He “borrowed” the cinematographer (Robert Richardson) of that generational nemesis who (“I hated that fucking movie. If you like my stuff, don’t watch that movie.”) “ruined” his Natural Born Killers. Richardson’s halation effect became a Tarantino-signature for those who took his advice on Stone’s cinema and didn’t rightly attribute the glow to the preternaturally talented lensman. It’s also obvious that Tarantino’s adoration for Sergio Leone informed his work, but when his work vibrated most sonorously his collisions of violence and humor hued closer to David Lynch’s absurd. As his career progressed, Tarantino seemed to work to smash any such interpretation (““David Lynch has disappeared so far up his own ass…”). There have been few directors in the history of the American Cinema perhaps as adept at challenging moral toleration. But– especially given Tarantino’s imaginative playfulness as a writer– there have also been few directors as adamant about exhibiting an inflexible literalness. As his career progressed, it became more apparent that his was a project of film criticism. Tarantino forced upon his critics precisely the kind of cinema to which he was ideologically committed. So there’s another revealing implication in his casual dismissal of Jean Luc Godard. This one makes more sense. Godard was a critic of the cinema in his own work, but was dedicated to the question. Tarantino was seemingly, in his mind and more vocally, a provider of the answer.
Reservoir Dogs (1991) was an exhibition of talent and a revue of inspired imitation seldom seen in a debut. Brilliantly wrought, the film reorients crime noir and exhibits an uncanny knack for both cutting dialogue and superfluous badinage. It has a bilious sense of humor and a glee for violence so overweening that one might laugh while shielding their eyes. It bore more than faint resemblance to Ringo Lam’s ‘City on Fire’, but audiences quickly learned that to accuse Tarantino of plagiarism would be akin to sucking out his lifeblood, like the vampires in his screenplay “From Dusk ’till Dawn“.
These tendencies continued in Pulp Fiction (1994), which was a sensation. For cinephiles, the film made its director a household name. Like “Spielberg” before him, “Tarantino” became synonymous with the movies. It’s described as a ‘crime film,’ but this description is almost uncouth. It is a ‘crime film’ like– to Tarantino’s critical idol Pauline Kael– Citizen Kane was a ‘newspaper film.‘ It took the endorsements of Kael’s “Trash, Art, and the Movies” and intensified them into a modish mélange of culturally archaic poses with spasmodic violence. Tarantino’s toying with French and American cultural archaisms invoked brand new stylized modes. His verbal talents were preternaturally cinematic, as through he spent most of his life in dialogue with the movie screen. After the sensation took hold, we’d learn more clearly that, in fact, he had. Others tried to copy its energies and failed, often because they misunderstood it. The film’s structure was its own intrigue. It was almost circular, like James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” and fanatics took a “Ulysses Annotated” type approach to teasing out its copious references. As an exercise in crime, the crimes in Pulp Fiction were of Tarantino’s joyous making. But they were plastic reexaminations, like celluloid itself– from Scorsese, Godard, Elvis, Blaxploitation, b-movie sleaze, in the mode of a Howard Hawks screwball comedy. If Hitchcock set out to prove that moviegoers relish murder, Tarantino sought finally to exonerate them of guilt. In it, John Travolta’s Vincent Vega could be riddled by bullets and yet return later as a living punchline. See?: Vincent is just fine, and he’s in those ridiculous clothes, no sense getting worked up about him or anyone. Tarantino’s winking nihilism resuscitated more than characters, but careers (Travolta), musical styles (surf), pop cultural landmarks (not Marilyn Monroe, but Mamie Van Doren), verbal dictions, old stereotypes. There was a genius to it. If Tarantino’s greatest contribution to the American Cinema was as a kind of deranged curator of its pulpier produce, then– naturally– Pulp Fiction was his masterpiece.
To switch gears (and probably to soften expectations) he adapted and renamed Elmore Leonard’s “Rum Punch” as Jackie Brown (1997). His most gentle and genteel (a relative usage) film, it featured a middle-aged romance between the nearly-forgotten Pam Grier and Robert Forster. Almost three hours long, it was languidly paced and– with the help of a score featuring 1970s Motown classics– sumptuous and rueful. When it lapsed taste it did so because Tarantino seemed to have no natural conception of taste. The n-word, as its come to be called, was used like regular punctuation in the picture and betrayed a degree of idiosyncrasy that was more than just quirky.
The two halves of Kill Bill, starring Uma Thurman and David Carradine, stirred influences like so much stew and did away entirely with any sense of taste and balance in their forward momentum. Vol. 1 (2003) was an inventive and deranged conflation of as much b-movie arcana as Tarantino could mash into its runtime. He strove ambitiously for new heights of grotesquery in a massive sword-fight that played almost like a vaudeville dance of ruptured carotids. While he occasionally succeeded with this kind of spectacle, the film was most successful when it relaxed and charmed. So Vol. 2 (2004), which has a stately (almost funereal) pace is so much the superior that its surprising to learn both films were shot simultaneously. The film contained sequences of superlative style and ended on a scene bittersweet enough potentially to lull a viewer into accepting how absurd were the premises that got them there. But the whole project winked to only the most dedicated of filmgeek and, at its worst, even its stylism was often an affront to taste.
Similarly Death Proof (2007), an experiment that tried to replicate the very spirit of b-movie sleaze, was a purposeful affront to taste that literally pretended to be one of those films. An interesting experiment, it devolved into gimmickry and was actually, in many scenes, boring– a sin once inconceivable in the church of Tarantino.
