In a recent review of Quentin Tarantino‘s different-film-from-how-it-was-marketed opus, Inglourious Basterds, film critic and friend of SCFOM Jonathan Kiefer writes, “When last we met in this space to discuss Quentin Tarantino, I claimed he was ruining American movies. Now I must acknowledge his progress. Now he’s on to European movies.”
I’ll take it a step further and suggest that he’s ruining movies. Period. His latest piece of fluff (dressed up as Important Movie), the aforementioned Inglourious Basterds, is sadly a box office champ, proving New York Times critic A.O. Scott’s theory that Americans have all the film sense of children (he also posits that we’re being treated as children, which, depending on your point of view, is accurate, cynical, or what we deserve).
How did this hack (and by “this hack,” I mean Tarantino) get to be the original Miss Jesus of cinema? Hard to say. He made one excellent film, which combined all the great elements of a classic genre picture and threw them into a contemporary stew of pop culture references, violence and kitsch. Its non-linear structure was just enough to distract viewers (including me) from the fact that the story wasn’t all that original (a bunch of guys knock over a store, it goes bad, they turn on each other, the end — see Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing for a similar set-up), and that it doesn’t add up to much. But so what? It’s a terrific flick. Its hyperkinetic energy alone is enough to make one look past its flaws. Plus, it has revelatory performances from Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen, and may be the last movie Chris Penn made before he got behemoth big.
Reservoir Dogs also introduced us to that Tarantino hallmark: his dialogue. And yes, it’s his dialogue. No character speaks in a voice that’s any different from Tarantino’s own, but no one knew that at the time. And it’s even kind of fun: ruminations on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and whatever-the-hell-else in the opening diner scene are pithy and cute in their four-letter way. And mercifully short.
So everyone lined up to blow Quentin and he rewarded us with Pulp Fiction, a great-on-first-viewing picture. (Others rewarded us with the wretched True Romance and the so-so Natural Born Killers.) Then you watch Pulp Fiction again and you realize it’s just what it says it is: pulp. It has no value. The dialogue goes stale after a second viewing because it’s all so indistinguishable, the characters are trite and Tarantino’s biggest directorial achievement is to make John Travolta look as if he can’t dance. That, and he brought Travolta back (a dubious blessing) and gave us the ham-fisted Samuel L. Jackson that has become the standard Samuel L. Jackson. Yes: Snakes on a Plane is a direct descendant of Pulp Fiction.
Pulp Fiction‘s not as bad as I make it out to be because Tarantino’s follow-up Jackie Brown is worse, unwatchable in all its talky nonsense. How can anyone make Elmore Leonard boring? Tarantino managed. Any clever ADR specialist could replace half the yapping in Jackie Brown with the words “yap yap yap” repeated over and over, and viewers would miss none of the plot. What a stupefyingly boring film, with dialogue that’s not only boring, but meaningless. And how many times do we have to watch someone open a goddamn car trunk from the inside?
Tarantino’s leap to douche-auteur got a tweak after Jackie Brown. As he says in a recent Village Voice interview:
I learned something after I did Jackie Brown—and don’t get me wrong, I love Jackie Brown. But when it was all over—even when I was making it—the fact that it was just a little bit once removed made me a little bit disconnected from it. That’s why I haven’t done another adaptation since then. I want to naturally fall into the next thing that’s going to turn me on.
You read that correctly: I love my own work too much to let another person’s decent source material cloud my vision. Ugh. That’s why we got Kill Bill, a movie so talk-heavy that it had to be split into two films. Sure, the first volume has lots of cool chop-socky violence and blah-be-de-blah snorkle bit (because that’s how much the story and talk matter), but it also has the “I’m telling you this important because if I didn’t you’d know it was horseshit” horseshit that’s become what passes for character development in a Tarantino film.
For example, The Bride (Uma Thurman) is some unknown entity to the audience, so much so that her character’s given name is bleeped out when other characters mention it in the film. That’s what the great screenwriter Tony Gilroy would call hype: calling attention to something that means nothing to throw off the audience from realizing that it means nothing. And really, who gives a shit what The Bride’s real name is? It’s not like the cops are eavesdropping and with that important piece of information they can go arrest Beatrix Kiddo (if only we knew her given name!). Christ. At least the movie has that great song by Tomoyasu Hotei.
