There was no gore in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (you never actually see the bullets hit the victims, even in the car scene).
The gore in Kill Bill was intentionally exaggerated to the point where it wasn’t realistic.
He didn’t direct the gunleg movie.
Tarantino’s movies are also moralistic if you pay attention. You say that Travolta’s character nauseated you, but Vincent Vega wasn’t supposed to be sympathetic. The overlying moral arc of the movie is the ability for bad people to find moral redemption. After they both survive the shootout in the apartment, Jules interprets it as a “miracle” and as a warning to repent and “leave the life,” which he does. Vincent ignores it as a fluke, shows no remorse or repentance for his sins (he is, in fact, needlessly cruel to Butch even when he has no reason to be. Jules is never pointlessly cruel, even before the “miracle”), and ends up paying the price for it.
The two protagonists who live are both redeemed by merciful acts towards people who little deserve it – Jules towards the couple robbing the diner, and Butch when he goes back to save a man who was trying to kill him.
Of course, Tarantino also revels in the low grade thrills of violent exploitation genres - rather than seeing it as beneath him, or unartistic, he celebrates it and wallows in it. He loves the gunfights, the bad language, the karate fights, the amoral characters. You either like that stuff or you don’t, but I can see him trying to recreate the feeling of sneaking into a theater to watch R-rated movies in the 70’s when seeing bare breasts and hearing people say “fuck” on a movie screen was novel, and exciting. I remember how transgressive it felt to see a movie like Death race 2000, or Rollerball. There is an energy charge to that kind of thing which is what I think he’s seeking.
Mr. Blond holding the sliced ear. The sliced ear-hole. Mr. Orange wallowing in a pool of his own blood. Blood splattering from the cop as Nice Guy Eddie shoots him.
Just because we don’t see the slicing or a close-up of the bullet entering, I wouldn’t call it non-gory.
Samurai sword wound on Zed’s little partner. Cleaning “brains”, blood and other assorted gore from the car. The aftermath as two blood-bespattered hoodlums are hosed off.
A wee bit less graphic than Reservoir Dogs, but there was gore enough. Gore needn’t imply graphic, close-up mayhem. To some folks a bloody nose = gory.
As for Tarantino, I enjoy his films to one degree or another when I watch them, but the only one I bought on DVD was Jackie Brown. His best work IMHO ( probably not a coincidence that it was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, rather than a original screenplay of Tarantino’s ).
I mostly like Tarantino but I think that he is a bit like Andrew Lloyd Weber - if he stole from one person he’d be a thief, if he steals from many he is a genius. Nonetheless his stuff is fun but you have to not approach it as real movie making it is Tarantino film making. It’s like going to see Metallica and complaining that they didn’t do any Beach Boys songs. A Tarantino movie is just a Tarantino movie. I think if you didn’t particularly like his schtick you may find the first one good and the rest ho-hum.
And I’m 56 and go to about 40 or 50 movies a year.
As to the end of the novella The Mist, spoilering just in case.The Mist has an open-ended ending like a lot of his stories. They do escape from the grocery store and head out in a vehicle. They search the radio dial for any broadcasts and they hear a fragment of a transmission. They think they hear a location (given in the book but I don’t remember off hand, somewhere in another state) and they start in that direction.
I’d say that after Reservoir Dogs (and possibly Jackie Brown, which I have not seen), Tarantino has basically been concentrating on ramped-up exploitation/grindhouse movies–Kill Bill (kung fu), Death Proof (slasher), and now Inglorious Basterds (over-the-top war epic). The lack of substance in these movies, of anything but homage, may be another factor influencing people’s dislike of Tarantino.
I’d say you definitely have to see Jackie Brown. As others have pointed out, it’s based on an Elmore Leonard novel so the story is solid. The film concentrates on characters that are pretty much ignored in the movies, a bail bondsman and a flight attendant, both middle aged, one black and one white. It’s Tarantino directing a mature story and he got lukewarm reviews for his trouble. I believe if he had directed this under a different name, it would have received considerably more praise. But coming after Pulp Fiction? People were apparently expecting Pulp Fiction II, didn’t get it and dismissed one of his most enjoyable films.