Then Tarantino moved in a direction that pushed his talents into precarious positions. He started playing a zero-sum game with his own reputation. And he shifted from the merely nihilistic, to the topically nihilistic, so that his carnage now strove to say something about the nature and history of American life. Inglourious Basterds (2009) was an embarrassment that worked only when Tarantino channeled old energies. It was depressing for what it did to the cinema, instead of exhilarating for what it did. It seemed, in its conceit, to equate nuance with boredom. It was blithely ignorant of history. The film boasted a couple of clever, suspenseful set-pieces, but its ideas were ludicrous, and much of it didn’t even work as entertainment.
Tarantino revisited the same exact conceits in a more straightforward manner with Django Unchained (2012). The picture was brutal, in every sense of the word. It exploited (there is no other way to put it) the tragedies of American Slavery to give heft to its meager revenge story, and to Tarantino’s now-stodgy and now-interminable verbosity. It was difficult to watch how brilliant were Jamie Foxx and Kerri Washington and Samuel L Jackson at rendering pain and outrage because it did less for history than if it did not exist. But it was finally too stupid to be controversial.
The Hateful Eight (2015) featured a marvelous (final) score by the late Ennio Morricone and not much else but a splendor of gore. It was too long, too hermetic to be cinematically vibrant, and it was too cruel to be fun. Tarantino had also reached the point of repeating old ideas and jokes. It was as if the film was made to admonish those squares who were not hip to his project (David Denby: Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque”).
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) sought to evoke the sensations and charms of a certain era of Hollywood’s history as a nostalgic fairy tale. It was a maddening film, because it contained some beautiful, languid sequences, a finely wrought evocation of late 60s Los Angeles. At points, it soared along with its performances, and so there is the sense of what it could have been. But what eventually emerged was similarly hermetic, strange, nihilistic and disappointing.
WORKS
Possessing a freakish talent for synthesizing a seemingly limitless amount of pop-cultural obsessions, Quentin Tarantino stole brazenly from a whole host of sources when making Reservoir Dogs (1992), his disturbingly engrossing feature debut. The film is blocked like a stage-play, replete with illustrative flashbacks. The first scene is a nine minute conversation in a diner that– instead of character– serves as characterization development, where we are introduced to a bunch of thieves uniformed in charcoal suits, like peripheral attendees at a funeral. The groovy strut– more like a revue– that attends the film’s credits announces a filmmaker with something more than just a simple adoration for the movies. You are in the hands of someone for whom the moviehouse is the world entire. Befuddled and frantic, these thieves show up at their rendezvous point– an abandoned warehouse– one by one, and tell us in their own words just how terribly wrong their attempted diamond heist went. Dead cops, pools of blood, overt sexism, overt racism, overt carnage– Tarantino’s vulgarity is built primarily upon relishing taboo violence simply for the sake of it. There is a masterpiece of a torture scene that is an exercise in pornographic violence conceived simply because its combination of tones lends it an audacious coolness. It nearly destroys the film.1 In another sequence that introduces the primary suspense to the affair, Tim Roth and Randy Brooks invent an anecdote as a credibility tool for the kind of cool viciousness the undercover Roth needs to blend with this group of sociopaths. Even the anecdote has a singular voice. Tarantino’s filmmaking in these mostly barren interiors, drab corridors, and empty spaces betrays a clear vision. His camera is mostly unobtrusive and static. He uses the entire frame both for the compositional impact of its axes and its quadrants, yielding less obvious frames within frames, moving our gaze in unusual ways. The shot is frequently ground level and where a dolly or Steadicam would do the work, he rather often moves the camera with steady hands. There are two other facts to the picture that serve to counteract its simple vulgarity. Firstly, the cast is sensational, an inspired assemblage– Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Lawrence Tierney, Kirk Baltz, and Chris Penn all doing some of their best work. Secondly, they read the fevered dialogue of a mind so inspired by the untold sums of trash he’s giddily consumed that he manages to render it all an incredibly entertaining pop-cultural melange of strikingly specific characterization. The character’s talk not only as the character’s would talk, but as only that specific character could ever talk. Tarantino has an uncanny knack for dialogue, for badinage. It’s a talent that can’t be taught and it is not the only strength to his writing. It seems, like most creative brilliance, so simple and obvious and yet so utterly his own. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Andrzej Sekula)
It took Pulp Fiction (1994) to make Quentin Tarantino a household name and with him the stars of Uma Thurman, Samuel L Jackson, John Travolta, Ving Rhames, Tim Roth, Eric Stoltz, and Amanda Plummer rose to hitherto unexpected heights. For Bruce Willis, Roseanna Arquette, and Christopher Walken, these were adventurous new avenues. For Steve Buscemi, one of those strange and humorous debasements. Even more violent, grisly, frank, and vulgar than Reservoir Dogs, the movie is two hours of wonderfully idiosyncratic stylism, homage, and appropriation. More important than each of these pieces individually is how they are combined. Playing with structure on a level beyond simple cleverness, Tarantino balances expectation and payoff in an audacious way. Characters are killed, raped, maimed, drug poisoned and yet… return unscathed, unchanged, even fresher. These episodes argue the plasticity of the whole enterprise. It is a means of deflecting outrage. Tarantino can get away with murder (and does) because this story can turn on itself endlessly. The film is a series of episodic premises– not a plot. There are four broad sections in it that could be translated into very good short films, but they would have infinitely less impact in their isolation. They are not quite, but roughly, circular. Certain set pieces have a brilliant color to them: Samuel L