Poll of the Day > Been on a Tarantino binge, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds are 10/10

(+) Yeah! (+)

I watched Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill back in the day but I've mostly been absent from cinema since my high school days, what's the best stuff he's put out? Been looking at Hateful Eight, and I've also considered watching the movies he considers the most influential to him, the trilogy that ends with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Ehh.

I won't necessarily argue that Tarantino is overrated, or that he's a terrible filmmaker, but I honestly never enjoy his movies as much as other people seem to.

I liked Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction definitely had its moments (and it was more enjoyable because I was in the college mindset at the time), but I honestly have trouble thinking of a single movie past those two that didn't leave me kind of cold at best and rolling my eyes hard at worst. It's just not even remotely my preferred style.



agesboy posted...

and I've also considered watching the movies he considers the most influential to him, the trilogy that ends with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

See, now I'd definitely recommend that. The "Man With No Name" trilogy is pretty good, if you can handle the slower pace of older movies and haven't been completely desensitized by modern frenetic filmmaking.

I never really liked Westerns as a genre, but about 20 years or so ago I just took a week or two where I'd have a nice glass of wine and I'd watch movies like those three, the Magnificent Seven, Once Upon a Time in the West, and a few others and just really enjoyed them. Even newer stuff like Silverado, Tombstone, Unforgiven, Quick and the Dead, etc.

I can't stand his movies. Awful pacing with a lot of meaningless bullshit and the few action scenes generally aren't that exciting.

That said, I liked the Hateful Eight and I've never seen Kill Bill or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Django Unchained was okay and I have yet to see Jackie Brown, either.

Much prefer Robert Rodriguez's stutf.

Krow_Incarnate posted...

That said, I liked the Hateful Eight

I kind of feel like movies like The Hateful Eight are almost entirely carried by the skill and charisma of the cast, moreso than by anything Tarantino himself brings to the table. Kudos to him for casting great actors, but I wouldn't say that makes him a brilliant filmmaker.

I honestly wouldn't disagree with that at all. Kurt and Walt Goggins are incredible.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I never really liked Westerns as a genre, but about 20 years or so ago I just took a week or two where I'd have a nice glass of wine and I'd watch movies like those three, the Magnificent Seven, Once Upon a Time in the West, and a few others and just really enjoyed them. Even newer stuff like Silverado, Tombstone, Unforgiven, Quick and the Dead, etc.

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried watching 50's-60's Japanese period films by people like Kurosawa, like Seven Samurai? It's apparently very adjacent to westerns, and I know it massively influenced western works like Star Wars (not to say star wars is exceptional or anything, but star wars can't be the only western work it influenced)

I mean to but watching old shit is really hard for my millennial gamer brain. Honestly, I watched Inglourious Basterds once on a second monitor while playing games, then made myself watch it with no distractions afterwards on my main monitor

agesboy posted...

Out of curiosity, have you ever tried watching 50's-60's Japanese period films by people like Kurosawa, like Seven Samurai? It's apparently very adjacent to westerns, and I know it massively influenced western works like Star Wars

It's "adjacent" to Westerns in the sense that movies like Fistful of Dollars and Magnificent Seven are literally directly copying them. They're basically just Yojimbo and Seven Samurai with the names changed.

And yes, I've watched a fair bit of samurai films. Those two, Sanjuro, Rashomon, Kagemusha much later - most of my experience with Japanese film is basically just Akira Kurosawa films. Though I also have Chushingura (The 47 Ronin) and a few other films (I've got a section of my DVD collection that has about three dozen Japanese and Chinese films - which is ironically right next to the Western section, because I sort my films by genre).

It definitely takes a bit more focus - I don't think you'll really appreciate films like that if you're just half-watching them while multitasking. But if you can put the effort it it can be rewarding.

Yeah if I give them a go (I'm planning on it now) it'll have my full focus, same with the Man With No Name trilogy. I just multitask by default, and ended up interested in Tarantino shit, then got interested in what he likes

I didn't like Inglorious Basterds when it came out, but I rewatched it about a decade ago and absolutely loved it. It's probably his best movie. I used to love Pulp Fiction but now it just feels mindlessly edgy.

agesboy posted...

Yeah if I give them a go (I'm planning on it now) it'll have my full focus, same with the Man With No Name trilogy. I just multitask by default, and ended up interested in Tarantino shit, then got interested in what he likes

Oh, I definitely get it. The last 10-15 years or so have definitely broken me that way as well. I have a really hard time just sitting down to watch anything without multitasking. Usually if I want to "watch" something I have to throw it on while I'm playing something like Stardew Valley or Dreamlight Valley, mostly "casual busywork" sorts of games where I don't have to give them my full focus, so I can half pay attention to something else at the same time.

