Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
The name Tarantino hardly needs any introduction. An outsider indie darling rocketed to becoming a household name by a slew of high profile hits with both critics and audiences. Also I kinda hate his guts. Don't get me wrong the Quentin Tarantino is an excellent filmmaker. He has a lot of skill in writing quick witted dialogue, and his narrative structuring is pretty air tight. Even the jumbled up nonlinear narrative of Pulp Fiction has a kind of flow. He also has an eye for stylish action that climaxes in a cathartic explosion of violence. Very little in film is as emotionally satisfying as the ending of Django Unchained, or the crazy 88s fight at the end of Kill Bill Vol 1. I also don't really want to characterize the man as some kind of asshole, though he might be. I hate him as a public figure.
Quentin Tarantino has achieved a great deal of prominance in the film industry, and I'll admit it's not entirely unearned, but his fans treat him as one of the great directors with a true passion for the medium. How could he not be. He's made 10 (9 by his count, arguably 8, but really 9 just not the same 9 he's thinking of) commerically and critically well recieved movies. Which is no easy feat. On top of that his deep wealth of knowledge really demonstrates that he loves the medium... Right?
"'What happened?' I remember asking.
'They died,' my mom informed me.
'They died?' I yelped.
'Yes, Quentin, they died,' my mother assured me.
'How do you know?" I shrewdly asked.
'Because when it froze, that was what that was meant to imply,' she patiently replied.
Again I asked, 'How do you know?'
'I just know,' was her unsatisfying answer.
'Why didn't they show it?' I asked, almost indignant.
Then, clearly losing her patience, she snapped, 'Because they didn't want to!'
Then I grumbled under my breath, 'They shoulda shown it.
And despite how iconic that image has become, I still agree with me, 'They shoulda shown it.'"
That was an excerpt from Cinema Speculation, Tarantino's nonfiction book of essays on film in which he relates a conversation he had with his mom at 9 years old after seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Upon reading this passage I had to stop for a moment and realize that what I had just read was far more of a peek into how Tarantino appreciates film than I had expected. There's no understanding of the medium there. Its a lot to explain because its the culmination of not just a film but a whole film genre, but suffice to say wanting to see Butch and Sundance get shot at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid demonstrates a PROFOUND lack of understanding of how film communicates. Of course I would expect that out of a 9 year old but then he had to go and admit that he still feels this way. Revisiting his films and the things he's said about films and filmmaking with this idea that he doesn't understand the medium makes far more sense than it should. His success has been in reconstituting the stuff he grew up watching. Westerns and blacksploitation movies remixed into Django Unchained. Samurai and Martial arts flicks from Japan and Hong Kong remixed into Kill Bill, and so on. I do believe the man is copying without understanding and it shows. His films replicate themes, narrative beats, symbols and images from his inspirations with mechanical yet stylish percision but rarely manage to actually say anything novel.
Being an uninspired filmmaker who doesn't fully understand the artform isn't enough to make me hate him however. No, no, no the man comes off extremely arrogant. Here is another excerpt from Cinema Speculation about his childhood: "Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren't, I appreared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was." This is presented without irony as the capstone to multiple paragraphs basically bragging about all the cool movies he got to watch as a kid even going so far so as to devolve into banal Ready Player One style lists of titles. This would be one thing if this was a school age kid writing all that, but this is a book written and published without any self awareness by a 61 year old man. I can't help but feel he doesn't give a shit about film as an artistic medium so much as he likes showing off that he knows a lot about film.
Really, this shouldn't bother me. A competant if overrated director is arrogant... so what. Well people keep listening to the idiot. It's some how become a big news story today that he said some inane nonsense in an interview with film critic Elvis Mitchell:
I just can't get over that quote. Like hes going to discount large swaths of the medium because they don't get a long enough theatrical release? Or is it that movies don't get the theater screen time they deserve? Either way he's being willfully ignorant of the fact that there have always been more films then there are theaters available to play them, and the ratio of films to theaters has been ballooning for as long as there have been films and theaters. The fact of the matter is that more people are gonna wanna see Sonic the Hedgehog 3 than... I don't know... Anora so of course Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is gonna get more screens and a longer runtime. Maybe if Tarantino wants movie distribution to change maybe he should do somthing about it. Maybe support independant theaters. Maybe then they can afford to book movies he likes for longer theatrical releases. Regardless, he's just an elitest prick and his whining is a constant annoying undercurrent in film discourse and I wish he'd just shut up!
Ok really, maybe in real life he's a really chill down to earth dude, I doubt it but stranger things have happened, and maybe he really does have a deep and abiding understanding of film as an artistic medium and so on. I don't really know the man, but his public persona pisses me off, and I had to vent about it.
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com