Jackson quoting Ezekiel in his wrath, a dance in a nostalgic restaurant balances Travolta’s affected finesse with Thurman’s playful sexiness. Elsewhere, Tarantino’s irrepressible tastelessness in this film comes in the form of a racist tirade, as opposed to the sexist form in Reservoir Dogs. Elsewhere a key character is anally raped in a scene featuring a BDSM sex-slave. In another, Travolta accidentally shoots an unsuspecting character in the face, and his exploded head is more of an inconvenience. But even these sequences vibrate on the screen in their delirious combinations. Though the film ends, the end is arbitrary, the lessons unstable, meaningless. The film is a celebration of meaninglessness– maybe the most profound thing Tarantino could manage to say. It’s striking, how entertaining it can be. At the very least, Tarantino is a verbal wizard with preternatural instincts combining image and music. As a stylist his technique is less visible except where the homage is obvious. Travolta in one instant seems to drive into a Hitchcock film. In another scene, Uma Thurman seems to dance directly into a Jean Luc Godard movie. There are many films even in its day that have a humanity and intelligence that far surpass Pulp Fiction, but there are so very few that possess the raw energy of a singular cinematic mind almost unfiltered in its application. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Andrzej Sekula)
Jackie Brown (1997) contains so much of what distinguishes Tarantino’s nonpareil talents and so little of what diminishes the impact of his work. It is his most touching, most sincere movie– maybe his only touching and sincere movie– and it contains several performances that derive their energy not from homage or parody, but from a place of genuine empathy. Quentin Tarantino movies seem to arise from the filmmakers’ full (read: obsessive) absorption into cinematic artifacts and arcana. So from the dust-accumulating bins of history where were kept The Delfonics, The Brothers Johnson, Kangol hats, and the ever-stunning Pam Grier is assembled this time-capsule of a film. That is Pam Grier of Foxy Brown and Coffy, 1970s ‘blaxploitation’ films from which Tarantino brazenly takes license for the excessive use of a certain epithet. The film follows Grier as the titular Jackie Brown, playing criminals and ATF officers off one another with the aid of Robert Forster. It is based on the novel “Rum Punch” by Elmore Leonard. It opens with a shot that recalls The Graduate, so that Tarantino excavates even the aesthetic tendencies of his decade of interest. What’s more impressive than the way Tarantino’s lens favors Grier and Forster is how beautifully they complement each other, and how finely understated they are. A romance more delicate than the advocates of Tarantino’s exercises in mayhem would likely have ever thought possible evolves, primarily the result of the director’s gorgeous, languid long takes. The camera work here is a marvel, and it is most certainly ‘work’. Pushing two hours and forty minutes, Tarantino obstinately refuses visual shorthand. His camera tracks– actually dwells on– his characters’ every move, as though we’d find a glimmer of the real truth if we just looked hard enough. As the great critic Roger Ebert observes: on more than one occasion, he dares allow them simply to stop and think. These are micro-dramas that play on faces in real time and they are more impressive than all the bluster. The performances of this ensemble are sensational– so sensational, in fact, that the relative insularity of the world, shallowness of the scenario and its semi-frequent vulgarities are mostly apparent only after consideration. It takes reflection to consider that Tarantino has Robert DeNiro in his hands and does so little with him. Like usual, Tarantino exhibits a hypnotizing degree of sheer cinematic talent; even his smallest gestures charm you into thoughtless submission. It would be a long list to recount the choices that are uncharacteristically free of gimmickry in this third Tarantino film. And it is unfair to the film, because it is terrific and stands on its own, his most approachable and humane. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Guillermo Novarro)
The first half of an unsurprising project, Kill Bill Vol 1. (2003) exhibits Tarantino’s aesthetic attention deficit disorder by stirring influences like so much stew. Not only each sequence, or each scene, but each shot seems reappropriated from prior movies, much of it picked from the trash heap, and some of it borrowed straight from the source nearly unchanged. Similarly is music borrowed– not in its spirit but in their original recordings. So he might, as a speculative example, announce a Kung Fu film setting with Sergio Leone, performed by characters costumed in the Grindhouse, cut away to a hip Godardian fatale lit in Bob Richardson’s familiar halo, only pull out to a birds angle tracking shot a la De Palma, cut in a new score from a karate movie so aged that the vinyl crackle has become part of its texture, and then have the whole party slice each other to bits in highest resolution. Almost all of Kill Bill has this schizoid energy. Tarantino’s combinations, when they are inspired, make benign material reverberate in new and strange ways. When they are not, they strain on the screen. This first film follows “The Bride,” Uma Thurman, through episodes of revenge. From a suburban living room to Okinawa to Tokyo, the only constant is carnage. The film is indulgent more often than not– in protracted knife and sword fights, in grisly anime back story, in deep cut references that strive for coolness. Everything here is genre inspired, which necessarily implies some narrative shorthand, but the film has neither a genre nor a briskness. Tarantino has directed a successful such film, but writing his own material he brooks no editor (not even his own) and so the picture will feature, for example, scenes like one in a hospital, where the Bride is nearly murdered in her comatose state by a eye-patch wearing Darryl Hannah, that serves as little more than a swell exhibition of Brian De Palma’s split screen technique set to Bernard Herrmann in a Candy Striper/Splatter milieu. There are also, repeatedly and pointedly, episodes where the only possible sentiment is revulsion. The best material has a charm to its making, such as when the Bride goes to the fabled katana maker Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba) who, as both myth and wit, says of his unlikely new blade: “If on your journey you should encounter God, God would be cut.” Thurman seems to be having fun, and