Ten Days of Terror!: Death Proof

Film: Death Proof
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time will know that I think Quentin Tarantino is a vastly overrated director. I’ll admit that some of his films have a certain style to them, and when he first showed up in the film industry, there was an unmistakable sense of brashness to his work. But then he seems to do the same thing over and over again. So much of Tarantino’s work, despite being touted as so wonderfully original, is completely derivative. Everything he does seems to be a reference to something else, and the more obscure the reference, the happier it makes him. Tarantino’s movies are less about the movie and less about the story than they are demonstrating that Quentin Tarantino is smarter than you and I are. He wants to make sure that you know he can reference more obscure movies than you and that he knows more about weird bands from the past than you do. And nowhere are these qualities more in evidence than in Death Proof, the back half of Grindhouse, his project with Robert Rodriguez.

I can’t pretend that I was looking forward to this rewatch even with the promise of the “scene missing” scenes from Grindhouse being “restored” in this version. I went into this knowing that I disliked it and I didn’t expect there to be anything here that would change this fact. And you know what? There wasn’t.

Bounty Law

Film: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
Format: Blu-ray from Sycamore Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I learned when doing the 1001 Movies list that there was a real benefit to watching the longest films I could get my hands on first, at least psychologically. I’ve been sitting on a Blu-ray of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood since the middle of March but really haven’t had the opportunity to watch it. I’ve also been dreading it slightly; I have a strange relationship with the films of Quentin Tarantino. I’ve said for a long time that I think he’d be a lot better if he stopped trying to be awesome and instead tried to be just good.

Not surprisingly, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a film that tries very hard to be awesome and ends up being merely self-indulgent. For starters, it runs 161 minutes long, and, judiciously, I think I could knock out half an hour of it without losing a great deal. And that’s going to be the theme here. I know that I’m in the minority when it comes to Tarantino; everyone seems to like his films more than I do, or to casually overlook his flaws in the interests of bread an circuses. In a lot of ways, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood feels like he wants to break away just a touch from that habit of showing off, but he can’t quite get there. There’s still a lot of excess here that seems to serve no other purpose than servicing Tarantino’s ego.

Djang It!

Film: Django Unchained
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

I should say at the start that this will be fully spoiler-tastic. I can’t say I was terribly shocked when Django Unchained was added as one of the 2012 films to The List. The List’s keepers love Quentin Tarantino, including now five of his eight features. I considered watching it a month ago, but I resisted. I have an unusual relationship with Quentin Tarantino and his films. I like some of his films pretty well, but I can’t call myself a fan. Every time I see him, I want to slap him.

Regardless, with the addition of all the new films, I once again have a chunk of movies well over two hours in length. With The Towering Inferno reviewed, Django Unchained was the longest film remaining. And so with no better credentials than that, it was time for a modern Western, and it is a Western despite taking place mainly in Mississippi.

On the QT

Film: Reservoir Dogs
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

So let’s get this over with. I’m not a massive Quentin Tarantino fan. I actually like a lot of his films pretty well; my issue is more with his public persona than his films. However, there are things about his films of which I am not a fan. One of the selling points of Tarantino’s films is his dialogue. A lot of his dialogue really is good, but a lot of it seems to exist only to show how much obscure music or movie trivia he knows. Fortunately, that doesn’t come up much in Reservoir Dogs.

Plot is simplicity itself: six guys are hired to knock over a jeweler. The plan goes bad because evidently they were set up, and they’re fairly convinced that one of the group, either the six or the men who hired them are working with the cops or may in fact be a cop. Typical of Tarantino, nothing happens in order and there are a lot of flashbacks and playing with time and narrative. But really, the bulk of the story is the job goes bust and the surviving members of the team try to figure out what happened.

Misirlou

Film: Pulp Fiction
Format: VHS from personal collection on big ol’ television.

I haven’t been shy about the fact that I think Quentin Tarantino is overrated as a director. My biggest issue with him isn’t that I don’t think he’s any good as a director; it’s that he shows a great deal of evidence that he believes all of his press. I have some problems with his sensibilities as well, which we’ll get to eventually. But really, my problem with Tarantino is that he’s lost control of his ego. That’s sort of my problem with Pulp Fiction, too.

See, Pulp Fiction really was a seminal film in a lot of ways. More importantly, it holds up. It’s just as good today (or almost as good) as it was in 1994. Tarantino lived off this movie for almost a decade though. Except for Jackie Brown and a segment of Four Rooms, he didn’t put out another film until 2003. There’s no reason for that, really, except that he was living off this film.

I’m not going to attempt to describe Pulp Fiction. If you’ve seen it, you know that it’s non-linear. The order of the film isn’t explained. Characters appear for a few moments in one part only to be featured in another part. We spend a good deal of time with Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and with Jules (Samuel L. Jackson). We meet Butch (Bruce Willis) and Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) and his wife Mia (Uma Thurman). There are all sorts of crazy violence and drug use. For all the skipping around in time, it’s wildly entertaining. I will not deny it.