The second Kill Bill film is even worse because it’s nothing but talk interspersed with some goofy violence that’s so absurd it doesn’t even thrill on a visceral level. (And Daryl Hannah as a bad-ass? Really?) Do we really care what these people have to say? Or care that Kiddo’s sense of honor has been violated by Bill? And who the hell thought David Carradine was worthy of all this screen time, anyway?
Oh, yes. The Tarantino dialogue. Honestly. It’s wretched. It means nothing. It’s an excuse for Tarantino to listen to his favorite subject — Tarantino — talk. Nearly endlessly. Kill Bill Vol. 2 is 136 minutes long and probably has 115 minutes of yapping, colorless, boring, self-important claptrap masquerading as Something Important. It’s not important. It’s hype. It doesn’t develop character. It doesn’t move the plot forward. It’s expository (which is doubly shitty of QT, because there’s really no story to Kill Bill other than “Woman shot and left for dead goes on a revenge-killing spree against the five people who wronged her,” which could be done in one shitty 90-minute film instead of two shitty 120-minute films). It’s dull. All the characters sound the same. Kind of like the characters in an Aaron Sorkin script sound the same. (There. I said it.) Add Diablo fucking Cody in there, too.
(I realize there are people out there who like that stuff. Stylized dialogue. Colorless characterization. Rote and one-note notions of honor. They should get out more.)
That brings us to Death Proof, the Tarantino half of Grindhouse, the we-have-some-clout-so-let’s-make-the-audience-suffer-but-it’s-all-in-good-fun crapterpiece Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino sort of made together in homage to the double features they grew up on. Guys, there’s a reason those double features don’t exist anymore: The movies sucked. For every Monte Hellman or Herschell Gordon Lewis there are 14 Sean S. Cunninghams.
Death Proof is so awful it’s hard to believe a studio would release it. (The Weinsteins released it, so maybe I shouldn’t call Grindhouse a studio picture. But hey: It’s Tarantino, right?) The movie is technically well made (and therefore subverts its own rules of being a grindhouse pic, but whatevs), but it’s a — shocker — big bore. First, we have to listen to Sydney Tamiia Poitier yap and yap and yap sanctimoniously about a bunch of nothing including Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and oh, who gives a shit, get to the fucking story. By the way, after listening to her talk and call her friends, more or less, assholes for nearly 30 minutes, her demise isn’t nearly gory enough.
But there’s no story. And yes, that’s kind of the point of Grindhouse. Except that true grindhouse flicks had stories, as dumb as they could be, and some of them were actually fun. (The inconsistent Rodriguez’s Planet Terror is fun, mostly because he’s a hack — a talented hack — doing hack work and having fun with it. Quentin: Don’t take yourself so fucking seriously.)
There’s a second scene with a bunch of girls talking about nothing, this time in a diner, just like the guys did in Reservoir Dogs (way to reference yourself, dick). After what seems like forever, they kill Kurt Russell (the only good performance in the Tarantino half of Grindhouse). The whole film is stunningly misogynistic, but its defenders think it glorifies women. I have to ask: What pro-chick film makes so many of them such horrible people, only to dispatch them so violently? And what pro-chick film makes the good girls a bunch of vengeance seeking gorehounds? Yeah, yeah, it’s Grindhouse. I missed the point. Fuck me. Even the level-headed and respectable A.O. Scott was sucked in by Death Proof:
I’m hesitant to risk giving away too much, but I will say that Kurt Russell is awfully good, and that I could listen to Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Tracie Thoms, two of the movie’s motor-mouthed heroines, talk through the whole three hours of “Grindhouse,” read the phone book or recite “The Faerie Queene” on tape in my Volvo in the middle of a traffic jam.
I’d rather put out a lit cigarette in my ass than listen to Tracie Thoms do the tough-black-chick routine that she’s reduced to in Death Proof. Honkey, please. Even the car chase is drab. Peter Yates, William Friedkin, George Miller — they all did it better. Much better. Even shithead Michael Bay has done it the fuck better.
