True Romance is the best one he wrote even if he didn’t direct it.
This is a fair point, but I doubt that it’s something that most less sophisticated movie watchers would consider. I don’t think it explains why 30% of people didn’t like it, I’m mystified that it’s ranked below Death Proof.
From this it seems that maybe people just found it too slow and meandering until the end, based on expectations from his prior movies.
I didn’t like it partly because it was creepy wish fulfillment. Yeah, I wish those people hadn’t been slaughtered either, but I was living in L.A. at the time of the murders. He really didn’t capture the zeitgeist. It was more of a cartoonish, hyper-violent pastiche. I admired the look of it it, but as a movie I thought it was rather dumb. Oh, and waaaay too long. I kept waiting for that damn Bruce Lee fight scene to be over – it was so boring. YMMV, obviously.
I’m not much of a fan - I’ve only seen 5 of the 9 listed - but I thought Reservoir Dogs was pretty good and picked that.
That captures my thoughts on most of what I’ve seen.
True. Even Inglorious Basterds had a real coyote/roadrunner energy.
I’d rank them
- Pulp Fiction
- Reservoir Dogs
- Inglorious Basterds
- Jackie Brown
- Django Unchained
- Kill Bill Vol 1
- Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
- Kill Bill Vol 2
- Hateful Eight
- Death Proof
Kill Bill is two movies. The first is better.
The fact his first two movies are my top two may be, I think, because they are somewhat better edited, in part because he couldn’t get away with just doing anything he wanted. His later movies are slowed down too much by a lack of editing; “Hateful Eight” is just Godawful in this regard.
RD was okay.
Never thought PF was great, though it’s certainly entertaining.
JB had about 2.5 minutes of entertainment for me, most of it in the parking lot scene with Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda.
I thought KB II was less bad than KB I.
DP was a waste of talent.
Disliked IB (but then, I don’t care for war films in general).
DU probably seemed better than it was because it was not as bad as the previous five films (also has, imo, QT’s best acting performance).
Haven’t seen TH8.
OUaTH had great production design, but seemed distasteful (and pointless) on top of the distasteful events it exploits.
It’s true–but it’s also true that I’m not the least bit inclined to pay attention when he claims that two movies are actually one movie through special directorial quantum entanglement or something.
Oh, I’d easily put Jackie Brown is his top 2 or 3 in its own right. It’s a great film, even if it isn’t as “typically Tarantino” as his other works. Unsurprisingly for a Tarantino film, the dialogue is top notch.
Pam Grier and Robert Forrester give incredible performances, and it’s almost meditative at points on topics like aging and last chances. It’s a movie with a lot of soul, which isn’t something you always see in his work. Highly recommended.
I’m a fan of Tarantino (second favorite director, after Kubrick). Hard for me to pick a favorite of his films, but I’ll give the edge to The Hateful Eight, for its breathtaking scenery and cinematography. I do have to give it one demerit for not having Christoph Waltz, however.
Came in to say this. I think it works in Kill Bill (hence my vote), but the others not so much.
Basterds might be my favorite movie of all time, which makes this a pretty easy call for me; but Pulp Fiction is a close second.
Without question, it’s Pulp Fiction.
Huge cultural impact, endlessly quotable, rewatchable as hell.
My ranking, and why:
-
Kill Bill vol. 1 - The hyperobsessive attention to detail just astounds me. The ability to get a story about an 11yo girl who turned into a pre-teen prostitute so she could kill her parent’s murderer (while having sex with him) past American censors was astonishing. KB was a muscle flex like few films ever, and I was completely gobsmacked at the ending’s reveal. That, alone, made chopping this film in 2 perfectly fine with me.
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Pulp Fiction. Of course. Had not KB vol 1 hit me in that special zone, this is the obvious #1.
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was barely married when PF came out. I took my daughter to this one. A special memory which enhances this film every time I see it.
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Death Proof. By far, by far, the most enjoyable opening-night screening of any movie I have ever attended. The midnight crowd was drunk, in a great mood, and willing to go along for the ride. Yes, in many ways this can be seen as his worst movie, but fuck it - you had to be there.
-
Kill Bill vol. 2. Funny and poignant, just going to say that the final shot of BB and Beatrice… as the then-father of a girl a little younger than that… fucking slayed me. I get that the KB films are noted for their visual acumen, but he really pinpointed some emotional nuance in these films.
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Jackie Brown. It’s a love letter to Pam Grier, done via an Elmore Leonard adaptation. Who has a problem with that? Also, Robert de Niro is actually funny in this movie, unlike 96% of his post-2000 ‘comedies’.
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Inglorious Basterds. I kinda feel like the king in Amadeus - too many notes (words). On the other hand, can rank fourth on days that I’m feeling it for this movie.
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Django Unchained. Saw it twice, it’s a fine movie with some great performances, just kinda doesn’t do it for me.
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Reservoir Dogs. Good film, just have seen it sooooooooooooo manyyyyy tiiiimes.
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The Hateful Eight. His only failure. You people ranking it #1 because he put a SuperCinemaScope (or whatever) camera inside a soundstage are freakin’ crazy. Bonkers script, revealing an entire cast of characters to whom I didn’t care if they lived or died. And when they died, I didn’t cheer. Well, you can’t win them all, Quentin.
(And I tried seeing the extended version of it, as well as the serialized version of H8, on Netflix. Nope, still a failure.)
Was this his decision? I assume it was the studio’s choice.
It was a mutual decision between Weinstein and Tarantino according to this 2003 Variety article:
Agree. Samuel L. Jackson, Robert DeNiro, and Bridgett Fonda shine as well. I reread Rum Punch recently (I do that every year as a beach read) and now I’m longing for a rewatch.
Even if one doesn’t think it’s his BEST, it is absolutely one of the most IMPORTANT movies ever made. Pulp Fiction spawned a whole new 90s-2000s wave of independent auteur cinema. It practically invented a new kind of crime movie. Insanely influential; it ranks with movies like Snow White, Citizen Kane, Star Wars, Bonnie and Clyde, and Toy Story, movies that literally altered the way movies were made.
While I ranked it very near the bottom, I do understand the Hateful 8 love somewhat, as it’s a spectacularly made film. I just didn’t care for the story at all. For both Django and H8, his work reminds me of most everything Scorsese has done since 2000 or so, namely it’s exquisite craft (usually with Robert Richardson’s always exemplary cinematography) but hollow on the inside. The film wonk in me loved that he used the physical lenses that were on the cameras for Ben Hur and shot in a crazy wide scope for interior shots. That wasn’t enough to care enough about all the scenes that went on twice as long as they needed to and the plot twist that was more about his pleasure in pulling it off than the actual storytelling.
I think Jackie Brown gets a boost from me because it doesn’t include the graphically excessive violence of his other movies. I haven’t seen Once or Django, but the others are just steeped in violence. The best part of so many of his movies are the parts where someone doesn’t have blood pouring out of his mouth, when there aren’t brains painted on the wall, it’s when people are interacting in meaningful ways.