Tarantino is a geek- that's why we love him
QT is not a "master" (yet). He's well on his way, though.
I understand your position, cinemabon: gratuitous violence doesn't make for great cinema. Your point is well taken. QT is over-the-top. BUT! He's over the top in such a way that it isn't so much gratuitous as it is upholding certain traditions: he pays tribute to the "vibe" of films like The Wild Bunch, Band of Outsiders, and Superfly.
Tarantino is a film geek. How can you not love a fellow film geek? If he was dishonoring the medium somehow I could see his dismissal as a "great filmmaker", but man, he's got a feel to his films that just soothes the soul. He loves movies of all types and he just tries to make the best films he can make while satisfying his own taste. Can't fault him for that.
His violence is cinema violence. You never actually see Marvin's head get blown off. You THINK you see it, (it's edited like a lightning bolt), but Quentin never actually goes all the way. You see a LOT of blood and "brain tissue"(which creates the revulsion/horror in the viewer), but he edited the scene so well that the point is driven home without EVERYTHING. Case in point again: the anal rape of Marcellus Wallace. You never see anything explicit- extremely disturbing, yes- explicit, no. Same thing in Reservoir Dogs during the "are you gonna bark?" scene- Madsen cuts off the cops' ear but YOU DON'T SEE IT ACTUALLY BEING CUT OFF.
QT knows the power of a well-edited scene. It's like George Lucas said: "It's not hard to get a reaction from an audience- just show some guy wringing a kittens' neck".
You seem to have a visceral contempt for Tarantino, cinemabon.
I sense you strongly object to his methods of delivering entertainment- not the entertainment he delivers. You mention The Godfather- a fairly violent movie. Sonny is riddled with bullets (like Travolta was in Pulp) and it's pretty shocking. How about the horse head scene? Grim stuff. Coppola showed you an ACTUAL horse's head! QT never showed you ACTUAL brain tissue or even ACTUAL blood. It's sfx. Coppola shows a cow being slaughtered in Apocalypse. Who's more gratuitous?
I won't try to sway you to join the QT camp, but I will say he's more aware of what he puts on screen than we are. It's because he's trying to honor the medium and the men who inspired him.
Film geeks and film buffs are too different animals.
I'm with you all the way on this, Johann. I think though that actually people, even FilmWurld people, sometimes resent rather than like Tarantino because he's a film geek, as well as because he's popular and super-famous. Some of us may feel he's just totally over-the-top as a film geek; that he loses touch completely with "reality" (a word that Nabokov said must always be in quotation marks, and certainly should be when we're talking about movies). A lot of filmbuffdom is about admiring offbeat, not-famous movies that are full of wholesome thoughts and fine intentions. That approach won't get you very far inside Tarantinodom.
For me Tarantino was always about the dialogue, but also about the fresh way he uses movie traditions, and stuff that's uniquely cinematic. There are things that work really well on the screen --for instance, shooting guns; smoking cigarettes; going very fast in cars -- which aren't necessarily a good idea in real life. But they are just very cool in the movies. Tarantino works with these things. He works completely out of the movies, all his references are to other movies, sometimes it seems every shot starts with a reference to another movie, and yet he doesn't need somebody else's ideas or stories to make his movies, they're completely his own. That's the paradox.
His sense of timing is exquisite. His pacing and editing. Along with that he has great clarity. Nothing is fuzzy, everything is spelled out, but with wit. There's tremendous enthusiasm for the process, and at the same time the detachment necessary to crack a joke -- a heroic quality, which is why he has been moving in the direction of heroic characters in Kill Bill 1 & 2. What makes Kill Bill 1 & 2 beautiful to watch is that clarity. And the clarity also is what makes QT's dialogue so much fun: its being so clearly in the moment. It goes where it takes them. Travolta and Jackson are going upstairs to kill some guys, but they're talking about foot massage, because that's where the dialogue takes them. Yet it's highly relevant to the story: it's about their relation to Marcellus Wallace. Few filmmakers in cinematic history have written better dialogue than Tarantino writes. But I'm not sure every film buff has a sensitivity to dialogue -- though a lot of average moviegoers do because it's pure entertainment. The film buff likes to see von Trier's women being tormented, and says that's uplifting, but when Travolta has somebody's head blown off, even though we don't see it and it's not really about hurting anybody, the film buff is filled with righteous indignation, because it's not serious.
Re: Kiarostami's TEN: Take me to Grandma's
Quote:
Originally posted by Johann
I'm adding Kiarostami's "10" to the list.
This film should have won the Palm D'or. Abbas takes a bold idea and comes up with a beautiful montage of female yin and yang.
It's a convincing exposee of one lonely Iranian woman. She's a taxi driver, and she's both repulsive and attractive. She has conversations with other women and her son that speak volumes about her own insecurities & dreams. Staggering film.
My favorite scene is the one with the prostitute. I know why Kiarostami doesn't show her face, but God did I want to see it!!
Never in my life have I wanted to put a face to a voice..
Touching, heartbreaking, I saw it twice.
I'm also adding Abbas Kiarostami's 10 to the list of best films of 2003. (The film had an official North American premiere on March 5, 2003 although it was shown at the 2002 NYFF). 10 was granted a (very) limited release. I had to import the dvd from the UK to have access to it.
I admire how effectively Kiarostami managed to circumvent Iran's strict censorship, which make it virtually impossible to deal with male-female relationships. He has found a formal structure consisting of ten scenes shot from a DV camera planted on a car's dashboard. An obnoxious boy of about 12 serves as a stand-in for the men in the lives of a middle-class female driver and the women who ride in her car.
Re: Spider and Mystic River
Quote:
Originally posted by tabuno
Ralph Fiennes had a great script, a great role, a superb grasp of his material and character...it wasn't over the top like Mr. Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Mystic River captured its accolades by going against type in terms of the general public's expectations of a movie - it seemed fresh and unusual. Mr. Fiennes, however, went beyond the normal mental illness stereotype to create a strikingly real and important experiential performance that really captures a disorder that impacts thousands of people in this country.
You are absolutely correct, and Cronenberg mentioned this himself in an interview that he has heard from many shocked by how realistic his portrayed of the illness truly was. Fiennes was great along with the film, no surprise that J. Hoberman selected Spider as the best film from 2003.
