My initial reaction to QT is one of annoyance and wishing he would go away. Such an irritating man.
And then there's his work...what a confusing mix of the inspired and the dreadful!
I was a film critic when he appeared on the scene with the astonishing Reservoir Dogs, a very fine heist/noir homage full of excellent performances. And what an impact it made! I many ways it was the new Star Wars in the way it made casual punters into film buffs. A dashed good film and one I have enjoyed many times...though not recently.
And then he blew the roof off the cinema world with Pulp Fiction. It seemed lazier than Reservoir Dogs, but had enough punch and glitz to drag you in...at first. Unlike Reservoir Dogs each repeated viewing brought out the flaws and the triteness. Eventually I could see how thinly it was all stretched. I actually gave away my VHS of it. I still find it awkward now.
And so on...Jackie Brown is great (probably his best) aided by being based upon a creditable source rather than Tarantino himself, Kill Bill was just awful in my opinion, and was largely inexcusable. QT had been around long enough to rein in his clumsy excesses and yet here he was not so much wearing his influences on his sleeve as wearing an entire fanboy suit of them and ramming them incoherently down your throat. Death Proof is an amateurish farrago saved only by a bevy of stunningly sexy women and the greatest car in history.
Films based on his writings are similarly mixed: True Romance is excellent and certainly Tony Scott's greatest achievement, From Dusk Till Dawn is fun at first but doesn't hold up to repeated viewings รก la Pulp Fiction. Then there's Natural Born Killers...I don't know who is more at fault, Tarantino or Stone, but Natural Born Killers is just a disaster. It tries so many things and fails at them all. An absolute turkey and one that, if I was Tarantino, I would be desperate to hide away off my filmography.
I've not yet seen all of Inglorious Basterds, I've sat down to watch it a couple of times and had no joy getting into it - before you ask! I will see it one day, but away from this forum I have nor heard very good things about it and this bumps it down the priority list.
So...an annoying human being but an occasionally talented one. If only his disasters weren't so colossally disasterous. Because his good stuff isn't good enough to balance it out.
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