It’s been a hard decade and a half for Quentin Tarantino fans. There’s no director in recent memory who has come out swinging the way he did, with a one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction… who then spent fifteen years whipping out self-indulgent loads like a partially pithed chimp in a cage.
You earned yourself a lot of goodwill after Pulp Fiction, Quentin, so we were a patient lot. We paid to go see the quickie dumpoffs of your earlier, unproduced scripts that Hollywood cranked out to cash in your your name… and we even ignored the glaring and obvious reasons why the studios passed on them before your were famous. We went to the theater like art fans entering a gallery hoping to see a little early Picasso and instead getting a Mapplethorpe exhibit, and finding yourself settling for a dick in the ass.
We paid to see True Romance, Or: Hey! What If A Hot Girl Liked Me Because I Was A Geek, And What If Something Interestsing Happened On The Way Home From My Tedious Genre-Retailing Gig!. We even sat through Natural Born Killers, Or: Hey! What If Charles Starkweather And Caril Ann Fugate Were Born In 1965, Were Marginally Attractive And Mildly Retarded? Natural Born Killers was so bad Rodney Dangerfield immediately tried to rehabilitate his reputation after playing a pederast in it by starring in Meet Wally Sparks and dying.
Finally, at the end of 1997, we saw the release of Jackie Brown, which we went to in excited droves and… sagged. What the fuck was that, Quentin? A crime flick with Don Vito Corleone… as a stoner loser? Who gets outwitted by the recent star of Strip Search and Fakin’ Da Funk? For two and a half fucking hours? Jesus, I wanted revenge on DeNiro for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein too, but next time show some common decency and use a fucking gun.
Stephen King once wrote that the test of a good movie is that you don’t find yourself wanting a cigarette in the middle of it. Technically Jackie Brown passed, because by the end of the third reel, I wanted to smoke crack, or anything else that might make the pain stop. Still I must admit that it wasn’t a total waste: at least somebody had the courage to finally shoot Chris Tucker in the face.
Tarantino went understandably silent after that for a few years, which makes sense on paper, but which in reality gave we fanboys time and distance from his magnum opi… time and distance that did not necessarily treat them kindly. If you take a step back from Reservoir Dogs and pull out the style and pop culture, you have a story about five guys planning the intricate crime of… making someone give them stuff at gunpoint. Things go wrong when, despite elaborate precautions to hide their identities including… picking one of the robbers up at his home address after calling his home phone number… an undercover cop foils the robbery after winning their confidence using… a story about taking a piss… Thus making Joe Cabot’s Master Crime Squad the only place where a detailed story about a bodily function can get you work other than Nick’s Comedy Stop.
And as much as I still love Pulp Fiction, I get sucked right out of it when Jules and Vincent, trapped in a house with a bloody car, require the assistance of genius master fixer Winston Wolf, who rides to the rescue with the master plan of… cleaning the fucking car. I’m guessing that somewhere there’s a deleted scene where he advises Jules to lower his fly before urinating, and reminds Vincent that he it might help matters if he could remember to continue breathing.
Then he came back with Kill Bill, which was fun but was nothing more than four hours of Sonny Chiba stomping on the villains of every 1970’s spy, blacksploitation and cracker revenge flick, except with tits.
Then we had Death Proof. Basically, Death Proof tried to pay tribute to bad grindhouse movies by being a bad fucking movie. An homage to shit is still shit; frankly, Quentin should have called the movie “Homage to Shit”. Then he might have gotten the hysterical, Piss Christ style attention of Joe Lieberman which might have at least helped the box office gross.
But it’s been three years since Death Proof’s ignominious collapse in theaters, and I think we can all be assured that the last thing Tarantino want’s to do is roll the dice on stepping on his dick doing another “homage” to some genre that might be out of his comfort zone. Right? Huh? What’s that you say? Oh, fuck.
So… the master of modern noir, who’s best at defining modern American cool by wrapping it in an 1970’s vibe… is doing a World War II flick set in France. Which is sure to make all film fanatics stand up and excitedly shout: “Why, fuckface? What did we do to you?”
Indeed. Why not just do a fucking opera, Quentin? Redefine that genre by having Pagliacci guzzle Fruit Brute while geting cornholed at gunpoint by the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Kid just off camera during a long close-up of some chick’s feet, all during the eight-minute album cut of MacArthur Park?
You were born in 1963, Quentin; what dazzling pop-culture references do you think you can use to add sparks to a movie that takes place in 1942 France? Let’s set the scene: two the the “Basterds” are sitting at an outdoor cafe sipping espresso and smoking Gauloises cigarettes, when the first Basterd says, “Let me tell you what In The Mood’s about. In The Mood’s not about some nice girl, who meets a sensitive fella. Minnie the Moocher’s about that, granted – ”
“You’re not even trying anymore, are you?” The second basterd says, “How long’s it been since you wrote anything worthwhile longer than the endorsement on one of Harvey Weinstein’s checks?” Then a giant Nazi with a band-aid on the back of his neck blows up the Louvre. Cut to: a long shot of a girl’s feet from the point of view of inside a trunk. We can hear a big-band version of “I’m A Little Bit Country” on a Jeep’s radio…
Nobody needs this kind of self-indulgence, Quentin, but remember: it’s not to late to fix it. There is a good movie in there, I can see it; you’ve already got some of the cast, most of the props and all of the dialogue. Just chuck the setting, the timeframe, and the original casting and picture this:
FADE IN: Brad Pitt stands over a naked, whimpering Angeline Jolie. He’s wearing a Hitler uniform and wielding one of Angelina’s ceremonial fuck-daggers. He leans into the camera with a crazy, determined look in his eyes and shouts: “And I wants my scalps!”
Yeah, it’s a Goddamned crime that Harvey Weinstein makes more money than me.
[tags]Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, Inglorious Bastards, Brad Pitt, movies, dark humor, satire[/tags]
