Hell Yeah! Baddest motherfucking movies EVER!
He certainly looks no more deranged than Steve Buschemi, and SB’s in Fargo a lot more than Tarantino’s in Pulp Fiction! 
Anyway, taste is taste. I don’t think you’re not ‘getting’ anything, maybe it’s just the particular style you don’t dig on. I actually have only seen one Tarantino film – Pulp Fiction – and I adore it. Love Fargo too. Yet Fargo is a lot more … well, sincere, I guess is the word? I think the Coen brothers have a more strongly defined morality to their films, at least the ones I’ve seen. As quirky and off-kilter as their characters are, you usually know where your sympathies are supposed to lie. The kidnappers in Fargo are amusing at times, but you don’t really want them to succeed and they remain scary throughout. And the deaths – wood chipper aside – are played as pretty tragic and serious, particularly
the cop, Mrs. Lundegaard and her dad
This is certainly not the case in Pulp Fiction. Death and violence are stylized and largely played for humor. And more to the point, just about everyone (aside from the racist raping bastards) is depicted both with moments of sympathetic behavior, even Marsellus Wallace, as well as moments of repellant behavior. While both films are sort of about the banality of evil, Fargo doesn’t find it all that funny, while Pulp Fiction does. Both films are great for different reasons. But liking one doesn’t mean you’re gonna like the other. That’s cool.
Just my thoughts.
Thanks, Admiral Crunch (love the nick, BTW)!
I think what you’re saying is that his films are satire, and because satire is my favorite genre (in both literature and film), it "bothers"me that I’m not “getting” it. I will give it another shot, and look at those films with that in mind.
Re: The Coens. Love them as well, especially* Fargo*, and O Brother. I know they’re two different styles, but I can actually laugh at the Coens’ work!
The stilted dialogue really gets me, and I think Clooney & Company are wonderful in it.
After we saw it the first time, me and my friends cracked each other up with the dialogue.
My favorite line: “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa! You cain’t swear at my Fionnnnng-Say!”
John’s favorite (and he’d drive this one into the ground): "But you ain’t bona-fide!"
And I believe that once again I have hijacked my own thread, haven’t I?
And maybe been “whooshed” by Tarantino’s work as well! 
Thanks for all the replies! I don’t post much interesting stuff, but what has been added here made for some enjoyable reading!
Quasi
Other people have already covered most of what I would have said.
Tarantino’s real shining point is his dialog, particularly in his earlier films. It’s very hard to do good dialog that manages to be naturalistic without being boring or banal, fast and frenetic without making you feel like you’re being inundated with words, and yet contain so very fucking many motherfucking goddamn cusswords that you swear to fucking god that your mom is going to come storming into the room and make you “turn off that filth!”
His approach to violence is a blend of realism and the stylized brutality of those 70s exploitation films and B cinema he obviously loves. The realism is that he often doesn’t sugar-coat the violence or make it beautiful the way so many action movies do. If you looked at the body count of your average action movie, you’d see that there are probably more deaths per 10 minutes of screen time than the average Tarantino movie has in its entire running time…and they make absolutely no impression on the audience because the deaths are abstract, often bloodless or only marginally gory, and you feel next to no connection to the people who are killed. It’s spectacle, sometimes not even that. Sometimes it’s background.
In a Tarantino movie, you feel every. Single. Death. People think they’re bloodier than they are because he doesn’t flinch. An exception to this is Kill Bill, which plays homage to the deliberately over-the-top violence in old Kung Fu and Japanese films.
choie, I actually don’t agree with you on this. For example, Marvin’s death in Pulp Fiction isn’t played for laughs, it’s played in a matter of fact way. The audience’s reaction is nervous laughter because the reactions of the characters are completely in character and it creeps people the hell out. It should; Vincent and Jules are sociopathic thugs. They don’t really give a fuck that Marvin died, they’re freaked out because now they’ve got a problem — namely, Marvin’s brains plastered all over the back seat of their car. Sure, Tarantino gives his characters lots of deliberately funny lines and clever repartee, but I think if you took another look at most of those scenes you’d see that he’s playing it straight, and the humor you read into it was a defense mechanism.
The reaction of the audience is no accident. It played for laughs by playing it in a matter of fact way. That’s exactly what makes it funny.
The main reason Tarantino is one of my top-three favorite directors ever (I love every single movie. Each and every one. Jackie Brown and Deathproof are my favorites.), for me, is also because of Tarantino’s love of music.
