It’s not an exaggeration to state that in 1993 I (like so many college aged dudes) was very enthusiastic about Quentin Tarantino’s debut film Reservoir Dogs. It was a fresh bit of filmmaking, talky but hardly dull, punctuated by enough violence to earn it the adjective “edgy,” and hip without being nauseating (that would come one film later). It was playing in the midnight art house theaters and in dorm rooms, wherein I watched it repeatedly. It was all my friends and I could talk about.
True story: in 1993, I was in a dorm room with a number of young women, all of them scantily clad, a few wearing nothing but their bras and panties. One other guy was in the room with me. And what were we Y chromosome bros doing? Why, we were discussing Reservoir Dogs. At one point one of the females said, “This movie must be great since it’s all you two can focus on in a room full of half-naked girls.”
Since those wild and crazy days, Tarantino’s star has risen, fallen, risen again. Pulp Fiction cemented his name in the film history books. Riding on that success, earlier mediocre scripts were turned into mediocre films (True Romance, Natural Born Killers). Then came Jackie Brown (the last of his films I enjoyed), which, while quite underrated, made people brush the young filmmaker off. And then there was the guy himself. Each interview Tarantino did was a chance to watch a grown man act like a child. When he came back with Kill Bill, the press gleefully reported that he kept, and often drove, the infamous Pussy Wagon from the film. Of course he did.
Perhaps I am prematurely aged, but my love for Tarantino waned quickly. I liked Pulp Fiction enough to see it multiple times in the theater, but there were moments that shined brighter than others. I love everything about The Gimp. That bit of weirdness spoke to my burgeoning love of the absurd. I enjoyed (almost) everything about the middle section highlighting Bruce Willis’s character. I was iffy on the last act. The final scene in the diner went on too long. In fact, if one thing seemed to change from Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction, it was the way the dialogue landed. Watching the first film, made up almost entirely of men talking to (and yelling at) each other, I was never bored. Nothing felt stretched too far. Would that I could say that about the follow up. The hipper-than-thou dialogue for which Tarantino is often celebrated tends to irk me. Or, worse, I get bored when the characters talk too fucking much.
Want an example? Consider the final show down between The Bride (revealed to be named Beatrix at that point, which is supposed to be a big reveal, though I’ve yet to figure why the fuck it matters) and Bill, the culmination of two films worth of killings and hyper-stylizing sword fights. After so much time, the scene finally arrives! But it’s almost immediately buried in a superfluous Superman analogy, long-as-holy-fuck chat, and a ridiculous anticlimax. If only fewer reviews had patted QT on the back for his dialogue, perhaps he might not have felt the need to let every damn word in his head leak onto paper, celluloid.
I know I’m in the minority. Tarantino has passionate (damn near rabid) fans. I’m used to reading/hearing lauds and praises heaped upon each new film, even when I disagree. I’m fine admitting that Tarantino’s films are just not my thing, that I don’t positively respond to them, and that that by no means negates the positive criticism his films receive. It’s my thing. That’s fine. But. . . can we maybe admit for a second that Tarantino’s strengths are in the visual composition of his films, the choice of music, the audio/visual manipulation of the viewer, and that the stories are often just okay?
The seams started to show when I saw the first Kill Bill. I couldn’t help but wonder why Lucy Liu’s character got so much screen time, even having an animated sequence devoted to her character, when Vivica Fox was quickly dispensed with. Sure, Lucy Liu was a big shot mobster in Japan and harder to get to and, in order to dispense with her guards, The Bride needed to get a special sword, adding a subplot about a retired sword maker and an overlong scene in a sushi bar. I suspected that QT wanted Kill Bill to be one long film, though, after the studio objected to a movie longer than two hours (these were the days before Marvel films made three hour film runs the norm) he split them up and padded out the now two short films. Obviously this is not the case. More likely: Tarantino just likes dialogue. And, apparently, so do his fans. Me? I’m less jazzed by long, talky scenes like the barroom chatfest in Inglorious Basterds.