That brings me to Inglourious Look-I-Spelled-it-Wrong-on-Purpose!-Basterds, the film that started this whole essay/rant. Having seen it twice (and once for free, thankfully) to make sure I wasn’t crazy for disliking it as much as I did, I admit there are some good things about it. First, Christoph Waltz as the SS Colonel Hans Landa is so good that you forget you’re listening to Tarantino’s tin-ear dialogue and that the Landa character is a caricature, and you feel a little guilty for liking a Nazi so much.
Second, there is no second. Sure, there’s a perverse thrill in watching Eli Roth beat a Nazi officer to death with a baseball bat. And yes, Mélanie Laurent and Diane Kruger are mesmerizing. And much of the dialogue is in French and German, so it’s hard to be distracted by how Tarantino-esque it is (though, as a French speaker, I can tell you the idiosyncrasies of Tarantino’s gobbledegook mercifully don’t really translate). But then there’s Brad Pitt, who’s distractingly bad. Bad accent, bad mugging, and he does that stupid squint he always falls back on, and lolls his tongue about as he’s done in nearly every picture since Thelma & Louise. Is that the point, to make Pitt so terrible? Probably not, since most of the actors are quite good. There’s also his unexplained character motivation (in fairness, does one really need a reason to kill Nazis in WWII?), which Tarantino addresses in that same Village Voice interview:
[I] had a whole history with Pitt’s character, Aldo. Aldo has been fighting racism in the South; he was fighting the Klan before he ever got into World War II. And the fact that Aldo is part Indian is a very important aspect of my whole conception, even of turning the Jews into American Indians fighting the unfightable, losing cause. So that lead guy is legitimately an Indian. Also, the dichotomy of this Southern hillbilly and his verbiage bouncing off them is interesting.
Hey! That’s some great character motivation for Aldo’s actions! Too bad it’s not in the film. It’s hype. And fuck you, hype.
And none of this griping even takes into consideration Colonel Landa’s unmotivated character change at the film’s end, or his reasons for leaving Mélanie Laurent’s character alive while killing the rest of her family. (Actually, her escape lazily sets up the film’s entire plot, because without her, there’s no movie theater in which to kill Hitler at the end of the movie.) And I won’t even get into the whole sequence in which Pitt and a German soldier discuss what constitutes a Mexican stand-off, except to say, “Hey, I know! This time, let’s have a Mexican stand-off in which everyone talks about what makes up a Mexican stand-off! I am so pushing the envelope!” And the other distracting casting: Mike Myers as a Colonel Blimp-like British officer. Barf.
No, the gripe ends here, with Hitler’s untimely death at the hands of Tarantino’s basterds. Yes, they kill Hitler. Which would have been great if he’d died, along with Goebbels, in 1944. But Hitler and Goebbels didn’t die then. And the manner in which they’re killed is childish. It’s the pipe dream of a 10-year-old who wants to rewrite history. It’s so ball-breakingly petulant, stupid and contrived and — let’s see, stupid — that it cheapens an already cheap genre exercise: Spaghetti Western masquerading as WWII flick.
The film’s opening grosses will do nothing to slow down Tarantino’s march to film history. (Neither will the fact that it’s called Inglourious Basterds but isn’t about the basterds, who are barely on screen.) Tarantino will never be the craftsman that Scorsese is — or Bergman was, or Spielberg is, or even, say, Michael Haneke is. And sadly, he doesn’t want to be. He wants the fame and accolades and all that other bullshit (read the Village Voice interview if you don’t believe me) and he has no interest in doing anything that means anything.
Maybe that’s not the point of cinema. Maybe it truly is to escape, and nothing more. Hopefully Tarantino’s audience will realize they’re being played for suckers, wise up and demand he do better, or better yet, desert him.
That likely won’t happen. As long as there’s a fan-boy culture, critics willing to blow him and actors who think he’s just, like, the greatest, we’re stuck with him as he is. He can set up a shot and place a camera well and (mostly) let an actor act well, but the work is just empty. It’s ruining movies.
I spent years dealing with everyone’s blatant incredulity and derision when I didn’t think Pulp Fiction was worth the three dollars I paid to see it (and worse: not funny.) Tarantino just does nothing for me – nothing at all.