she starts that sequence out with a charming girlishness before transforming into a transfixed psychopath. But everyone in the movie is a transfixed psychopath looking to gut the other, and when the transfixion is dialed back and the psychopathy leavened Tarantino shines. The Bride moves on to Tokyo, to kill Lucy Liu’s O’Ren Ishii and her schoolgirl sidekick Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama). Tarantino makes extra-clear who needs to die and as everyone on screen is a homicidal maniac, he has to introduce other taboo victimization to up their ante. So, to put it mildly, both of these women shun sexualization. And so it is a pity that the movie’s massive sword fight, shot on a soundstage with the kind of infrastructure that allows Tarantino to do just about anything with his camera (which he does), is never so exciting as cutting God. You don’t get many examples of women of this mien in the movies. Even as a dance the sequence is too claustrophobic and simultaneously too cartoonish to be suspenseful and too grisly to be fun. Eventually the fight spills out into a snow covered Japanese garden of such delicate ornateness that the silence is deafening. And then QT blares the music again. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Robert Richardson)
Kill Bill Vol 2. (2004) and Vol. 1 were shot at the same time, so it is a surprise that this second volume has an almost funereal pacing and a tone of sadness that never abates. There is but one “sword fight” in the whole movie. It features not one, but two swords crafted by the mythic “Hattori Hanzo” (Hanzo’s mythology lends certain scenes wonderful dialogue). The fight ends when Thurman plucks Darryl Hannah’s eye right out of the socket, made yet more brutal by Tarantino’s direction, which has Hannah writhe on the floor of a filthy bathroom hysterically, shrieking like an animal. But that’s about the extent of the kind of gratuity that was the entire tone of Volume One. The rest of the film is quite measured. In the first volume it was Tarantino’s stated ambition to create ‘one of the best sequences in the history of cinema’. That film contained none of those. But here, the sequence at “The Church of the Two Pines” is an example of cosmically wonderful filmmaking. It’s shot in black and white with Robert Richardson’s gorgeous luminosity, which catches even the particles in the air as though they were cinematic fairy dust. This film has a soul the prior did not have, and much of that is a testament to a performance by David Carradine that makes of Bill a personality of such unusually formal verbosity that he appears as a satanic raconteur. Similarly, a marvelously subdued Michael Madsen brings a weatherworn sadness to his scenes that belies his sadism. He manages to trap Thurman’s Bride (in a funny sequence she’s revealed as “Beatrix Kiddo”) and bury her alive, a predicament so hopeless that any escape would require explanation. Bill is a spinner of tales and teller of fables. One scene has him fireside, using his flute to accompany his storytelling, and the sequence it prefaces is yet another example of superlative style and humor. It features Gordon Liu as Pai Mei, a mythological Kung Fu master implied to be more than 1000 years old. He teaches Beatrix a trick that causes a persons heart to explode in their chest. He also teaches her how to punch through solid wood, such as a casket. The exploding-heart trick is both absurd, funny, and bloodless, which is how Tarantino ends his film. The last sequence is nearly 30 minutes long. By this point, Tarantino has so much confidence in his abilities that his nearly four hour revenge fantasy ends with some snuggling in bed and a conversation about Superman. The climactic scene is bittersweet enough to potentially lull a viewer into accepting how absurd were the premises that got them there. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Robert Richardson)
Death Proof (2007) is one half of the film Grindhouse, a project of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The movie– itself broken into two halves– is a celebration of those low-budget oddities of the 1970s and 80s American Cinema, various forms of underfunded sleaze. More precisely the film is a celebration of the experience of watching those films. It goes to great lengths to literally look like one of them, including simulating scratches, pops, lens flashes and even emergency splices to the film itself. Even the title card is snuffed out. Cleverly, Tarantino knowingly exhibits the most damage at where would run the beginning and the end of reels, so that the film stabilizes a bit before again looking roughshod. But then everything was roughshod and plastic about those movies. Overacted, overexposed, oversexed, overripe– they were cheapies, a bit filthy, like cinema unbathed. Kurt Russell stars as “Stuntman Mike”, an over-grown child and sociable mass-murderer who uses his stunt-car as an instrument of death. In a funny touch, he’s a teetotaler who hangs out at bars. The rest of the cast, aside from real-life snuff-film director Eli Roth and another classically awkward turn by Tarantino himself, is made up of women in short-shorts and bare feet. Since the film is supposed to be sleazy, it is. In its first section, the women are as idiotic as the men, and even the center of attention, Sydney Tamiia Poitier (daughter of the esteemed actor) acts like they can’t act. So it’s a bit revealing that the most convincing material in the film is the violence. To punctuate the first section, Russell shatters the face of Rose McGowan off of his dashboard. As she slumps back in her seat, the blood bubbling from her mouth would be a b-movie makeup artists finest achievement. Similarly, when Russell then slams his car into the vehicle carrying her friends, the subsequent crash would comprise the entire budget of one of his beloved trash-fests. Stuntman Mike gets away with murder and the film jumps forward. It’s second half is shot in rich 35mm with color correction that gives it a richly saturated look, candy coated colors and fine grains. It can be gorgeous. Less gorgeous are the fussy dialogues. The actors here– Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Zoe Bell, and Thamia Thoms– are actually too good to maintain the gimmick. It suddenly seems as if Tarantino has decided this is a real movie. But its not: the script spends seven minutes in a diner getting across information we’re about learn anyway. It grows hard to tell if the conceit is that we’re still watching a movie that’s purposely bad. The finale has a car chase that is more thrilling than all of its inspirations and the film finally ends in cartoonish violence that we’re not fully sure is a murder until Dawson caves Russell’s head in with her boot heel. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Quentin Tarantino)