USA! USA! USA!

Film: Inglourious Basterds
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Ask most Americans how they spend the Fourth of July, and the majority will probably include barbecue, beer, and fireworks. I love barbecue and fireworks; I’m not that much of a drinker. So instead of beer, I’m substituting watching a film that glorifies the horrible slaughter of enemies of the American people and the world: Nazis. A few days ago, watching Das Boot, I was seeing German sailors not as enemies, but simply as men. That changes in a film like Inglourious Basterds in which Germans are essentially their 1940s propaganda counterparts, suitable mainly for extermination.

In the modern age of film, admitting that you aren’t a Tarantino fan is sort of like saying you don’t like coffee. Well, I don’t like either. Coffee tastes like ass, and Tarantino’s films always feel to self-referential to me. He likes his dialogue a lot and likes to show off his knowledge of obscure things. There seems to be a part of Tarantino that can’t resist demonstrating the sort of obscure knowledge he carries around in his cranium so that his fanbase can titter about just how awesome Tarantino really is.

So it was mildly surprising to me that Inglourious Basterds doesn’t contain much in this respect. It’s essentially a dark, violent fairy tale, even starting with the words “Once upon a time” before it gets into the meat of the story. Here we have a few stories that all converge on the same point, leading to a fiery, explosive conclusion.

For one story, we have SS Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz), who has recently been given the task of rounding up all of the Jews still in France and sending them off to concentration camps. We see him in action at the start, brutally slaughtering a French Jewish family hiding out on a dairy farm. One member of the family, a daughter named Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) escapes, and naturally this will become important later.

A second story concerns a group of American Jews who have been airdropped into France. Nicknamed “The Basterds” by the Germans, this group scours the countryside slaughtering every German soldier they can find. Their leader, Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt), has demanded a bounty of 100 Nazi scalps from each man under his command, and thus his soldiers do scalp their kills. The idea is to put incredible fear into the German troops and wear on their morale, and kill as many of them as possible. Included in the group are a couple of German-born Jews who defected to America and signed up to kill their former countrymen.

A third story concerns the premiere of a new propaganda film. This film concerns the exploits of a German sniper who single-handedly fended off an enemy column by killing several hundred enemies over the course of a couple of days. The private in question, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) becomes entranced with the owner of a small cinema in Paris, and he demands that the premiere be held there. Of course, as it turns out, the owner of the cinema is none other than Shoshanna from the start of the film.

With the premiere of this film involving many members of the German High Command, the British decide to take a whack and getting rid of many “rotten eggs in one basket,” sending in a British expert on German film to infiltrate the showing and blow everything to hell. This man, Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is to meet up with the Basterds and then a German double agent—a famous German actress named Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger).

Death, blood, explosions, and all manner of insanity ensue.

I was prepared to dislike this film, but found that I couldn’t. I already don’t love Tarantino in general, and there’s an additional reason for this not mentioned above. When he first hit, I loved his work and thought he might be a genius. And after Pulp Fiction…he didn’t do anything. It was as if he did nothing but believe his own press and rest on his laurels, and I really started to not give a crap about him. Compound that with the fact that one of the actors in this film is Hostel director Eli Roth, and you get a collection of things that really don’t interest me at all.

And yet this film has a peculiar manic energy to it. It’s bloody like all Tarantino movies, violent and disturbing in places, and with a strange humor in other spots. Landa is such a complete prick that it’s impossible not to hate him, and yet played so well that it’s impossible not to enjoy having him on the screen. The film slows down in parts—particularly the sections regarding the film premiere—and is far better and more interesting when we are dealing with Brad Pitt and his crew.

So it turns out I liked this film, save for one enormous ego-stroking dick move pulled by Tarantino at the very end. I’ll put this under a spoiler tag.

*** NO PEEKING ***

Raines and his men mark the few survivors of their attacks by carving swastikas in their foreheads. Confronted with a situation in which they have to allow Landa to live, Raines carves his forehead up and says something to the effect of, “I think this is my masterpiece.” The very next frame is “Directed by Quentin Tarantino,” essentially declaring his own work a masterpiece. It may well be, but the man has gone beyond simply stroking his ego to publicly masturbating it.

*** ALL DONE ***

It goes to show that the movie really is the thing, and even someone who appears to be out of surprises can still surprise us.

Why to watch Inglourious Basterds: Quality, splattery death.
Why not to watch: Tarantino’s biggest dick move.

What Tarantino Dreams of

Film: Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.