I’d just like to add this, and say “what an asshole”:
LOS ANGELES – Quentin Tarantino isn’t saying why he spelled the title of his World War II adventure, “Inglourious Basterds,” the way he did.
“I’m never going to explain that,” Tarantino said during a news conference in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where “Inglourious Basterds” premiered. “When you do an artistic flourish like that, to describe it, to explain it, would just … invalidate the whole stroke in the first place.
“(Artist Jean-Michel) Basquiat takes the letter L from a hotel room door and sticks it in his painting,” he added. “If he describes why he did it, he might as well not have done it at all.”
http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/movies/story/1201380.html
Yeah. He’s an artist. OK.
I hate you.
Well, Dave, allow me a minor response, if you can see me from way up there. What I can’t stand are people with overinflated, self-important opinions who can’t lower themselves to conceive of a reason someone may disagree with them…well, a reason other than “they must be idiots.” I guess I must be one of the childlike Americans who you mention “lining up to blow Tarantino” because I enjoy some works from the great destroyer, the Shiva of cinema, the harbinger of artistic doom. By all means, don’t save your rancor and bile for the real things that are threatening artistic film endeavors (recessionary budgets, a paucity of places that welcome diversity, forums for intelligent discussion), blame Quentin Tarantino, who has actually been more missing than present over the last decade.
I swear that if the Internet has done anything, it’s given people the self-righteous belief that their position isn’t just correct, but that all others who deign to believe opposite are subhuman and irredeemably flawed. Dave, my boy, I separate the artist from the art, I hold that everyone can look at a creation and see something different, that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I respect the diversity of opinion that holds Tarantino is both over and underrated. But most of all, I respect those who choose to engage in discourse and not straw man attacks. Burn Tarantino at your verbal stake all you wish, but try not to refer to those who enjoy his work as moronic pig people. Some of us have learned to read and write and may just take your inflammatory screed and call for attention seriously.
From a guy who needs the Internet to be validated to a guy who blows Tarantino: Fuck you. You’re an idiot.
On a less personal note: C’mon man. You’re a critic. Or at least I think WOWT is an NBC affiliate in Omaha at which you do some criticism or something. You must get burned up by stuff that other people love that you see no value in. Or maybe you can see all sides of each issue. In which case, fucking hurrah. You’re man of the year.
As for my “rancor and bile” that doesn’t address “the real things that are threatening artistic film endeavors,” such as “recessionary budgets, a paucity of places that welcome diversity, forums for intelligent discussion” why would I address those things in this post? THAT’S NOT WHAT THIS POST IS ABOUT. This post is about Tarantino and his films. End. If I wanted to tackle the other stuff, I would have. Don’t try to change the argument to fit your argument.
Christ, people like you are really jerks. You go out of your way to get offended by the post (after going out your way to misread it — at which point did I write that Tarantino fans must be idiots?) and then tell me I’m a know-nothing because I have a blog. News flash, dick: You validated my blog by leaving a comment.
“Dave, my boy,” he writes. Nice attempt at emasculation. What an asshole.
Ryan Syrek: what blogosphere do you personally dwell in?
Here’s the thing, I have no problem with you swinging your cyber dick around and wielding your intellectual prowess with witticisms like “Fuck you. You’re an idiot.” I don’t even have a problem with your opinion that Tarantino will open a giant black hole of suck into which all good film falls. That’s fine. But seriously, you seem to be an intelligent guy and, although somewhat quick to anger, a pretty good writer as well, so why the need to fall into the whole “if you disagree with me you’re a child who has succumbed to the will of Tarantino” bullshit? Let your argument, which is often well supported, stand on its own.
I guess what chapped my metaphorical hide was that it seems like the new modus operandi for people having discussions of all kinds these days is to piss on the character and quality of the people who support a given issue (be it health care reform or, say, film) in an attempt to make a point. If you remove your slaps against the people who like Tarantino’s work, I think you make a few valid claims, but I was instantly turned off by the “I’m cooler than you” posturing. I was not morally offended, I was not shocked to my core, I just didn’t like it and…to be honest…thought enough of your blog to respond.
