Monday, January 28, 2013

Y'Know What I Hate? Quentin Tarantino.

There, I said it. I don’t like Tarantino films and I think he is an untalented hack. Now, clearly I’m in the visible minority whilst swimming in a sea of Tarantino dick riders.
Firstly, I’m not saying I’m any better than the man. But I’m not necessarily saying I’m not either, nor am I not saying that a wet rag couldn’t write a Tarantino script after watching a few Spaghetti Western flicks with Shaft while eating Sashimi.
I’m merely commenting on how bad of a filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is; rather than continuing to keep this information bottled up for fear of being ostracized by 90% of people in this world. Look, there are things I appreciate about the man. I do applaud some of his early writing. ‘True Romance’, which he wrote, is one of my favourite films. But that’s neither here nor there.
I don't understand how so many people consider him a "visionary" or "genius". To me Tarantino is like a mildly amusing cover band that’s being heralded as the great new saviour of rock n roll, not to mention that he spends entirely too much time trying to make his movies cool, stylistic and hip, which dates them almost instantly.
If you consider making movies that are essentially homages to earlier movies as being genius, then I guess he is, but to me that’s being a thief and this is a huge gripe of mine as a filmgoer, writer and art enthusiast.
Tarantino has stolen dialog from Karate Kiba, The Killers, Band of Outsiders, Lady Snowblood, and he straight up has taken shot-for-shot “inspiration” from The Graduate and Branded to Kill. When the list of films you’ve “sampled” is longer than your resume, you’re doing it wrong.
He stole the theme music from ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’. The cunt straight up ripped it off.
Now it’s one thing if Tarantino himself loves ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ and wants to preserve Ennio Morricone’s beautiful compositions but it’s another when you take music, from other classic films, and slap it on your film for use as your own. People are supposed to think to themselves and say, ‘Oh I love that finale song in ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ not ’Oh yeah…..that’s the song from ‘Kill Bill’.It’s awesome’.
You do not simply take another films theme song, no matter how old the film is.
That’d be like a filmmaker saying, ‘Hey the music to ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ is in the public domain now….I’m too lazy to find a great new composer for my film, so I’m just going to use that music in my film. It’ll be great!!’.
It’s theft, plain and simple. A movie has many elements; a script, actors, a director with a vision, producers, a composer etc and what do most average movie goers remember besides the story and the actors? The music!
Music can make or break a movie. Part of being a filmmaker is realizing that you’re creating something original, not hacking apart other films and pasting them together to make ‘your film’.
Tarantino has even said of film composers, ‘I just don’t like the idea of giving that much power to anybody on one of my movies’.
So dickhead, it’s ok for other filmmakers to collaborate with composers, like normal professionals do, and to trust them and give those composers control over the soundtrack? And when it’s done well, for instance with films Ennio Morricone composed, you can then steal their hard work which was meant for another film, because why… you’re ‘special’!?
Special you indeed are, but I’ve never been one for political correctness so..
Retarded. Mental. Mong. Mental Midget. Spastic.. these seem somehow more fitting. With that box shaped head of yours and that weather report lisp.
Which brings me to my next point, HE’S THE WORST ACTOR. He doesn’t speak clearly. He’s too energetic and outrageously distasteful. Just look at him in ‘Sleep With Me’ or ‘Desperado’.
He’s just a nettlesome cunt who likes to hear himself speak. Just try and get through that 4 ½ minute interview, you know, the one where he is wearing a kimono, using a crappy fake Italian accent and talking about zombie movies and music. It’s harder to watch than the video of that chick chowing down on her tampon. It feels like its 3 fucking hours long.
This is why he writes asinine dialogue that is painful to listen to and it seems a lot of the time to go absolutely nowhere, and this is coming from someone whose favourite sitcom is Seinfeld and one of my favourite screenwriters is Kevin Smith. The conversations are dragged out too long, and they rarely add depth to a character or progress the storyline further. I do dig movies with quite some time in between cuts.
But not when it's 5 minutes of dialogue about milk in a movie about Nazis.
People will argue tooth and nail that his dialogue helps build character development, how each line (especially Mr. Pink's speech in Reservoir Dogs) attributes to the overall story because of the fate of each character; how about Mr. Brown's 'Like a Virgin' speech? How does this relate to his death?
When do we ever hear his voice again? Maybe one or two lines over the course of the next hour and a half. Yet his rant takes up about three or four minutes of the opening of the film, probably slightly longer than Pink's speech.
Or how about when Nice Guy Eddie picks up Orange at his apartment? What does that have to do with anything?
Lady E and Christie Love? This deals with the story in no way.
And fans will probably say 'Well, their immaturity and lack of focus on the job illustrates their fates'. (Though that would contradict your argument on Pink's realist and professional way of thinking.)
Most likely, Tarantino included that dialogue for none other purpose except to entertain. It was thrown in because Tarantino loves popular culture and enjoys embracing his encyclopaedic knowledge of film.
Some people view his early work as 'the cool of cinema'. Because it looks and sounds really cool.
In my opinion, if Pink mentioned an interesting past job that went awry (much like White had said but with more spice and depth) this would have been more interesting and possibly more stimulating and many would better understand his mentality in the warehouse.
A simple rule of thumb people, if someone comes across as pompous, arrogant and obnoxious on video, how do you think they’ll be in real life? And more importantly for a filmmaker, what do you think their films will be like..?
I mean, I've always been a fan of Grindhouse Cinema and Blaxploitation Flicks, the types of films he pays homage too. I can see why people let him get away with his shit though.
Because no one watches original movies anymore, they watch factory bred, studio funded monotonous bullshit. Whatever movie has Johnny Depp in it this month, or which film has the coolest looking poster plastered to the side of the bus this week. But if you bothered to skim the surface just a little bit you’d see that Quentin Tarantino is doing to Sonny Chiba what NWA did to Ice T and Schoolly D.
Example being Reservoir Dogs, the film most Tarantino fans use in his defence. When I saw ‘City on Fire’ with Chow Yun Fat, not knowing anything about the film beforehand, and I got a little bit raw about the blatant theft of Tarantino’s work. So I did a little reading in to, turns out five years prior to Reservoir Dogs this flick had came out, a Hong Kong action movie that had the exact same premise, the exact same fight scenes and was complete with one "undercover cop" in a Mexican Standoff ending. On top of that the cop torture scene is a rip off of another movie titled ‘The Big Combo’. So essentially this movie was a hacked up version and straight up jack of other films.
When Tarantino is approached about his consistent theft, he claims that he doesn’t rip movies off, and that they are in fact ”a homage” to the original. Wow, that’s a pretty cheap copout.
“Oh no sir I didn’t counterfeit this money, it’s an homage to real cash”. Wanker.
He’s much like Michael Bay, purely style over substance, and look, it was cool when ‘Pulp Fiction’ came out. The world was ready for something quirky and different. That style exploded and everyone tried to copy it. But go back and watch the film now though.
Just like all his other films, it is the ultimate steroid pumping latent homosexuality film.
Lots of sex, violence and witty pop culture references that I never know whether they are inserted in there to try and show his superior film knowledge or whether it is to taunt the people watching his films who have actually scene the flicks that he is terrorizing and getting away with .
There are no real complex ideas or concepts, Just high adrenaline, high tension action movies.
It’s all boring. It was just a fad. There’s a reason why I only liked ‘Pulp Fiction’ when I was 16 and not when I was 20 or now almost 25. It’s a childish, funky, single use film for the ignorant adolescent.
After that, it’s drab, repetitive and stale. In my opinion it just doesn’t hold up or stand the test of time. It’s like ‘American Pie’ for grungy, wanna-be violent kids with a lot of pent up anger.
As are all of his films.
First of all Pulp Fiction was heralded as some breakthrough in cinema because, SHOCK HORROR, it was edited out of order. Tarantino did that with Reservoir Dogs already and he’s not anywhere near the first to attempt it. So cross that off your list of shit he invented.
I’ve also left out how clunky, stupid and unnecessary Bruce Willis’s whole part was, it literally stops the film dead in its tracks.

