Ever since Reservoir Dogs -a movie that echoed early-'70s cynicism, with its tragic Mexican standoff ending, and thus played perfectly with the early-'90s Sundance set trying to recapture the spirit of New Hollywood-Tarantino has made movies in which the "good guys," such as they are, "win." Sometimes that victory is mixed (in Pulp Fiction one of our black-suited hitmen buys it on a toilet, while the one who pledged to walk the righteous path lives on) or bittersweet (again, Jackie Brown driving out of Max’s life). When even popular audience movies like Three Days of the Condor counted on a certain amount of cynicism and paranoia from the popcorn eaters.Ĭonsider that passage in the context of Tarantino’s body of work. When the senseless death of your hero at the climax was the vogue ( Easy Rider, The New Centurions, Electra Glide in Blue, Hustle ). In a Hollywood that had forsaken the Old Hollywood happy ending as bullshit propaganda from " the Man ". When even crowd-pleasing comedies like The Longest Yard included the brutal death of characters. You had to live in a world where a movie like Papillon was a Hollywood blockbuster. Passage the second:īut the real reason that the film Rocky could never have the impact it did in 1976 is because to have that same impact, you had to live through the tough, gritty, downbeat, pessimistic films of the early seventies to be floored by the feel-good catharsis of Rocky. The next section comes from a chapter in which Tarantino gushes about the Sylvester Stallone film Paradise Alley -the movies he chooses to praise, the movies he chooses to damn are always amusing-and why it would be impossible for modern audiences to stumble onto Rocky today and receive it the way it was received on initial release. Some folks criticized Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood for being extravagantly long certainly, we didn’t need shot after shot of Brad Pitt driving through late-1960s Los Angeles, did we? But this misses the (or at least a ) point of the film, which was to re-create that city’s vibe, to suffuse you in it, to see what was lost when the horror of the Manson murders infected La La Land. Vincent Vega cruising in his convertible as he zones out on some high-grade heroin while The Centurions’ "Bullwinkle Part II" plays in the background Bobby Womack’s "Across 110th Street" playing as Jackie Brown drives out of Max Cherry’s life the melodramatic strings and vocals of "Malagueña Salerosa" after the Bride has been reunited with her daughter at the end of Kill Bill Vol. Tarantino has always been a master of the Cinema of Vibes, of making sure what we’re watching onscreen looks cool and composed. Passage the first:īullitt is about action, atmosphere, San Francisco, Yates’ great location photography, Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score, and Steve McQueen, his haircut and wardrobe. There are two keys to understanding Tarantino’s body of work in this book, two passages that turn the tumblers and help you make sense of his artistic project. This book is for the appreciators the scolds can go stew somewhere else. Early on he discusses his mother’s theory of violence onscreen-that the act itself is less important than the context in which it occurs-and notes that "this would be a conversation I would have for the rest of my life," this push and pull between decency and outrage, between scolds who think you shouldn’t blow a guy’s head off in the back of a car and cineastes who appreciate the dark humor in it. I loved every page of it.Ĭinema Speculation is part memoir, part critical essay, part lament for a past that has departed. "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."Īgain, if you’re familiar with the man’s voice, you can practically hear him saying those lines, perhaps emphasizing "because" in each sentence, eyebrows arching and voice inflecting a notch higher on the "they were right." It’s almost eerie. "Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates," he says after recounting being taken to the theater by his folks (and, later, his mom and her suitors) to see films like M*A*S*H and The French Connection as a tween. And much of the book’s early going is concerned with those dives and those exploitation flicks, as well as the cineaste’s own earned bravado. He’s an inveterate raconteur, less conversationalist than lecturer, one whose head is overflowing with trivia about which Los Angeles dives were playing which cut-rate exploitation pictures at what point in his childhood. I mean this in the best way possible, as Quentin Tarantino is one of the most interesting filmmakers on the planet.
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