The only way I can really just give a show or film my full attention now is to either watch it with someone else, or to go to a theater where I'm more in the movie-going experience mindset (and where I can't really have my phone or laptop out, because unlike some people I am not an asshole).

But there are definitely some things where you just won't get anything worthwhile out of them unless you can give them that full focus. Especially if you're talking about foreign stuff where you need to read subtitles.

I loved Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time, but they are both almost purposely slow. Much slower than his normal work.

my personal favorite of his is Jackie Brown, but that one might be the slowest one hes ever done. I just love everything about it.

thats how I think everyone is, with Tarantino. They have their deep favorites (mine are Jackie Brown, Inglorious Basterds and Kill Bill), and when you have a favorite, you get an incredibly rich production filled with a million little Easter eggs, worth multiple rewatches. Thats why people care about his stuff so much

also if you really want to go deep, watch his Grindhouse double feature with Robert Rodriguez. Hell, you can even watch the CSI 2-part season finale he directed in like 2005. Its all quality work, and he care immensely about the things hes making

I love all of tarintinos movies and inglorious basterds is definitely my favorite.

i can put any of his movies on at any time. Theyre so strangely comforting. Once upon a time is probably the one Ive watched the most

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I won't necessarily argue that Tarantino is overrated, or that he's a terrible filmmaker, but I honestly never enjoy his movies as much as other people seem to.

I liked Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction definitely had its moments (and it was more enjoyable because I was in the college mindset at the time), but I honestly have trouble thinking of a single movie past those two that didn't leave me kind of cold at best and rolling my eyes hard at worst. It's just not even remotely my preferred style.

I think this says best how my opinion was and is now. I very much enjoyed Kill Bill and Inglorious Bastards and Django at the time, but I really feel like his films appeal to younger teenage / early 20's audiences. Thinking back, I'm sure my approach was more based on joining in on a popular trend because he Tarantino was all the rage in my age group back then. I found the films "fun" but I don't particularly remember growing attached to any of the characters or really understanding much of the plot. It was all just revenge porn. And a lot of scenes and quotes even then left me to cringe.

Also, I did try watching Sanjuro but found it very boring at the time. But maybe I didn't have the right perspective for older films then. I had the same feeling for Citizen Kane when I tried watching it. Tapped out after five minutes.

I forced my gf to watch Once Upon A Time In Hollywood with me last week and she said the pacing was awful and that the movie should have started when Brad picks up Margaret.

For Tarantino fans, don't forget to watch Four Rooms. The first 2 segments are awful, but the 3rd and 4th (Tarantino's is #4) are great.

Inglorious Basterds is my favourite

I feel like you more or less watched his best already, but everyone has their own flavor of Tarantino movie. His first directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, put him and his style on the map. It's definitely more rough and raw than his others, but not in a bad way. Full of great moments, intensity, and trademark quotes. I always find RD hard to rate exactly.

Jackie Brown is my least favorite of his, but by no means bad. Just could never get into it as much as his others.

Next in order that you haven't seen is Death Proof, which most people usually rank last, but is criminally underrated IMO. It's a giant love letter to films like Vanishing Point and stunt players, with Kurt Russell playing a great villain. This movie was credited for revitalizing his career. Fantastic stunt car chase scene for the last half of the movie.

The Hateful Eight is definitely a different beast. One of the more "grounded" of his works, and it films like a stage play, because it essentially is. It's a much slower burn and has mystery elements. I actually need to rewatch this, I was a little underwhelmed when I saw it, and I've only seen it once.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is also a little slower and plodding compared to his others, but is just a fantastic and fun journey of the final days of the Hollywood Studio system, set during the hippie movement of the time.

And yes, The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly is a masterpiece absolutely worth viewing. Amazing cinematography that would be copied and inspire film making forever more, endlessly memorable quotes and scenes, and just peak Westerness.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

His first directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, put him and his style on the map.

Pulp Fiction was really the film that moved him up from someone that only film nerds (ie, people like Tarantino himself at the time) would talk about with each other to being someone that everyone knew. I always sort of think of Pulp Fiction as his "first" film, and then Reservoir Dogs is the "prequel" you go back and watch afterwards (even though that's not the order they were released in). It's definitely the order I recommend to people who are starting to watch Tarantino for the first time.

That being said, I've always sort of questioned whether the strong mainstream appeal of Pulp Fiction was the work of Roger Avary more than Tarantino. At the time a lot of people talked up his contributions and influence on the film as well as Tarantino's (at least until the narrative later minimized him so they could lift Tarantino up as a cinematic genius anyway), but then you look at the stuff he worked on afterward and... hmm.

It's hard to see anything even remotely "avant-garde" to his work apart from Killing Zoe and Rules of Attraction.

ive liked all his movies. usually have a lot of action

In his honor this is now the feet pic general thread

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Pulp Fiction was really the film that moved him up from someone that only film nerds (ie, people like Tarantino himself at the time) would talk about with each other to being someone that everyone knew.