The only thing QT’s movies do for me is make me want to watch some real independent cinema.
Which thanks to him, barely even exists anymore.
With the arrival of Pulp Fiction, Independent Film went from the melting pot of new ideas to a style, a way of doing things that made them“independent”. For years after Pulp Fiction we had to deal with pop culture snappy dialog films featuring a car, a gun, bad guys being funny and shootouts. It was also the start of high profile celebrities wanting to cement their“street cred” by being in these lame movies.

Instead of Tarantino renouncing this as any true fan of underground culture would he embraced his new “Coolest Guy We Know” status with famous people.
Tarantino also managed to kill off Samuel L. Jackson the actor and replaced him with ‘Jules’ the character from Pulp Fiction. Jackson has been phoning in some variation of that part in all the films he’s done since then.
Only one character in all his films (the bondsman in Jackie Brown) is actually deep. Out of 8 films he's only managed to create one character that the audience can really identify with. All of his other characters are just "cool" characters. Think of all the famous Tarantino characters. They're all very one dimensional “bad arses”. Vincent Vega is a case in point, all he seems to need is Cheeseburgers, Pussy and Elvis..
Now I can’t front this as something to want in life, I feel the same. But I don’t need to pay money to watch some Scientologist millionaire pretend to have my problems.
‘Inglorious Basterds’ was and always will be a complete joke. Bastardize, ‘Inglorious Basterds’. Very funny, but no.
It is not historical. Even if I was looking at the un-historical, hokey comic book style he went for, it’s still a joke and I’m laughing at the fraud, not with him.
If I were Jewish, I’d be offended. If I were a Nazi, I’d be offended. If I were Brad Pitt, I’d be offended. This film is a complete waste of time. The only saving grace is that the world was introduced to the mind blowing abilities of the Austrian genius, Christoph Waltz.
Mr. Waltz deservedly won the Oscar for his performance. But do you really think Quentin Tarantino was directing him heavily? Especially when he acted fluently in French and German..
An actor that good needs to merely be encouraged not directed. So, with criticizing Tarantino, I give him that minute bit of credit for giving Christoph Waltz an opportunity to shine, much like writing a part so perfect for James Gandolfini to fill all those years ago in True Romance.
Quentin Tarantino is always a bad choice. At the end of the day, he’s a loaded, commercially viable, familiar face for movie director who is backed by The Weinstein Machine.
Whether or not he produces flops, he will probably have opportunities to make more films until the day he dies. If you measure that as success over a person’s integrity, attitude and talent.. Well then, I guess your brain is wired to like utter shit and you will continue to make bad choices.
I give credit to Tarantino’s writing of ‘True Romance’ again (Which even then is widely questioned how much writing he did in contrast to Roger Avery). But other than that, No thanks.
One last thing before I go, ‘Django Unchained’ (2012). Let me spoil it for you.
It’s homicidal. People have repetitious, meandering conversations with an overabundance of words like ‘Nigger’ and ‘Fuck’ for no good reason. There is some Ennio Morriconne tunes lifted from another movie. There is some funky music from the 70′s along with jagged editing and Samuel L. Jackson is in it.
I know all of this to be true. And I’ve seen no more than 10 minutes of the cunt.
This is why films like Citizen Kane, the first 2 Godfather's and Casablanca will be considered great films while Tarantino's will only be on the "best movies of all time" list for some want to be film student or gangster.
Until next time, eat a dick.
28/01/2013