Yay with reservations. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown we’re incredible and Tarantino showed such promise. While I still value his later films they seem to suggest that while he seemed like a true artist at first, he may just be an entertainer, albeit a damn good one.
Nay, Tarantino is just a comic book dork with films that usually appeal to teenage punks!
Yay, cuz Tarantino makes great films…YOU CANT HANDLE THE TRUTH CLOVENHOOF!!!!!!
He loves to emulate. He loves it TOO much. Actually, he usually goes beyond emulation to just plain lifting ideas from other films. There isn’t anything wrong with a director showing his influences and inspiration; every director does this, to a point. But the way I see it is, why bother watching Tarantino mash all these idea together when I can just watch the real thing? Nowadays you don’t have to work in an independent video rental store to have access to all the old exploitation and B-movies that Tarantino gets 100% of his ideas from. Why bother with Kill Bill when I can watch Lady Snowblood (or any number of Shaw Brothers films, for that matter)? There is so much to explore in these classic genre films that it just seems like a waste of time to even bother with him.
Neigh neigh and triple neigh. A clever writer at his best, but a thieving magpie (yes, i know, “geniuses steal”!), trashy, juvenile and juvenile-appealing, violence-glamourising film geek with too many films in his life and not enough life in his films. It’s high time he grew up.
haha Kenji tout response….indeed it is time for him to grow up…
His pulp fiction effect on me does not show big signs of wear off as yet…
I did enjoy Pulp Fiction, it was hilarious at times as well as very entertaining (could have done without the long Tarantino-Keitel car-wash section though, which has some of the QT faults that have become more apparent since). It’s lost a little for me over the years, maybe partly due to all the fool imitators- not QT’s fault- but also maybe not quite enough depth to last the long course. It had the advantage of having lovely Maria de Medeiros, as Bruce Willis’ “pot belly”- and of course Uma Thurman is great in it. I wonder if QT decided on casting both Uma and Maria together, from seeing them in Henry and June. It’s a pity being cool is a QT obsession. His actors and actresses now might as well have a sign on their heads, i’m a super-cool Taranatino character. The fun can wear off and his love of violence for its own sake got up my nose in Kill Bill.
I read he wanted Irene Jacob to play Maria de Medeiros’ role.
The violence sometimes it unwanted and the worst thing is his fixation with making full length features inspired from genres, I think he had one too many fun times paying tributes and homages to blaxploitation/grindhouse/martial arts/western genres and its is definitely a time to think a little differently if he wants to make another Pulp Fiction (I mean not exactly PF but something fresh and stepping to untested waters) and yes the fixation to be cool and all is for adolescents really who get on to things as easily as they drop them in no time.
Ah well Irene Jacob was so wonderful in Veronique, such poise, integrity as well as soft sensitivity, but i think Maria brings something very warm and cuddly and touching to the part…oooh, i’d love to give her a…big big hug, she makes me go all gooey and protective. And she’s Portuguese, which is even better. I wouldn’t really have expected either actress as tough guy Willis’ girlfriend but it worked with Maria so why not with Irene too?
ps: had QT been really impressed with Maria and Uma’s rapport in Henry and June i guess he would have found it hard to keep them apart in Pulp Fiction
talented, but he makes terrible films, and should let someone else write his scripts.
so, NAY.
I think he makes fun and enjoyable films that have some aesthetic and technical qualities to them but nothing much exceptional.
If Tarantino is the standard contemporary film is held to then get ready for one long freakin’ dry spell.
This is the best we’ve got? We should be embarrassed.
Why do we need another Tarantino thread, especially one this general?
He has no depth. And not one of his films is set in a moral world (okay, maybe Jackie Brown is an exception, but it is an adaptation and not a Tarantino “original”). And he is a juvenile, Tourettes-suffering, insufferable twit (see every interview he has ever given, and every screenplay he has ever written).