In one reading, Inglourious Basterds (2009) is a continuation of Tarantino’s project to dredge up the hoary cliches, nostalgic oddities, and cinematic exploitations of movies past and recast them as exuberant spectacle. In another, Inglourious Basterds is the kind of appalling affair only digestible when artist and enthusiast alike shun reading entirely. Tarantino calls his villains “gnatsies”. They are, in effect, comic ghouls, or cultured murderers, or mass-exterminating buffoons, or Aryan-privilege incarnate. It so happens that the film purports that they are also “Nazis,” as in: those foot soldiers or executioners of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, of the German Reich, in the year 1941, under the dictatorial rule of Adolf Hitler. Hitler is in the film. Or at least some cartoon manifestation of him appears on screen. At one point he bursts out screaming “nein nein nein nein nein,” as if to clear QT of the accusation of giving him any good dialogue. One of the film’s many stars, Brad Pitt, is the Gnatsie Hunter, Lt. Aldo Raine. He wants his men– “Eight Jewish-American soldiers”– to collect “gnatsie scalps”. When he speaks, he’s funny, especially in this first monologue, because Tarantino writes jaunty dialogue and Pitt is a good actor. He is also, it must be said, demanding of his specifically Jewish troopers that war crimes be committed, and Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat do they commit them. Some might perceive this as a piddling point, or of missing the point. Must we be so concerned about some Nazi scalps? But it is a point that begs to be made. That “a gnatsie ain’t got no humanity” is likely the comfort afforded to those giddy at watching them scalped. But the Nazis were in fact, all too human, as were their acts. That Tarantino acts otherwise is in avoidance of truth and of a film of any resonance, one I suspect he is not capable of making. He’s clearly not interested in making such a movie. So, not surprisingly, even though the movie is about a new, “Jewish empowering” history, Tarantino tosses actual history aside from the films start. The Wannsee Conference– the meeting led by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command, that spelled out the systematic murder of European Jewry– in fact, took place on January 20th, 1942. Without the existential horrors of the Holocaust, the Basterds’ bloodlust is strange and disturbing. That Tarantino’s premises are hostile to nuance is unsurprising. But regardless they do make complicit those who would accept them. These implications raise questions that the film doesn’t answer, such as Who, then, is not as bad as a Nazi? Certainly Jews can be, the film argues, and are wont to be when given the chance. Why is the Nazi Colonel the only character of any real dynamism? When Eli Roth’s “Bear Jew” beats the uncooperative gnatsie’s brains out (for doing something that, were he differently uniformed and in a John Ford film, would be found heroic) Rain says of the beating: “It’s the closest thing we ever get to going the movies.” Should movies bring us closer to the joyous sensation of beating someone to death with a Louisville Slugger? I understand and sympathize with the response: “It’s just a movie.” Similarly: “It’s a fantasy, silly.” From audiences, this makes some practicable sense. Most go to movies not to think, but to be entertained. For practitioners and students however, this kind of comatose reading renders one’s moviegoing life meaningless. If you can get past this (and I submit there is no sense in bothering) there is, given Tarantino’s great skill, only a little engaging work left: The loathsome SS Colonel, Hans Landa, played by Waltz, cruelly toys with a French farmer (Denis Menochet) in an interrogation of verbal curlicues and multilingual gymnastics before murdering the man’s family. One daughter, Shoshanna, escapes to exact revenge and is well acted by Melanie Laurent, though her character is superfluous. In another clever scene, a card game in a bar turns into a Reservoir Dogs-esque Mexican stand-off after an undercover Michael Fassbender 1 betrays his identity with a gesture. But he’s also superfluous. These hyper-extended set-pieces are strong enough to lament a film that could-have-been, especially one less repugnant and devoid of meaning, but they never really connect to anything. And the picture goes garishly wrong in almost everything involving the “Basterds.” It culminates in a sequence in a movie theater that is unsatisfying even as vulgar fantasy and which is, ironically, photographically bland. That Hitler is slaughtered here before he could enact most of the Holocaust is a fantasy worthy of what? Catharsis? Hilarity? (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Robert Richardson)
Django Unchained (2012) flips the charge of Inglourious Basterds, and I don’t write that to claim it’s a better film. It’s equally outrageous and ends even more outrageously. With Basterds, part of my revulsion (and confusion) was that the only person in the film of any real dynamism was the mass-murdering Nazi SS officer played by Christoph Waltz. Colonel Hans Landa was a calculating, reptilian sociopath who, intriguingly, spoke numerous languages, seemed eminently cultured, and toyed with his victims with a verbal wit and a sinister charm that was at once terrifying and darkly funny. He was such a devious opportunist that Tarantino practically implied that it was Landa’s backstabbing treachery that allowed his sanguinary “Basterds” to disintegrate Hitler’s face with bullets. That is, until the script– as if to erase any implications– transformed him into a naïve buffoon. In Django Unchained, Waltz returns in essentially the same exact configuration, but as an empathic hero. The film begins with Waltz, who plays one Dr. King Schulz, masquerading as a traveling dentist. He could be an ancestral relation of “The Jew Hunter.” He is a German in America and, in reality, a bounty hunter looking for a trio of brothers guilty of murder in another state. To do this, he needs the assistance of a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), who knew these sadistic torturers from his time on another plantation. Schulz confronts a pair of slavers at night, in the woods, who are leading Django along with other slaves, and the scene (the very first one) immediately establishes all that is wrong with the film. A legend