Just a heads up for anyone who like Tariintino as much as I do, the November 9th episode of Iconoclasts on Sundance Channel is featuring him and Fionna Apple. It’s a great series, and I’m happy to see they are spotlighting two of my favs…
I don’t. His movies look good and have witty dialogue, but I have yet to discover a Tarantino film with a discernible theme.
A few years ago, a friend and I were discussing Boogie Nights. He said he didn’t like it because all the violence made it seem too much like Pulp Fiction. My response was that Boogie Nights was a great movie with a great theme, that home is where you find it. Pulp Fiction’s theme was that violence looks neat. It occurred to me that that’s waht all Tarantino’s movies are about.
I’m sure Tarantino has a truly great movie in him somewhere, but he hasn’t made it yet.
Pulp Fiction’s main theme is redemption, is it not?
Not together, I hope. He’d have her crying within seconds.
I love Tarantino and his movies are highly, highly entertaining, but even the best film student’s best film is more than likely about film students making films. Y’know? At least he does it well. Still, he was already referencing Reservoir Dogs in Pulp Fiction.
How? Is he going to bore her to tears?
I think Tarantino is terrific. He is messing with everyone who thinks a movie is supposed to have a “theme.”
Not if she doesn’t do it first.
I’m a fan. He’s so good at what he does, he can say anything he wants, and people just bruch it off as “being Quentin”. Charles Barkley and Howard Stern have those luxuries. People should be so lucky to be who they are and not have to put on a show for the rest of the world.
One of my favorite quotes, and I don’t know if I have it exact, but someone asked Mr. Tarantino why he doesn’t like CGI graphics in his movies. Quentin replied by saying that if he wanted CGI in every movie and to flood the movie with computer images, he’d just stick his dick in a Nintendo.
I’m a fan. He’s so good at what he does, he can say anything he wants, and people just bruch it off as “being Quentin”. Charles Barkley and Howard Stern have those luxuries. People should be so lucky to be who they are and not have to put on a show for the rest of the world.
One of my favorite quotes, and I don’t know if I have it exact, but someone asked Mr. Tarantino why he doesn’t like CGI graphics in his movies. Quentin replied by saying that if he wanted CGI in every movie and to flood the movie with computer images, he’d just stick his dick in a Nintendo.
I’m a fan. He’s so good at what he does, he can say anything he wants, and people just bruch it off as “being Quentin”. Charles Barkley and Howard Stern have those luxuries. People should be so lucky to be who they are and not have to put on a show for the rest of the world.
One of my favorite quotes, and I don’t know if I have it exact, but someone asked Mr. Tarantino why he doesn’t like CGI graphics in his movies. Quentin replied by saying that if he wanted CGI in every movie and to flood the movie with computer images, he’d just stick his dick in a Nintendo.
you can say that again.
I like Tarantino’s movies, but I enjoy Robert Rodriguez’s more (give me El Mariachi or Sin City any day) in the “stylized violence” genre.
I’m pretty sure the theme of Kill Bill was how Revenge begets Revenge.
Yeah, I’m also a bigger fan of Robert Rodriguez’s Burrito Westerns than Quentin’s Samurai Westerns. As cool as a sword that can cut God is, it doesn’t compare to a pair of guitar cases with built-in machine guns. 
You ever notice how Spy Kids has pretty much the same cast as Desperado, but in a kid’s movie?
Oh, and has anyone else noticed how Quentin Tarantino can’t make it 30 seconds into a Robert Rodruiguez movie without getting maimed and/or killed on screen?
Isn’t the Iconoclasts thing that they ARE together? They hang together, talk about each other, and generally interact. And I believe they’re admireres of each other, as well.
I’ll take it if I get to stick that woman’s foot in my mouth while she pours whiskey down her leg to feed me.
That’s still 29 seconds too long.
(Incidentally, my postings in this thread do not apply to how I think of Tarantino as a filmmaker but rather as an actor or interviewee. I’ll grant he’s quite knowledgeable about some of the more arcane genres and sub-genres of cinema and can be interesting in small doses. But he often comes across as a self-absorbed, overbearing, know-it-all who doesn’t know when to shut up.)
So themelessness is the theme? Yet, wouldn’t his theme then become themeless itself, creating in infinite paradoxical spiral of imprecise themeness? And the universe still survives? Genius!
Actually, if you ask me, the theme of Pulp Fiction is that moral relativism can be dangerous. Every single exchange in that movie revolves around the idea that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” That we are seduced by the idea that things are not what they seem to be; that we get to define what they are. I mean *every *exchange: it’s both a Quarter Pounder, and a Royale with Cheese; a foot massage is either innocent, or it’s gonna get you thrown out a window. A boxing match is victory for one, death for the other. A packet of heroin can make one person high and happy, and another almost dead. Piercing the body with a needle can either be about sex (Roseanna Arquette) or death (Uma Thurman). Pork is nasty, or it tastes good. The Samuel Jackson character represents a refusal to continue playing that game; to insist that truth is truth, and right is right.
See, that’s why Tarantino builds the film out of such jarring juxtapositions: he makes us laugh at horrific violence, and keeps the rug of chronology pulled out from under us.
Now, I don’t think he’s ever achieved, since then, what he achieved with Pulp Fiction, which succeeds on so many levels: I won’t argue any such themes for his later movies, which just seem like pransktery excuses t ohave fun on a movie set. Still, some of them are fun to watch.
That’s a really interesting take on the movie, and it may help explain my reaction to the movie: I walked out of the theater with an almost painful rictus of a grin on my face, thinking, “Why the hell am I grinning like this?” I enjoyed it a lot, and was also deeply disturbed by it. Now I want to watch the movie again with this in mind.
Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is the only other of his movies that I’ve enjoyed nearly so much. The first one got lost in cartoonish gore, and I just left the theater feeling sick. The second one, though, seemed to be, how to put it, a tragedy about folks’ inability to change who they are. It was great fun to watch, but the final scene, in which Bee is sobbing on the bathroom floor, summed it up for me. She’d done what she wanted to do, and in so doing, she’s lost her core–and at the same time, it was almost certainly not what she wanted to do.
Daniel