By the way, I wouldn’t call Death Proof a slasher film in any way. It’s a car movie like Eat My Dust.
Most of Quentin Tarantino is dark comedy combine with homages to kung fu and B movies.
Some lean more one way or the other, for instance, Pulp Fiction leans more towards black comedy, and happens to be the greatest movie ever made. Whereas, Kill Bill is almost all homage, and is absolutely awful.
Reading you post, I would say you’re probably not getting Tarantino because you’re probably not a huge fan of black comedy. To each their own. To me, the scene where they kill Brett, and where Marvin gets shot in the face are hilarious. Other people may find them to be horrible.
There’s nothing to ‘get’. He’s a film buff who loves B crime movies. That’s it, that’s all. There’s nothing to get other than he is trying to make movies within a certain milieu that are quirky, violent and funny. If that’s not your bag then that’s fine, but it’s not that you’re not ‘getting’ it because there is no secret message hidden there. They are just stories of a certain type.
Badly…
They are not “really bad”. You just don’t like them. And that’s fine.
The “point” of Tarantino films is that he kind of has a yen for the B-movies he grew up with - exploitation films, dubbed martial arts flicks, crime dramas, car films, even anime. His films are both inspired by and pay homage to those genres.
His movies often try to capture a lot of that cool, gritty, 70s vibe. They are driven by witty dialogue and interesting characters. Mostly physical effects instead of CGI. Almost a kind of low budget feel.
While not particularly gory by today’s standards, there is a certain callousness to the violence. And there is a certain casualness about it as well. As if the characters inhabit this bizarre other world that kind of blends into ours in many ways, but the normal rules of society don’t apply.
When talking about Tarantino, people always leave out True Romance, which he wrote and was directed by Tony Scott as well as Natural Born Killers.
Also another bit of trivia, the character of Texas Ranger Earl McGraw who appears in Deathproof and Planet Terror also appears in Kill Bill and From Dusk Til Dawn.
I watched From Dusk Til Dawn because someone said it was an interesting take on vampire movies. What I got was a really interesting crime drama for the first hour so that I was annoyed when the vampires finally showed up.
How so? From my memory, Vincent’s entire dealings with Butch involve getting blown away by Butch with a submachine gun in an incredibly poor ambush attempt at Butch’s home. But Vincent’s job is to kill people and I didn’t see anything to suggest that Vincent was going to do more than plug Butch full of lead, had things gone to plan.
“Black Comedy” movie, I really liked:* Harold and Maude* (of course I was younger then).
Fargo (William H. Macy fan)
I liked the Creepshows too.
Back to The Mist: I really didn’t see that one coming, and felt “punched in the gut” at the ending.
Guess ol’ Steve-O would be pleased at that, though, huh?
I hope that picking and choosing like that doesn’t make me some kind of film-hypcocrite, but that’s the best way to explain it - unless I have a repressed revulsion to Tarantino (who looks a bit deranged) himself?
He also said: “I ain’t your friend, palooka.” Really rubbing in that he knew Butch was taking a payoff, and that Vincent that it meant that Butch was past his prime and couldn’t win another fight.
To all the would-be film critics in the thread, Tarantino is indeed influenced by trash. He is also heavily influenced by the French New Wave, those snobby art movies from the 1960s, that were in turn influenced by earlier American trash.
I know it’s hard to be objectively wrong when discussing art, but you’ve managed it with gusto. Tarantino is easily one of the most visually distinctive directors in the business. If you’re not watching, you’re missing half the movie.
As for the violence, a normal movie lets you put up your internal defenses, but when the perpetrator is the protagonist and cool it makes you feel bad, which is what it’s supposed to do in real life. Except in Kill Bill, of course. In that he makes the violence so over the top that any emotion other than glee is kinda inappropriate.
To the OP: read some reviews to get feel for what you’re looking for, watch one of the movies again, and enjoy. If you still don’t like it, no worries. You just don’t like his movies. He makes movies that play with movie conventions. If you’re not familiar enough with the language of cinema, it’ll all be like a bunch of inside jokes that you’re not privy to.