I agree with what many of you have already said about his usage of other films’ plot, themes, elements etc. But I’d like to motion an admiration for such technique. Admiration not from the originality of it, as, obviously it’s not original – but that’s what I find so original about it. It’s originality through cliche.
So many discredit him as soon as they’ve found out he’s borrowed from other films, as if in a “Well we caught you” sort of way, but I don’t think he looks at it as getting caught. For him it’s more like, “I know right!” And he’ll go on for hours about his source inspiration. Which is very redeeming and for me as an audience member to all of his homage ridden works it’s very uplifting to me because I do see his inspiration, in fact he was so heavily inspired by it he had to go and make an entire movie concerning that genre.
Which is another thing to love because I don’t feel we’ll ever see him repeat himself as so many directors have once they’ve found a genre they flourish in. He’s paid his ode to samurai films, and now he’s moved on. Paid his ode to slasher and car pictures in one swift move, and now he’s moved on. I don’t find it fruitless to watch them when I could be watching Lady Snowblood because I do see differences galore. Now I’m talking better or worse, I leave that to each person’s individual tastes – but if you can’t see at least a difference between Snowblood and Kill Bill I suggest a reviewing of both, or Vanishing Point and Death Proof, or Coffy and Jackie Brown.
Cut and dry of it is he’s not trying to pull a quick one over everybody, he’s just hammering out movies he wants to make, putting his own spin on each of the genres that so defined his life growing up, and for that, like his pieces or not, I say yay.
How is Jackie Brown an adaptation, Neil? If you mean that it references Grier’s earlier blaxploitation films then yes, but thats not necessarily an adaptation – a rather harsh word actually.
But to return to the topic at hand, “Yay with exceptions”. As stated many many times before, Tarantino is a referential hack that once had promise (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown) and is now content to merely rehash older premises and constantly cast himself in his own films. However, my favourite casting role of his is where he plays a soldier with his balls melting off.
Jackie Brown was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel (Rum Punch), douche.
That’s right. I stand corrected, it’s been a long work night – what’s your excuse?
For calling you a “douche”? I’m just mean.
HAIL TARANTINO, he is fun… no matter what you guys say, he is a fun director, and has a very good editor, nice screenplays, yeah he shows off his influence too much but he’s still fun, I guess i love tarantino for everything that you hate him for, i think you’re biggest mistake is to take him too seriously, just relax and enjoy…. nothing he has done has disappointed me unlike other directors.. so i say bring it QT.. i’m still a fan,, can’t wait for those “basterds”
I think Tarantinos favorite pastime is ripping off Melville and Scorsese. I agree with Kenji.
just relax and enjoy….
Thing is, I can do that with adult film makers, why waste time with this child.
I might enjoy a remake of Jackie Brown with the "N’ bombs and “mofos” bleeped the way Jean-Luc used the telephone in “Made in U.S.”
nay
I’ll wait until I see Inglorious. His first four films were excellent. With Kill Bill Vol II he went off the boil for me. | wouldn’t argue with any of the points put above. The guy knows how to direct a film and currently his style (call it ripping others off if you want) remains one of the more interesting and imaginative around.
Nay!
Nay. Tries to hard. Too pastiche.
Y’all wanna hear something truly hilarious?
My roommate’s favorite director is QT (he can’t name more than 5)-
he said one time – in front of me and all my film snob friends – “If you take all the great directors in the world right now and put them in a room….Quentin Tarantino would stand out. He’s like a man amongst boys.”
Clovenhoof-
its not just them. Its Kurosawa, Suzuki, and all of post-war Japanese cinema. French New Wave for sure.
Hell his production company is named after a Godard Film — “A Band Apart” — that mirrors the French Translation for “Band of Outsiders.”
You want to know why “nay”? Because I grew up watching the same crap he did (in third world grindhouses) and I can spot his rip offs a mile away. He is not good for the same reason Green Day is not good.
Daniel Purcell
Yay. Love all his films, especially his Grindhouse collab with Rodriguez.