Yeah, which is why RD gets skipped over or forgotten a lot. That said, it has all the hallmarks that would become his style: "Tarrantino'ing" (he didn't invent non-linear storytelling in film, but whatever), casual but graphic violence, and emphasis on dialogue-driven scenes, especially where the characters talk about the seemingly mundane, etc.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's hard to see anything even remotely "avant-garde" to his work apart from Killing Zoe and Rules of Attraction.

Tbf, I'd say this is more because he became an overnight sensation after Pulp Fiction, and thus the budgets studios were willing to give him exploded, vs the shoe-string budgets of RD and PF, which force a more avante-garde style by nature. Jackie Brown was next, and that only cost a bit more than PF to make, but it was also a film that didn't really need a big budget to make. IIRC, PF was like $8M, and JB was like $12M. Compare that to Kill Bill V. 1 and 2 that came next, which had a combined whopping $60M in budget.

CyborgSage00x0 posted...

That said, it has all the hallmarks that would become his style: "Tarrantino'ing" (he didn't invent non-linear storytelling in film, but whatever), casual but graphic violence, and emphasis on dialogue-driven scenes, especially where the characters talk about the seemingly mundane, etc.

I'd argue he didn't "invent" anything. He mostly just stole ideas he liked from other movies and then did them again. Sometimes without the original context, but sometimes finding new ways to reinterpret old things.

Similar to my take over in the Beatles topic, he wasn't really an innovator as much as he was a synthesizer and popularizer. He found ways to take ideas that already existed, sort of smashed them together, and then managed to get it to the masses more effectively than his predecessors. Which in turn made people think he invented those things because his work was the first time they encountered them, even though they'd been around for years (if not decades) prior.

If I wanted to, I could make the same argument I made for the Beatles - which is that mainstream audiences were more willing to accept certain things from a dopey ex-video clerk white dude than they would have from blacksploitation or Asian exploitation films of the 70s (which is where Tarantino drew a lot of inspiration from, something he himself has always openly admitted, and even referenced in his own movies). It allowed people to pretend certain things were now "art" when previously they might have seen them as being "crass". And even then, his acceptance (much like the Beatles) mostly came via younger people embracing their work while lots of older people complained about it.

He might also have been one of the first major directors who were almost entirely shaped by "ground-level" pop culture (something that's become almost ubiquitous now, and not necessarily in a good way). So much of his aesthetic stems directly from working in that video store and watching all the movies for free, which meant he was willing to watch a lot of cheap and/or terrible movies most normal people would never be exposed to. Not to mention that some of his more memorable dialogue/rants were taken almost directly from conversations he had at the video store (his one Madonna rant, his take on Top Gun, etc)... generally, whenever a character played by Tarantino himself has an extended monologue in one of his movies, you can probably assume he's just repeating a conversation he's already had with someone else in real life when there weren't any customers and he was really, really bored.



CyborgSage00x0 posted...

Tbf, I'd say this is more because he became an overnight sensation after Pulp Fiction, and thus the budgets studios were willing to give him exploded, vs the shoe-string budgets of RD and PF, which force a more avante-garde style by nature.

Yeah, but I wasn't talking about Tarantino in that part you quoted, I was talking about Roger Avary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Avary

My point was more that, when Pulp Fiction first came out, people talked it up like it was a full collaboration between the two, and Avary got a lot of the credit. Considering he'd just come off Killing Zoe, you could easily make an argument that the two of them had similar quirky styles, and together they were able to polish the script way more effectively than either of them alone, which in turn contributed to Pulp Fiction taking off so strongly when Reservoir Dogs didn't (in spite of the fact that, in retrospect, I'm almost willing to say Reservoir Dogs is the better movie).

But if you look at Roger Avary's filmography post-Pulp Fiction, there really doesn't seem to be that same level of shine. Whereas Tarantino just kept putting out progressively quirkier and quirkier films.

Plus, if you factor True Romance into the mix (which Tarantino helped write prior to filming Reservoir Dogs), it's even easier to see "Tarantino before he was Tarantino" in the finished project (it definitely feels more like a Tarantino film than a Tony Scott one). Which can call into question just what exactly Avary DID contribute to Pulp Fiction.

I'm tempted to say that Tarantino's original script ideas were potentially much rougher, and it took Avary to sort of "smooth it out" to make it more appealing to mainstream audiences than Reservoir Dogs had been, which helped contribute to its booming success. But I have no real idea. And short of being able to travel to a parallel universe where Tarantino wrote and filmed Pulp Fiction without Avary to see what it would have been like, it would be very hard to ever truly know.

True Romance* and Jackie Brown are so underrated. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were great for their time, but I dont think have aged as well as others.