appears on screen “1858”. “Two years before the civil war,” Tarantino adds, in case his historically ignorant audience needs more context. Does the fact that the year 1858 is not two years before the Civil War imply that this is maybe another ‘alternate universe’? Waltz addresses the men in his decorous way. “I wish to parlay with you,” he tells them. The slavers– a pair of brute yokels– won’t abide it: “Speak English,” they tell him. “Hello you poor devils,” he calls to the slaves, “is there one amongst you who was formerly a resident of the Carrucan Plantantion?” The way that Foxx reads his line, “I’m from the Carrucan Plantation,” is so soul-sucked, so destitute, so painful, it’s almost searing. The film is immediately saying: this is going to hurt. Schulz moves down the line of men with a lamp, and they each look like historical tragedies made flesh and blood. Tarantino, his costume designer (Sharen Davis) and make-up artists, evoke extraordinary recreations in the film. Schulz and Django exchange information, Foxx’s bright eyes dart around in his head in post-traumatic terror, when one of the slavers intervenes. He points his gun at Schulz and warns him away. “Last chance, fancy pants,” he finally says, and Schulz promptly shoots him between the eyes. Schulz also shoots the horse of his companion in the head. From both spurt a cartoonish explosion of terrific gore. Though the slaves are horrified, he’s not at at all bothered by this. Nor, perhaps, is the audience. These were not men he killed after all, but cartoons. By the time the scene ends, even the slaves are moving in for some Frontier Justice. They borrow a shotgun and shoot the other slave-driving goon. The way the blood erupts from his body, you’d think he was a tick. Why? Django Unchained, while as pointless as Inglourious Basterds, isn’t entirely devoid of interest. Tarantino stages some grand and sometimes marvelously funny set-pieces, particularly early on. Some of them, unfortunately, are also unfunny in uncharacteristic ways, such as a scene featuring KKK goofballs on a failed night-raid. There’s also some resonant imagery: blood spraying on cotton from a gunned-down overseer, the stark brutality of Kerri Washington’s form curled in a “sweat box”. But the mode of the film, which eventually introduces Leonardo DiCaprio as a one-dimensional expression of white avaricious psychopathy, is always this: Tarantino exploits real tragedy as a means of lending emotional heft to his meager revenge tale. There is no image of the tragedy of American slavery that doesn’t induce pain. There is no rendering of its horrors that doesn’t cause viewers to wince in either anguish or guilt (and often both). It takes no effort for this to produce an effect. And Tarantino practically revels in the horror. The ruse that drives the plot revolves around the world Mandingo fighting, an aberration in American history so noxious one almost can’t believe it existed. Both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, that’s because there’s no evidence it ever did. Tarantino took his disgusting idea from the 1970 exploitation film, Mandingo. He will be cartoonish in his violence in one moment, but in this central exhibition of fake historical outrage he is so earnest with it that the critic Roger Ebert (who praised the film, nonetheless) admitted to composing a letter to Tarantino in his head about why he nearly stopped watching his film. Why did he continue? Why did I?3 How do you reconcile these outrages with the performances of Jamie Foxx and Kerri Washington and Samuel L. Jackson? They are marvelous (if that’s even remotely the right way to put it), but I’m puzzled by their participation. It couldn’t have been an easy decision, and it had to have been because they thought they were doing something meaningful by doing so. They were not. The film descends into such preposterously stupid and cartoonish mayhem4 that I wonder how it could not have been clear to them that Django Unchained is not also an exploitation film, and one that does less for this grim history’s victims than if it did not exist. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Robert Richardson)
“You keep talkin’ Pete. You gon’ talk yoself to death.” Samuel L. Jackson delivers this telling line near the end of The Hateful Eight (2015). By this point, he is laughing hysterically in a cabin dressed with the exploded innards of its sadistic temporary inhabitants. His testicles have just been shot off, so he’s sitting in a bed. Moments later, he and Walton Goggins are ‘hanging by the neck until she is dead’ the film’s best actor, Jennifer Jason Leigh, from whom dangles by a handcuff the arm of Kurt Russell, which she just sawed off with handsaw. Her face is tomato red because it is caked with the brains of her brother (Channing Tatum). She’s spent the last three hours suffering indignity after indignity, which is fine, because she’s a hell of a psychopath. When her body stops spasming, Jackson sighs. “Now that was a nice dance,” he says. “It sure was pretty,” Goggins agrees. This is the theater of Quentin Tarantino, which puts up ideas about the possibilities of human anatomy and expresses them in the most vile ways possible. That’s not a qualitative judgment. It’s what the film is about. Tarantino has always been gleeful with gore, and finally the gore is whole point. But it starts off as a clean slate: The movie opens to incredible snow-covered Wyoming vistas. There is a shot of birds lifting-off to orchestral strings of resplendent menace. Eventually the camera fixes on a snowswept crucifix, Jesus wearing a crown of white powder. Tarantino hangs on the image for an eternity, like he does with almost everything in the picture, but it’s worth lingering on. Tarantino now has Ennio Morricone composing new material for the film, so he can stop re-appropriating at least his music. A cello hints at sinister devices to plodding percussion. It all has terrific energy. A stagecoach rides into frame. Its passengers are going to Minnie’s Haberdashery to take shelter from the oncoming blizzard. It is senseless to relay the plot because the film hasn’t much else. It’s 1877. A group of hateful people are trapped in a cabin. Some of them are former soldiers of the not-so-recent war. For both sides. They still have their opinions and they still have their prejudices. One of them, Jackson, fought for the Union side. At one point, he makes remarks that are some of the film’s only resonant material, saying, “You don’t know what it’s like to be black man facing down America.” They are made to justify why he’s lied about the authenticity of a letter