Quentin Tarantino tends to provoke two reactions: unbridled adulation or equally unbridled disdain. Strangely, I fall somewhere in the middle. I appreciate some of his films. When Pulp Fiction was shiny and new, I loved it, although I love it less now. Reservoir Dogs is still one of the best films of its decade. But I soured on Mr. Tarantino, in no small part because it seemed like he made a huge name for himself and then did nothing as a director for years. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is his fourth complete film, made 11 years after his first full-length feature.

In short, while I think the man had and possibly still has some real chops (I’ve yet to see Inglourious Basterds, his fourth film on the list along with the other three mentioned), it seems to me that he believes his own press. One of the reasons I like his first two films as much as I do is because he’s obviously a smart guy who can make reference to film culture both well-known and obscure. I appreciate that. However, it seems also that he can’t not make reference to such things and enjoys showing his audience exactly how much he knows all the time. Characters in his films are hyper-aware of pieces of pop culture—a band, a film, a whatever—and this seems to be to make us as audience aware that Tarantino knows all about those bits of pop culture. He’s often in love with his dialogue to the detriment of his films. That’s my opinion, of course.

Until tonight, I’ve avoided Kill Bill: Vol. 1 for the simple reason that I didn’t want to spend two hours watching what looked to be Quentin Tarantino’s masturbation fantasies. Again, my opinion. And really, what do I know? After all, he’s the one making movies and I’m the one teaching English.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a revenge picture, pure and simple. We open with a fight between a character known only as The Bride (Uma Thurman…and the character’s real name is evidently revealed in the second film as Beatrix Kiddo. If you look quickly and carefully, though, you can see it on her plane tickets a couple of times) and a woman named Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox). They destroy the hell out of Vernita’s house until her daughter comes home, and then the two talk civilly, planning a fight for later that evening. When Vernita goes for the double-cross and tries to take out the Bride with a gun, she ends up dead. The Bride leaves, crossing a name off the list, and we can see that she’s already scratched off the name O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).

The rest of the film to the very end is told in flashback. We start with where the revenge starts—the Bride is known by this name because she was attacked by a collection of assassins on her wedding day. The entire wedding party, as well as her unborn child, were killed. It’s also made evident that the Bride was once a member of this group, led by the Bill (David Carradine, who does not appear in the flesh aside from his hands in this film) of the title.

The Bride is comatose for four years, during which she is evidently repeatedly raped by a sadistic hospital worker, who also sells out her services. We discover this when she comes to just before another rape and annihilates the rapist as well as the hospital worker. While she’s working on getting her legs to function again, she relates the story of O-Ren’s rise to power in the Tokyo underworld. And then we get the story of her getting a kick-ass sword from a retired swordmaker (Sonny Chiba) and the giant battle scene against O-Ren and her minions including schoolgirl assassin Gogo Yubari. And the rest of the story presumably happens in the second film, which I did not watch.

Kill Bill is all about spurting blood, violent death, and 1970’s-style wire work. It’s as much a modern action/revenge movie as it is an homage to the Shaw Brothers films and the martial arts classics of that era. This is undoubtedly intentional on Tarantino’s part. Averaged out, there’s a dead body for almost every minute of the film here. Blood sprays in geysers from severed limbs and heads, fountaining as if arteries were high-pressure hoses. The giant battle takes place mainly in black and white, apparently in homage to the old martial arts flicks that did it to avoid television censorship. That which isn’t in black and white is in monochromatic blue and shown in shadow pantomime.

It’s extreme. I’ve never let a bit of gore or a good bloodletting stop me from liking a film, but this was simply too damn much. I fully understand why people like this movie, why people look at this as a continuation of Tarantino’s promise. I demur. It’s too much, too extreme.

Again, in a Tarantino film, there are no innocents. The Bride can’t wake up from her coma and escape the hospital—it has to happen as a part of a rape scene that we as viewers are led to believe has happened over and over in the four years she has been comatose. That’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder where Tarantino’s head is at. Why the hell was that necessary? To show that the Bride can kick ass? We already know that from the opening sequence. To up the revenge? Also not really necessary. To add another layer of depravity in the film and show us again that Tarantino has a thing for female characters who can kick his ass? Yep.

I know I’m in the minority here, but so much of the violence here seems to be nothing but violence for its own sake. It does nothing for me. Will I watch the sequel? Probably not.

*EDIT*
Thanks to some excellent comments and a little more thought, I've finally come up with the way to describe this film: it's like a video game. "Soulless" is a great description (thanks, fellow 1001 blogger Edward Boe for that observation). The film reads like nothing so much as a stream of combats in an effort to get to the boss fight. This may be the reason the film is so popular and highly regarded.

I worked in the video game industry for about 12 years, first as a journalist and then as a hint book author. I haven't played a video game in seven years because I burned out and burned out hard. This may well be the reason this film holds no magic for me.

Why to watch Kill Bill Vol. 1: Ass-kicking on the grandest scale.
Why not to watch: Violence for the sake of violence on the grandest scale.