Quentin Tarantino | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jan

django unchained

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Struggling after the fact to put my conflicting feelings about Django Unchained and Quentin Tarantino into words, I came up with this: Tarantino never makes films in the genres he admires. Rather, he borrows the trappings of genre to talk about subjects he finds important. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino used the trappings of a war film to tell a story about the language of cinema as it relates to national identity^*. Django Unchained dresses up like a Western, but its meaning should, well, be obvious.

It’s not only possible to get a good education in America – best high schools and colleges – without knowing just how bad slavery was, it’s pretty damned likely. This isn’t to say that we never covered slavery in civics class, or that our teachers overlooked Black History Month. But the narrative that most folks would agree to is that slavery was this awful thing that happened long ago, but the Civil War fixed it, and then racism just kept happening for some reason, but then Martin Luther King fixed that, and that’s why we get the day off. We don’t really get how bad slavery was, not in the gut. Six hundred thousand people kidnapped from Africa. Four million slaves in America at the dawn of the Civil War. Iron shackles on bare calves, knotted whips on bare flesh, starving in wooden pens that reek of shit. An evil on par with the Holocaust, an industry that was so ingrained in the infrastructure of this country that the regions that profited the most off it – like Mississippi, the setting of most of the film – are miserable pits today.

Tarantino’s tendency toward excess, which I’ve always had a hard time with, serves him well here. We’ve all seen after-school specials and 19th-century woodcuts on the evils of slavery, but nothing makes you recoil like seeing Kerry Washington getting whipped by a sweating, ugly slaver while her husband not only pleads with the overseer to let her go, but pleads with her in the language of his oppressors: how master wouldn’t want a good house nigger marked up. After a few displays like that, including one pivotal scene I won’t spoil, you’ll cheer when Jamie Foxx, as Django, pulls his pistols. The shootout scenes are equally indulgent – they literally wallow in blood – but are well deserved.

Sylvia and I parted ways on Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance. I bought into the caricature he was going for: the plantation owner with the Satanic profile, right down to the devilish goatee and dinner jacket; the spoiled brat grown up, still looking like a boy as DiCaprio always will, living in a paradise called Candieland and talking about how well he knows black folks. But DiCaprio’s never been a subtle actor, and if you can’t take that you won’t quite like him. I don’t know that I’m qualified to comment on the whole spiderweb of controversy surrounding Samuel L. Jackson’s character, save that it felt legit to me. Sylvia also pointed out that Kerry Washington’s character didn’t have much to do beyond the “damsel in distress” role, which is sadly true.

Tarantino’s drive to load a film with every cool bit he can think of hurts the overall narrative, as it always does. While every distinct scene is entertaining or moving, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. There were scenes I laughed out loud at that I would still suggest cutting. At two hours and fifteen minutes, the movie could have been a masterpiece. As it is, the length doesn’t take away from the gripping power of the most visceral scenes, but it does take away from the overall composition. See it once on the big screen to see what it does to your gut; after that, you probably don’t need to see it again.

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* Also, as with Basterds, the ostensive subject of the film, as depicted in the trailer, is discarded in the first 30 minutes. Oh, the Brittle brothers, yup, that’s them over there. I wonder if trailer editors have a hard time turning Tarantino’s bloated films into enticing packages, or if Tarantino perhaps salts enough narrative in there to give the marketing team something to play with.

Dec

the decade in film: 2003-06

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 10:30 am

The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together; I could only re-arrange the order.

So the following list does not contain the Best Films of the Decade. But it has films that all meant something to me, personally. Call them my Signature Films of the First Decade of the Second Millennium. Or something snappier.

Part Two: The Post College Years: 2003-06

In 2003 I saw the first film that I got in an Internet argument over: Kill Bill. A combination of what I liked least about Quentin Tarantino’s style (not knowing how, or when, to edit) with what I liked least about samurai movies (gushing blood) made for an appalling ninety minutes. Strangers told me I was a barbarian for not picking up on, or appreciating, all of Tarantino’s subtle references. I knew they were references, guys; that doesn’t make the film any good. Still don’t like it.