he carries, from Abraham Lincoln, something he uses to disarm the natural hostility of white folks. The fact that the letter is a fake evokes a revue of racist responses, some overt, some subtle. It’s good writing, immediately reverting to vulgarity only moments later, where Tarantino has Jackson relay an twisted anecdote to Bruce Dern (playing a former Confederate General) that betrays a perception of race relations so deranged it could only be captured on celluloid by a madman. The movie elsewhere implies that Dern and Jackson fought for opposite sides in the Battle of Baton Rouge and that Dern slaughtered a clutch of African American prisoners of war merely for their blackness. I probably don’t need to mention that not only did this not happen, but it would hardly have been possible given that there were no African Americans in the Battle of Baton Rouge, nor the war at that point in time. Who cares? The Hateful Eight ultimately fails for too many reasons, but two are most clear: It is interminable at times. It is also too cruel where it seems to try for fun. Later in the film, Zoe Bell enters as “Six Horse Judy” bringing a lovely shyness that’s delightful– even more so because of how hermetic the film has been. How she is killed is so cruel it evades sense. To put it in the movie’s terms: what in the contumacious fuck are we supposed to take from this? (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Robert Richardson)
Tarantino referred to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)5 as his “Magnum Opus” during its development. He first wrote the film as a novel. He even wrote several episodes of the fictional television show– a corny Western called “Bounty Law”– the movie depicts that features its fading star, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). So it is a very deeply “lived-in” universe. Though since it seems safe to assume that every Tarantino movie emanates mostly unfiltered from some febrile corner of his hippocampus, I expect he’s been living in this particular world his entire life. This is a film that is maddening in almost every respect. It succeeds in whole swathes as entertainment. It’s also a beautiful evocation of the moods and physical sensations of Los Angeles, and of certain qualities of its era. But it is also practically autistic in its indulgence in redundant tendencies. The film confirms that essentially everything Tarantino had to say, he said by 1994. Has his artistry improved? Even if I were sure of the answer, it wouldn’t matter. He renders the question moot by eviscerating any reason to answer it. The declining actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt-double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) are narcissistic lunatics. They are probably sociopathic, but Tarantino films brook no actual possible psychologies. In the case of Cliff, it’s insinuated that he murdered his verbally abusive wife with a harpoon. This has effectively ended his career as a stuntman. In a daydream, he imagines himself back on set thanks to an intervention by Rick on his behalf, and, given a last chance to repair his reputation as wife-killer, he dreams up a scenario that has him embarrassing Bruce Lee by tossing the actor around like a ragdoll. What would one call such a psychology? Anyway, Rick Dalton lives on Cielo Drive, next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. It is 1969. So we know what this means. Tate is portrayed in the film by Margot Robbie. In a lovely section, mid-film, we get to spend some time ambling around Westwood with her. She buys a book, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for her husband Roman. We also know the real life Roman would soon direct “Tess” in memory of his murdered wife. Yet a few years later he would sodomize a 13-year-old, Samantha Gaines. But never mind that. There’s a bittersweet melancholy to Tate’s day. She happens upon the Bruin Theatre and watches her newest film, The Wrecking Crew, starring Dean Martin. That was a real film, and when Tate props her bare feet (QT should just make his fetish movie already) up on the seat in front of her, the dirt crusted on her soles from the ever-dry and dusty city exhibits a sense of a real LA, where one steps outside and feels filthy in but minutes. Respectfully, Tarantino runs the actual Wrecking Crew with the real Sharon Tate up on the screen. It’s a lovely moment and Robbie is fairly angelic. There are other isolated, well-wrought episodes: A tense, disturbing comedy on Spahn Ranch, the Manson Family’s hideaway, that is the eeriest of sleaze. Another superlative sequence has DiCaprio acting his heart out– and where it becomes apparent the real Leo is probably always doing just that– to win himself just enough self-respect to keep himself alive. But the point (and what?) of the movie really exists in this juxtaposition between Tate’s portrayal and the film’s end. There’s an easily missed and very gentle bit hidden in Kurt Russel’s voice over narration that points out how the heat is making her feel “especially pregnant in all the worst ways” on the night in question. Tarantino makes it extra-clear that he regards Tate lovingly. He also fairly insinuates that her ambivalent privilege probably swam against the current of the time. Those currents we never really see, however, outside of the dimwitted hippies at Spahn Ranch. Who knows what kind of film would have resulted from having his script follow through in portraying what really occurred that night in August of 1969. The whole film would have to be altered. It would not be a “Tarantino film” anymore, but rather maybe a resonant and interesting movie made by Quentin Tarantino– which he would almost certainly abide less. There’s even a film possible here that follows through with Tarantino’s “audacious” project to restate the outrages of history that would earn the film’s final moment. But alas, this does not. Instead, when those faux-satanic buffoons burst into Rick Dalton’s home, Cliff Booth commands the film’s only purely lovable character, the dog Brandy (Sayuri, a Pitbull), to rip Tex Watson (Austin Butler) to shreds. There is a clever irony to the scene that affords Brad Pitt a couple of funny line readings: Cliff is the one high on acid, not the vicious idiots looking to gut him. It’s helped by a bit of speechifying Tarantino earlier affords the would-be killers before they walk up the hill. Something about, “Killing the people who taught us how to kill.” It helps the Mansonites look like bloodthirsty ideologue cartoons instead of the deranged and frightened psychopaths they really were. This is necessary for