I guess I’m just tired of the constant character attack above content attack. The “if you disagree, you’re fat” approach. If it makes me an asshole to respond instead of just reading it, thinking something negative and walking away, then okay, I’m an asshole. I’m okay with that. I’ve been called worse. For the record, I don’t think you’re an asshole. I just think that you engaged in what has become the new cultural tradition: take your shots while making your point. Also, just a tiny little point, isn’t there the slightest chance, given the size of those who seem willing to metaphorically fellate him, that they may have some measure of a point?
Hmm. I guess you could look at the post as me claiming superiority. You could also look at it as me being some kind of film or pop culture dilettante because I don’t like QT. Your choice!
What surprises me is that you took it so personally that I had the gall — the gall! — to suggest that A.O. Scott should have included Tarantino or at least some of his films in his article about the childishness of American cinema. If you don’t think the phrase “get medieval on your ass” is childish (for starters), then we’ll have to agree to disagree.
But hey, at least people are reading me and getting riled up. And by people I mean moronic pig people who “thought enough of [my] blog to respond.” Fancy! And you traffic in a sea of snark, so what’s the problem?
What chaps my metaphorical hide — as opposed to my literal hide — is the way your calmer, more thoughtful second response is casual/clever: “I guess what chapped my metaphorical hide was that it seems like the new modus operandi…” To say nothing of the fact that the “modus operandi” you describe, this so called “new cultural tradition,” isn’t new at all. Please see Manohla Dargis, Pauline Kael, Patrick Goldstein and certainly Roger Ebert, who has books called “Your Movie Sucks” and “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.”
Finally, I’m puzzling over the last line of your second comment, trying to unpack its tortured syntax. When you speak of the size of those willing to metaphorically fellate QT (again with the metaphorically! thanks, I get that it’s not literal), do you mean physical size, as in a Weinstein? Or audience size? In any case, I’m pretty sure the “If other people like it, it must be great” logic isn’t necessarily more noble or correct than the “If you disagree, you’re fat” approach.
As for me being quick to anger, I suggest you re-read your first comment, which I think had a whole lotta cyber dick swingin’.
You’re going to have to forgive me, sometimes I forget how this works. I just assume that all people who write about movies want to have some measure of actual discussion. That’s not always true. You wanted to make a point, which you did. I would expound, but I fear your habit of placing my words in quotation marks with mockery has wounded my spirit. The double use of the word metaphorical was quite the gaff, although I’m glad I have permanent record that I have never actually tried to perform oral sex on Quentin Tarantino.
Lord knows if we were both capable of being fair and not petty, I think we can both see that we’re overstating the other’s case…but such is not the way of modern discourse. Oh, and I would never suggest that you are a dilettante because foreign-sounding words frighten and confuse me. I will freely admit I was spirited in my first post, your rhetoric seemed to move me to that tone.
I guess in the end, all I was trying to say was that it was possible to disagree with you, to support a defense of Tarantino without being a potato head. If you concede that, I have no more qualms.
[...] The case against Quentin Tarantino « Some Country for Old Men somecountryforoldmen.com/2009/08/27/the-case-against-quentin-tarantino – view page – cached #Some Country for Old Men RSS Feed Some Country for Old Men » The case against Quentin Tarantino Comments Feed Some Country for Old Men Fat people aren’t athletes Mike Bloomberg can’t find his skybox — From the page [...]
For what it’s worth, I think you’re both assholes.
Fair enough.
[...] One guy got the approach really wrong and, despite making a decent point or two, was such a jerk about it that we (that is, I) felt justified in being a total asshole in return. And then there was a half-assed apology/mea culpa from him and then we went back to making fun of this guy. Such is life. [...]
Yeah, I don’t know, brother. I watch everything. I fucking love movies (not just the movies I love, and there is a distinct different between the two). I’ve watched and own the classics, foreign stuff from Fassbender to Godard, and I gotta say, Quentin Tarantino makes some entertaining movies. No one man can “ruin” movies, and I’d put Tarantino at the end of a very long list of men and women even remotely capable of that. I think you’re quite wrong on this one.
[...] You get the idea. That’s not to say that none of these films is good or deserving of water cooler talk or accolades between peers who made them. Except Inglourious Basterds, which is simply one of the worst films ever made. [...]
[...] Tarantino’s defenders, after coming across like dicks, can be kind of nice in a condescending [...]