I joined Netflix in late ’03. Netflix deserves its own special chapter in the history of film in the 21st century; what it’s done for the at-home viewing experience is nothing short of remarkable. I remember waiting for Catch Me If You Can, my first Netflix movie, with uncertainty. Was it going to show? Would it be in watchable condition? Netflix was new enough at this point, remember, that it could have all been a complicated scam or a poor business model. Today, as the dominant platform for watching DVDs at home, it’s hard to imagine a time when this was in doubt.

(Catch Me If You Can: diverting, not great)

Netflix exposed me to the best (Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, Collateral, The Italian Job) and worst (Terminator 3, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Italian Job) that the last seventy years of film had to offer. It’s made me a more sophisticated student of film. It’s also given me plenty to blog about.

Finally, this was also the period when big-budget superhero flicks came back in style. With Spider-Man and X-Men opening the door earlier in the century, DC waded in with their heavy hitters. I saw Superman Returns on Independence Day in 2006, giving it a B for effort and a C-minus for output. I debated its merits and failings with Matt McG. at a rooftop barbecue later that afternoon. “It would have been a much more satisfying movie if Batman showed up on that Kryptonite island,” I remarked.

I was hearkening back to my memories of Batman Begins in 2005: a more mature and satisfying look at the superhero movie than I’d ever seen. Batman Begins was innately satisfying to me because it used the conventions of Serious Film – clever cinematography, good pacing, characterization, dialogue – to tell a story about a Comic Book. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was good, sure, but it still had the flamboyance of a comic book splashed on screen. In the hands of Chris Nolan, however, you could believe that this Batman guy was real.

Part three on Friday, if I feel like it.

Sep

and I've been putting out the fire with gasoline

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Inglourious Basterds: I’m posting this on Labor Day in the hopes that no one sees it.

Quentin Tarantino has always approached films with the geeky enthusiasm of a comic book collector, rather than the affected aloofness of a film student. The movies he makes reflect that: a smorgasbord of styles, an epic assault on the senses that’s as likely to confuse as delight. Most of his movies suffer for it. But when he makes a movie about the affect movies have on audiences – as he did with Inglourious Basterds, a cheeky little piece of overthinking masquerading as a war film – the encyclopedia in his brain serves him well.

Not that every choice he makes is a good one. Midway through the film, two characters eat strudel with whipped cream in a Paris cafe. A fiber-detailed closeup on the bowl of cream: backlit, the spoon descending from above to harvest a dollop, and the spongy texture remaining. Artfully done, but what purpose does it serve in the scene in which it takes place? It’s likely a reference to some obscure film that Tarantino’s patting himself on the back for knowing. Likewise an early interrogation in a rural French farmhouse: the camera circles around Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a hapless French farmer during one point in the questioning. Why does it circle? What does it reveal, or heighten, or say that the two-shots we’d had to that point wasn’t revealing?

(This scene also brings up another recurring peeve I have with Tarantino: characters who talk about how delicious something is, rather than reacting as if they tasted something delicious. Samuel L. Jackson does it in Pulp Fiction – “you mind if I have some of your tasty beverage to wash this down?” – and Waltz does it in this scene as well. I know complaining about implausible dialogue in a Quentin Tarantino film’s like complaining about how quiet you have to be at a golf match, but it’s just stupid. Enough with the kvetching; on to how great the film is)

But tricks of camera, editing and pacing are the way films tell stories, and, oddly enough, Tarantino has a story to tell. He didn’t in Pulp Fiction (other than, “hey, wouldn’t it be neat if a lot of unbelievable coincidences linked the lives of a lot of ridiculous characters, and Uma Thurman’s hot?”, to which of course, yes) or Kill Bill (other than “aren’t kung fu films cool, and isn’t Uma Thurman hot?”, to which et cetera). He coasted on style. But Inglourious Basterds is all about style: the unspoken language that we use to hint without vocalizing. It’s a commentary on style. And given that Tarantino doesn’t just deliver a verdict on style, but uses style so effectively to do it, makes this – as Brad Pitt observes – his masterpiece.