taste, because Booth is soon thrashing Patricia Krenwinkel’s (Madisen Beaty) face off every hard surface in the room until it is so fully caved that he looks at the cranial mush in disgust and tosses her aside. Meanwhile, out back in the pool, Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison) is barbecued by a flame-thrower wielding Rick Dalton. Though she is literally in the water, Tarantino makes sure to have her scream as she burns for a good 10 seconds before she submerges in a hiss. And so whatever residual energies that the film put up on the screen are again put to the flamethrower. DiCaprio delivers another line that it’s hard not to laugh at. When soon after asked if he’s okay, he affirms, but follows: “The fuckin’ hippies aren’t, that’s for goddam sure”. It’s funny because its true, but more so because of a central irony: it reveals the film as so unconcerned about being trash, that if it is sincere in its longing for its lost golden age, and if it is submitted as an homage to that eras triumphs, then it regards that eras worth on the same level it does human life. (w: Quentin Tarantino, c: Robert Richardson)
ENDNOTES
1Yet still, this is filmmaking of such bravado that it could give a person shivers, and not just of horror. I have no idea what films Tarantino might have cribbed from to direct this audacious sequence. That is much of its brilliance. It’s almost unconscionable that a first time director at such a tender age would have the vision to direct our gaze in such impressionable ways without some inspired theft. When Michael Madsen’s “Mr. Blonde” hunches over to slice Kirk Balz’s ear off, Tarantino pans languidly to a dead space. There’s ironic scrawl on the wall, softening the impact. He pans back. Madsen makes a macabre joke funnier than anything later Tarantino could ever muster. Then his handheld camera follows Madsen out to his car. He steps outside to silence. There are the sounds of children playing somewhere off in the distance. He removes a gas can, the kind of prodding, ambivalent black humor that Tarantino relishes. He re-enters the building and the song that was playing, Steeley Dan’s “Stuck in the Middle with You”, picks back up in such a way that we feel everything that is happening is the orchestration of a movie deviant. It is. Blonde douses Balz with gasoline, still in handheld so rough that it splashes on the lens. It is outrageous, combative, anti-social cinema with the blackest sense of humor.
2 Fassbender’s character, Archie Hickox, and his co-conspirator, Bridget Von Hammersmark (an exceptional Diane Kruger donning a terrific name and some terrific outfits) are movie people. He’s a student and she’s an actress. There is a scene, early on, where Hickox is interviewing with one of Churchill’s generals for the film’s secret assassination mission, which requires he prove his cineaste bonafides. That he mentions he was published in a journal named “Films and Filmmakers” is very funny to me, but is, in truth, just a coincidence.
3 Here is a revealing passage from Ebert’s four-star review: Because “Django” is so filled with violence and transgressive behavior, [Tarantino] told me something that day that’s worth remembering when discussing “Django:” “When I’m writing a movie, I hear the laughter. People talk about the violence. What about the comedy? ‘Pulp Fiction’ has such an obviously comic spirit, even with all the weird things that are happening. To me, the most torturous thing in the world, and this counts for ‘Reservoir Dogs’ just as much as it does to ‘Pulp,’ is to watch it with an audience who doesn’t know they’re supposed to laugh. Because that’s a death. Because I’m hearing the laughs in my mind, and there’s this dead silence of crickets sounding in the audience, you know?” Ebert goes on at length about the nature of the film’s violence, about Tarantino’s use of violence throughout his career. He can perhaps be forgiven for getting some details of the film factually wrong. He was quite sick at the time. What I cannot and do not understand, though, is how his response comports with, say, his review of Blue Velvet. To my mind the answer is simple: it doesn’t. It’s a brazen contradiction.
4 I have little doubt that Tarantino had both Carrie and The Shining in mind when writing and directing the film’s final sequence. Carrie’s final conflagration was the culmination of a 15 minute sequence that simmered in grim expectation. Many writing about the film are apt to compare it to something like an impending car wreck– one, perhaps, in De Palma’s signature slow motion. As the sequence goes on, we just know it will end horribly. Famously, De Palma swirls his camera in an extended dance that seems to take joy in how much dread we have. It’s audacious filmmaking and the horror that follows it is searing because of how much impact De Palma has earned. Tarantino’s climax doesn’t swirl the camera, but as no one ever shuts up in his films, it does the same with dialogue. And it builds rather fairly. Like Carrie, its culmination is soaked in blood. Unlike Carrie, Tarantino earns no such impact, though he tilts so many buckets of it that he literally paints the walls red. One might recall Kubrick’s famous usage of blood in The Shining, which poured out of the elevators of The Overlook Hotel in a crimson river. It was an evocative image, made more evocative yet by the many ways of reading it. Was it the accumulated blood of history? Tarantino is probably trying to suggest as much in his film. But in Django Unchained it is just movie blood. It is never more than movie blood. Kubrick, it should also be said, never made his holocaust film. The horrors of the subject wore him out. He grew depressed and had too much respect for historical memory.
5 A key to “reading” the film was revealed three years later, with the publishing of “Cinema Speculation,” Tarantino’s triviality-obsessed, though imaginative, book about “key American Films of the 1970s”. That book is the most revealing distillation of Tarantino’s peculiarity, as– though it is a respectable work of film criticism– it also has such an insulated, idiosyncratic view of its era that it might as well be another ‘alternate universe’ from its start. Much of the book consists of speculations such as, “what if Brian De Palma directed Taxi Driver?” Not surprisingly, the speculations are more interesting and insightful than what Tarantino accomplished in his film. Here is a historical reality for you: Leslie Van Houten was paroled in 2023. I speculate if she’ll rent the film from Amazon Prime. She can write a letter to Tex Watson about what a hoot it is.
films and filmmakers 