The soundtracks are, without exception, sublime.
The songs, generally awesome catchy pop tunes which were once one-hit wonders, but now have slipped into obscurity until resurrected for a Tarantino film, always always always help tell the story. I find myself singing the songs long after the movie is over and some of the songs will never be the same for me again because of the scene they offset in a given movie.
I’ve heard Tarantino talk about music a lot and it seems like his knowledge base is as broad and deep as his love for B-grade genre movies. He seems to love B-grade genre rock and roll as well.
Can you imagine Jackie Brown with any other soundtrack? Perfection…
No. There’s plenty of ironic humor and distance in his movies, but he’s not satirizing anything. He’s just enjoying stuff that is often dismissed as trashy.
There’s no comparing anything Tarantino has ever done to Harold & Maude, which has dark subject matter that’s always played in a sweet and life affirming way. It’s hard to compare the gore in most of his movies to the gore you see in horror movies because it doesn’t mean the same thing.
I agree. KB 1 & 2 was desperately in need of an editor–had it been reigned into a single tight movie it would have been great. Otherwise, it was an amazing homage to the slash-fu genre but padded with far too much self-serving Tarantino-fluff.
Couldn’t disagree more. If they had been one movie it would have been uneven and jarring to go from stylized action to a character piece in one sitting.
The two movies are different genres almost. With the exception of the short fight wtih Elle and the even shorter fight with Bill. V.2 is a very talky and a very character driven film. Part one is almost entirely action.
Agreed to a point, it distills down to me what I felt KB 1&2 succeeded best at as a Tarantino movie. In this case, the action-focused portions were superior and Tarantino at his best, while many of the “talky” segments did little except continuously disrupt the pace of the film. I feel if it were condensed to be, like Pulp Fiction, more short character vignettes and shorter snippets of more clever dialogue, instead of longer plodding expositions, it would have been a better movie.
To contrast with his “talkiest” movie, the dialogue and exposition in Reservoir Dogs created superb suspense and tension in a fantastic character-play. KB 1&2 exposition seemed unfocused on character and more focused on the “cool”, and grew tedious to me. Imagine if the conversation between Uma and John in the 50s diner in Pulp Fiction had lasted for 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes…
The protagonist thinks he hears two words whispered in the static, “Hartford” and “Hope.”
This was going to be my contribution, although far less analytical: I’ve been saying since Reservoir Dogs and, more particularly, Pulp Fiction, that Tarantino wields music like a fucking club. Profanity, too, but the music is just killer.
I’ve never listened to Stuck In The Middle With You in the same way, ever since Reservoir Dogs .
For me, it’s the dialogue between characters intermixed with the particular scene they’re in that make it interesting for me.
Take for instance the opening scene in Pulp Fiction. Travolta and Jackson are talking about how quarter pounders are different in France, then transition into a witty foot massage discussion, all this right before they’re about to kill three people. And, even when they enter the apartment, Jackson still manages to have a mundane, pointless, yet oddly poignant conversation with Frank Whaley about his Kahuna burger, and even gets a little personal revealing his vegetarian girlfriend which pretty much makes him a vegetarian, right before him and Travolta blow his brains out. I mean, where else can you find this stuff in movies?
I think another aspect is the fact that we get to see a human side to these otherwise cold-blooded killers. We get to see the everyday problems they might encounter that, in any other movie, we wouldn’t necessarily get to see. Tarantino just knows how to pull this off. Somehow, we end up caring more about these guys when we see the normal, everyday stressors they have to deal with, as opposed to your average, run-of-the-mill bad guy, who we usually don’t really care about.
And, I’ll just throw out one more scene. Take the scene with Travolta and Jackson driving to Tarantino’s house to clean up the mess they have with Marvin. Here they are, these two cold-blooded gangsters, who you’d assume wouldn’t give two fucks what anyone thinks about them. Yet they actually do care, and show it by having the decency and courtesy to respect Tarantino’s home by trying to keep his towels clean, complimenting his coffee, and even respecting his marriage by trying to get everything done before his wife gets home. So, again, just little human touches that Tarantino adds to his characters, which for me anyway, makes them a lot more interesting.
Take it for what you will.
Alright, now it’s on my mental “films to watch” list.
Say Quasi, given that your like of Fargo and Creepshow, perhaps it’s the overall grimness of the violence that turns you off? Fargo, Creepshow, etc. seemed to have a kind of tongue-in-cheek quality, but I, personally, have never seen the black humor stated to be in Pulp Fiction.