Brad Pitt, as we all know from the trailer, is Lt. Aldo Raine, a snarling Tennesseean who claims enough Apache blood to lead a platoon of eight Jewish soldiers deep into German territory. He plans for them a campaign of terror and brutality in order to inspire fear in the minds of Nazi soldiers. We watch him deliver an inspiring speech to his men about just what he intends to do to every Nazi they capture. And that’s it. We get one scene of the Basterds scalping, executing and bludgeoning a Nazi squadron, but otherwise see very little of them in action. This might disappoint the casual action audience, but this is exactly the point. The movie’s not about the Basterds. We merely need to establish that the Basterds exist, and they’re doing stuff in France.

If the movie’s about anyone, it’s Shoshanna Dreyfus (who, since Tarantino couldn’t plausibly cast Uma Thurman as a 19-year-old Jew, is played by Thurman-lookalike Melanie Laurent), sole survivor of the scene with Col. Landa that begins the movie. Fleeing to Paris, she poses as a native Parisian and the owner of a small local cinema. There, she catches the eye of a young German soldier (the haplessly likable Daniel Bruhl), who’s been thrust into fame as suddenly as she avoids it. This soldier has the ear of Joseph Goebbels, and arranges for the premiere of a populist war film at Shoshanna’s cinema. She puts in motion a plan that’ll end in the deaths of every German officer in attendance, not knowing that the Allies already have a similar plan in motion. And that sets the tension which carries the rest of the film.

“What have you heard?”, everyone in the film keeps asking. Reputation and word of mouth are the most important currency in the film, whether Landa’s uncomfortable nickname “The Jew Hunter,” the campaign of terror spread by the Basterds, or even a stuffy British lieutenant proving his bona fides to Winston Churchill by comparing Goebbels and Selznick. Language itself also plays a critical role: Landa speaks English in the opening scene not just as a sly concession to WW2 films targeting American audiences, but also because the Jewish prisoners beneath the floorboards can’t speak it. The ability or inability to speak a language proves critical at various climaxes; note that the polyglot Landa survives to the end of the film.

Tarantino uses the language of film to make his point: that the language of film tells us whom to root for and whom against. The action climaxes at the Paris premiere of Goebbels’ crowning achievement, Nation’s Pride, a film that (apparently) consists of nothing but a lone heroic German sniping Allies from a clock tower. The audience (including Hitler himself) cackles and cheers. Later, when two of the Basterds massacre fleeing German civilians from a similarly elevated perch, the correspondence is obvious. And if it’s not, Landa makes it obvious when he captures Raine: “Were I sitting where you are now, should I expect mercy?” We are told by the film to imagine the characters in reversed positions.

The point isn’t mere moral relativism: that you can’t tell the Nazis from the Allies. Tarantino’s not leveling judgment on WW2. The entire movie takes place in a WW2 that never happened, as the film’s final outcome should make abundantly clear. The point Tarantino’s making is that you can only tell the heroes from the villains based on who gets the better close-ups.

It helps that Tarantino has assembled the finest cast he’s ever worked with for this movie. It’d be a waste of time to call out individual performances: they’re all fantastic. Especially the Germans, whom he invests with a great deal of humanity – although never without one perfunctory flourish of villainy on the end that justifies their execution. It seems odd, if you think about it, that someone would be a decent, patriotic German their entire life only to descend into savagery right before getting shot. But you’re not supposed to think about it. You’re supposed to recoil from the character’s villainy and then relax as the movie shares our judgment and ends their life. That’s how movies tell us who the villains are. And that is Tarantino’s point.