Quentin Tarantino
An hour with Quentin Tarantino
An amazingly talented director, I keep waiting for him to make his first film for adults. All of his films are spectacularly violent in a comic-booky sort of way--but there are moments in each film that are really spectacular. For example in this last film (Inglourious Basterds) there is a long conversational prelude in a French Country house in which the Nazi bad-guy is getting the owner of the house to admit that he is hiding Jews in beneath the house. I could have watched that movie, without violence, without any further motion for quite some time--perhaps for the length of feature. Just ordinary conversation and the intensity builds and builds and builds and then explodes apart in the usual senseless comic book fashion. Same with Death-Proof--the man has a deft hand at conversation. But I never feel that I have entered the real world of real people in his films. The violence is over-the-top comic-book mayhem: witness the moment in the Battle with the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill vol. 1 in which one guy's limb--an arm if I recall is lopped off and we're plunged into the Shakespearian tragedy that Wednesday and Pugsley play for us all in The Addams Family, not an arterial spurt, not merely sprays--but a veritable waterworks of brilliant red water.
I like his films, but I keep waiting for him to grow up and make a film for adults, not merely an adult film.
An amazingly talented director, I keep waiting for him to make his first film for adults. All of his films are spectacularly violent in a comic-booky sort of way--but there are moments in each film that are really spectacular. For example in this last film (Inglourious Basterds) there is a long conversational prelude in a French Country house in which the Nazi bad-guy is getting the owner of the house to admit that he is hiding Jews in beneath the house. I could have watched that movie, without violence, without any further motion for quite some time--perhaps for the length of feature. Just ordinary conversation and the intensity builds and builds and builds and then explodes apart in the usual senseless comic book fashion. Same with Death-Proof--the man has a deft hand at conversation. But I never feel that I have entered the real world of real people in his films. The violence is over-the-top comic-book mayhem: witness the moment in the Battle with the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill vol. 1 in which one guy's limb--an arm if I recall is lopped off and we're plunged into the Shakespearian tragedy that Wednesday and Pugsley play for us all in The Addams Family, not an arterial spurt, not merely sprays--but a veritable waterworks of brilliant red water.
I like his films, but I keep waiting for him to grow up and make a film for adults, not merely an adult film.
I am with you on this.
ReplyDeleteIt took me some time to come to his films, mainly due to their violence, since giving him a try an I very impressed with his storytelling.
I fear that we may have a long wait for him to make that film for adults that we would both like to see.