Have you seen No Country for Old Men, and if so what say you? Because that was the Coens returning to a grim, deadly serious noir sensibility.
That wasn’t them, that was Mr Wolf.
I cannot seem to wipe this shit-eatin’ grin off my face, y’all!
It has become very obvious to me that I am not looking at these films with the same “eyes” as you, my friends, and it’s gratifying that I can still post a thread to which people will add their ideas and advice!
I have seen No Country for Old Men, and the one scene which stands out in my feeble memory is the “coin-toss” scene. Dude, I didn’t know which way that one was gonna go, and I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath till it was over…:eek:
I am a huge fan of Tommy Lee Jones as well, and although (like John Wayne) he tends to play himself he never disappoints me when he “owns” his parts.
But I must say, this is a Coen Brothers film that left me exhausted rather than nauseated. I would not want to see another like it. They made their point, yes, and they had me “on the edge of my seat” (especially with the motel room sequence), but Kids, I don’t wanna have to work that hard!
I need a happy ending if I can get one, please, and you’re talking to a die-hard John Wayne fan (has to do with my childhood admiration of cowboys while growing up in post-World War II Germany - so try not to hold it against me, okay?)
But you’re also talking to a guy who’s willing to keep an open mind (although how much longer we’ll be “open” is anybody’s guess;)) and really wants to understand.
Kids, I am still working on the meaning behind 2001 A Space Odyssey, okay?
2011 had a few answers, yeah, but not enough…
Anyway, thanks for all the “brain-exercising”!
Quasi
No, it was actually them. They were the ones keeping his towels clean, complimenting his coffee, and working fast so his wife wouldn’t find out. Mr. Wolfe just told them what they needed to do.
I’ve always found the Coen brothers use of violence to be much more disturbing than Tarantino’s. Tarantino can be gory, but his characters, despite being thugs and murders and junkies, tend to operate within a clearly defined set of appropriate moral behaviors. They’re killers, sure, but they aren’t indiscriminate. No one in Pulp Fiction kills anyone that hasn’t acted in some way to “deserve” it. They’re all people who have opted into this violent society in one way or the other: numbered among the dead are drug dealers, hit men, stoolies, and rapists. They aren’t killing innocents or random people. And the central story of Pulp Fiction is that of Jules, the hitman who abandons his life of violence and attempts to find some sort of redemption, contrasted with Vincent, who spurns redemption and is killed for it. The underlying moral to the story is entirely conventional.
Contrast that with virtually any of the Coen’s noir films, but Fargo in particular. The only person in that entire film who dies who remotely deserves it is Buscemi, and his is the final death in the film. Before his appointment with the wood chipper, he and Peter Stormare engage in a constantly widening maelstrom of random violence, brutally claiming the lives of people just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. John Travolta being gunned down in the toilet is somewhat affecting, because his character is likable, but you can’t argue that he didn’t bring it on himself. Compare that to Macy’s wife in Fargo, who is dragged out of her home, humiliated (remember the scene of her running, blindfolded, through the snow while Buscemi laughs at her?) and ultimately murdered after being kept tied up for days by a pair of monstrous psychopaths. These aren’t honorable or likable men. They are unthinking parasites that destroy everything and everyone they come into contact with. And we see the wreckage left behind. The characters in Pulp Fiction are loners. They have no family, beyond a wife or girlfriend. Whereas the driving conflict in Fargo is ultimately a family conflict: Macy is driven to his scheme by his desire to prove himself to his wife and son that he’s a man, and is constantly stymied in his efforts by his over-bearing father-in-law. As a result of his actions, his family is utterly destroyed. Can you imagine what his son is going to go through, in the aftermath of that movie?
And that’s just using Fargo as an example because it’s a movie I can actually rewatch. No Country for Old Men draws an even stronger contrast, but I don’t like to dwell on that movie for too long, because it is so bleak and horrible. Even their lighter dramas still have material that’s hard to take, such as the death of the Dane in Miller’s Crossing, or Barton waking up next to Audrey and killing the mosquito on her back in Barton Fink, both scenes that I’ve found far more disturbing than anything out of a Tarantino flick.
Really great way to put it.
“Girl… you’ll be a woman soon…” plays just before B. Kiddo kills somebody. (Kill Bill)
I love that.
It was, that is why Butch looked at the car as he was walking out. That was when he keyed it. That is what I like most about that movie, everything in all the storylines links together somehow.