Lest one think I am a man of few words (have you met me?), let me clarify. I love dialogue in film when it works, when it serves a purpose, or when it is doing more than signaling to the audience how cool and knowing the writer is. Half the time, Tarantino seems to be writing to remind his fans that he’s seen more films than they have, that he’s a product of geekdom, a student of pop culture, that it’s okay to be like him, obsessed with cinema to the degree that your friends hate you. I tend to roll my eyes at Sam Jackson’s, “It’s Kool and the Gang” or most of what comes out of Uma Thurman’s mouth in Pulp Fiction. That Tarantino cut a scene from Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman interrogates John Travolta on video camera, asking if he is an Elvis or Beatles man, a scene that truly sucks, is a testament that he knows when to trim some fat. But more often I see his dialogue as too slick and cool, annoyingly so.
I think I get why people like him. I think it has to do with dedication to cinema in all its forms and wide history, his way of honoring film tradition, his commitment to using film as a means of rewriting history and perhaps pointing out why we love movies: the escape, the hyper-reality bordering on surreality, the sheer spectacle. And, as he has done since Inglorious Basterds, he has made it his mission to root his work in specific time periods and subvert the notion that stories must obey the facts of the era. The one thing I enjoy about Inglorious Basterds is the sight of Hitler getting assassinated. Sadly, many reviewers have pointed out that the trick has now been played too many times, thus, watching members of the Manson Family getting slaughtered before they can kill Sharon Tate, while gruesome fun, is pretty much expected at this point.
The above 1,000 plus words are a long way of stating that I saw my first Tarantino film since Inglorious Basterds (which I disliked so much it turned me off the guy, I thought, for good). Once Upon a Time. . . in Hollywood seemed like the Tarantino movie I might not hate, largely because of the setting. I’ll admit that I was in no mood to see Tarantino’s recreation of the Civil War south or the American west. I just didn’t want to see the props. I think it was Christoph Waltz’s big pipe in the opening scene of Inglorious Basterds, a prop that got a lot of laughs during the screening I attended. But late 60s California... that I could stomach.
Quick review: a lot of fun moments that add up to little. A lot of moments I don’t care for. Inoffensive. Un-impacting. But I didn’t hate it.
Of course, the film has netted Oscar nominations. That level of honor is par for the Tarantino course. I don’t know why. I’m, again, in the minority, but I can’t fathom why a movie that felt like a C+ story with an A+ look is getting high accolades.
This is the root of my problem with Tarantino. I find his stories to be sloppy, dull, or gratingly cool. There are, to be sure, moments that feel profound, but as entertaining as some of his work can be (in spots) I never leave feeling changed. At least not since Reservoir Dogs and, to a lesser extent, Pulp Fiction. And while it is hardly the goal of all art to change the viewer/reader/listener, work this universally praised should be more than a fun night out.
Now I feel the need to share some details about my taste in film. I love a lot of silly stuff. Horror films, comedies, bizarre cult movies. . . love ‘em. Some I think are as good as the so-called classics. I’d put Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Alex Cox’s Repo Man among my favorites, right alongside The Third Man. I’ve seen Big Trouble in Little China more than any other film in existence. I’ve argued that After Hours is Scorsese’s best film. I’m all for fun, for pure entertainment. Not every film needs to be deep. So my criticism of Tarantino’s work as being trite tales in glossy packages is not a product of a theory that all movies need to be serious FILMS. I just don’t think that the level of form and content in his movies is always equal.
No one needs to agree with me. I’m not setting out to change any minds (who are you, anyway, reader?). I just wanted to do what I always tell my students to do when they are struggling to come up with thoughts on a subject—write until you figure it out. Maybe now I have a better grasp on why I can’t join the Tarantino party. Maybe I have a better idea of why I value what I value in art. Then again, maybe I’m full of shit. Maybe. Regardless, these are my thoughts and this is my blog. Thanks for letting me work that shit out.