What does Quentin Tarantino do so well? What’s so special about his movies?
What are his influences?
How has his work evolved over time?
I’ve got some ideas of my own but I’d like to hear what others have to say before making suggestions of my own.
Got an essay due for film class, eh?
I’m a big QT fan but I can see that he’s not for everybody. I’ve liked or loved everything he’s done and I do think his work has evolved to be more complex in terms of characterization and storytelling. He also has an uncanny knack for resurrecting actors that are past their prime and giving them a new life in Hollywood (Travolta the obvious example here).
First and foremost, he’s a fan of film. He loves movies so much that most of his movies are pastiches and homages to the movies he loved growing up. He’s a very sharp writer of dialogue and is a pretty snazzy director to boot.
This.
His character interactions are beautifully written.
I’ve always said that Tarantino doesn’t makes movies about people or real life. The subject of his movies are movies themselves. Inglourious Basterds, for example, wasn’t about World War II - it was about World War II movies. Tarantino will take a film genre, watch all the movies in that genre, and distill its essence into a single film.
To add a bit to what others have said, as a writer, I think he has some of the best dialogue I’ve ever seen. Of course, even the best dialogue needs to be well performed, so obviously that also points to his ability to choose the right people to play the roles and give them good direction. That he can build so much tension with just dialogue is amazing.
For example, the opening scene in Inglorious Basterds, with the Colonel talking to the farmer, it’s a very tense scene largely carried by what, on it’s surface, seems like fairly mundane chatter, it has a hint of humor to it, and you really get all the character development you need for the villain, and it sets the tone for the whole film. The movie as a whole has some issues, but I think that’s a brilliant scene.
He can also do other remarkable things with dialogue besides just build tension. Recall the scene in Pulp Fiction where Christopher Walken rambles about hiding a watch in his ass. In the hands of virtually anyone else, there’s no way that scene could have worked and be taken seriously, but he manages to take such a ridiculous premise and make the audience believe it.
He also has an ability to create remarkably complex characters that defy the typical archetypes that we expect in a film. There’s no real “good” or “bad” people in his universe, instead we have protaganists, some for whom we’re led to sympathize with and some we’re not. Look at Kill Bill, the Bride is hardly a good person and she knows it; hell, she’s out to kill people for doing exactly what she did. And we find out that Bill, despite being a horrible person too, ultimately does have a good side to him, in caring for his daughter and, presumably how he felt for her before he had his…urm… jealous streak.
And, of course, he has his signature style. As someone else pointed out, ultimately, he’s sort of doing a film study and doing an homage to various styles of film. Some directors have more distinctive styles than others, but I think Tarantino’s films are among the most distinctive, and what’s more, is that it fits in well with his skill sets and the themes he’s exploring, whereas some styles are more just distinguished by things that don’t particularly add or detract from those ideas (eg, JJ Abrams and lens flare).
I’d say that he has his area of genius and his area of interest, which are entirely different things.
His genius is in having better-than-average dialogue; having motifs, themes and deeper meanings; and in being willing to present any random thing to the viewer, without self-editing or trying to conform to big budget standards (without going all artsy-fartsy).
Unfortunately, his interest is in making pulpy, shlock films, but personally I think he’s too erudite and methodical to do it right. Tarantino wishes that he was his best friend, Roberto Rodriguez, and could make something like Desperado or Machete - fun and silly. But since it doesn’t come to him naturally, all he can do to try and do it “perfectly” is to add more blood and to steal more scenes from old/foreign movies, either of which is a cheat and doesn’t quite work.
Overall, I think that Pulp Fiction fit him right because he didn’t try to make an exploitation/schlock film, but had enough of a budget to actually have some fun and interesting things happen in the film (unlike with Reservoir Dogs, where all he could do was have people talk about fun and interesting things which happened off-screen). Hopefully, he’ll accept that he doesn’t have the right inclinations to do schlock right some day, and try to make some more films that suit his style.
I’d say the one genuine exception is Jackie Brown, which is the most emotionally mature of all his films, and the only one that’s an adaptation of someone else’s material.
Yeah - I came in here to mention Elmore Leonard. Tarentino looks at genre movies through an Elmore Leonard lens, focusing on dialogue to make big characters, provocative juxtapositions and loose plots go down easy and cool.
Jackie Brown is his best movie because it does depart from Tarantino’s decision to be to action films what Mel Brooks is to comedy, a distiller of homage and some satire to the genre he is depicting.
He pays tremendous attention to dialogue and writes great dialogue. He loves actors and acting. His own acting ability is superficial at best. He doesn’t ruin his own scenes, but they all could be done better by real actors that he and a casting director pick. By loving acting, he lets his actors move and talk in a way you want to watch. His sets are meticulously set up and everyone on the crew pays attention to small details. He gets tremendous photography out of his photo director and camera operators. They have all clearly thought about the visual effect of every scene.
He has very damn high standards in every respect, except story. Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained miss being great movies because instead of the reality and horror of the subject matter depicted, they are revenge fantasies. The subjects are tragedies. End Inglorious Basterds with nobody important showing up to the premiere and it becomes a mainstream masterpiece. End Django with him hanging upside down and dead in the barn and Candi off to another slave auction with some talk about secession from some new characters and you get a much better movie showing the monsterousness. The revenge fantasy endings belittle the awfulness of the tragedy the movies exploit. This works in Grindhouse and Kill Bill because the whole thing is fantasy. It doesn’t work with real history because history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
Aside from all these other statements, with which I agree, I’ll tell ya one other reason I love Tarantino’s movies above all others: He is a friggin’ genius with the music. Sometimes, the lyrics of the song actually reflect the dialogue. He uses the music in the movie as another character that helps tell and develop the story.
Examples of musical genius in Tarantino films:
• Putting out fire (with gasoline) - Inglorious Basterds, just before Shoshanna burns her theater down. I heard the first three notes of this song, instantly recognized it, and laughed to myself in the theater because if there was ever a perfect song for that scene, that was it.
• Across 110th Street - That song totally reflects the struggles in Jackie Brown’s life. Street Life was also used in that movie and also illustrated Jackie Brown’s life well.
• Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon - Right before Uma Thurman’s character OD’s in Pulp Fiction. Yep. That’s one way to grow up. :eek:
• Stuck In The Middle With You - Fits the scene in Reservoir Dogs perfectly.
• Chick Habit - Lyrics: “Hang up the chick habit…” perfectly illustrates great advice for the end of Death Proof.
To add to the above, he loves to resurrect nearly-forgotten songs like Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” (in Django) and make you go “I can’t believe he used that - it’s so corny, but it works!”
Also, it’s not unfortunate that he makes pulpy, schlocky films. His whole thing is to demonstrate that those cheap exploitation films he loves are legitimate cinema, as worthy of respect as any other genre. (And his films get nominated for Oscars, proving that we noticed.)
Among the other things mentioned, Tarantino is very well tuned into pop culture, past and present. His soundtracks are often amazing. He knows what tweaks people.
If I would suggest any one scene, it would indeed be the opening to Inglorious Basterds. Few filmmakers are talented enough to make a scene that great.
Seconded. “Down in Mexico” by The Coasters for the striptease scene in Death Proof totally sells the rest of that movie even though, realistically, its not very good.
I think you could recast any given Pulp Fiction role and still have a pretty great film. With the exception of Tarantino seeing the unique potential of Samuel L. Jackson.
I’m a big Tarantino fan myself and I’ll just say that what does it for me is…
-Really well-written dialogue
-Great soundtracks
-Perfect casting choices
I didn’t care much for Inglorious Basterds as a whole, but I will agree that the scene others have mentioned should be studied in various film schools and such for a very long time. It’s the perfect scene for what it is trying to evoke in the audience.
My sediments exactly.
The thing is Tarantino isn’t trying to parody the genres he’s working in. He treats them seriously. Kill Bill, for example, wasn’t intended to satirize martial arts movies - it was intended to epitomize martial arts movies.
I don’t think Tarantino gets enough credit for his talents in directing his actors. Look at Daryl Hannah as an example - what other role has she ever played that’s comparable to Elle Driver? But she was great. I don’t think this means that Hannah has secretly been a great actress all along. I think it means Tarantino is a great director.
My biggest problem with Death Proof is that it compares unfavourably to Planet Terror. On its own, it’s… okay. Maybe overly chatty, and the women in the latter half are are a lot less sympathetic than the victims in the first half.