Quentin Tarantino movies, to be specific.
I saw Inglourious Basterds last week. I was reluctant because it was Tarantino, and my only experience with him til then was Kill Bill Vol. 2, which my friends wanted to watch in high school. I don’t remember much about it besides Uma Thurman kicking a lot of ass and at one point someone losing an eyeball. I’m assuming it would have been a better experience if I had seen Vol. 1 first. There was a lot of violence in it, and that’s what stuck with me. So, I was assuming Inglourious Basterds would be a gore fest too.
After some prompting I finally decided to give QT another chance and I went and saw it. Yes, there were a few scenes of violence, but it’s a World War II movie, so that wasn’t really surprising. Some of these violent scenes were sort of unconventional for a WWII movie (scalping Nazis, bashing in someone’s head with a baseball bat) but it’s Quentin Tarantino, so again, not too surprising.
What was surprising was how much I loved it. I mean, I even put it in my “favorite movies” list on Facebook, which means I REALLY loved it. And when I came home afterwards I added a bunch of Tarantino movies to my Netflix queue. As of now, I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Death Proof. I have seen Pulp Fiction, but it’s been a while, so I’m not going to talk about it in this post. (Spoilers galore!)
True Romance is the one I watched tonight. Quentin Tarantino didn’t direct it – Tony Scott did – but he did write the script, which is the most important part (in my biased opinion). I was expecting it to have a depressing ending, because most characters die in the end of Tarantino stories. Most of the people die in this one too, but not the two main characters, Clarence and Alabama. All I knew before this movie of Patricia Arquette was the commercials for the show Medium, which I have always thought looked idiotic. Well… in this movie, at least, she was great. This was almost a cute movie. Clarence and Alabama fall in love in a night, get married the next day, then steal a bunch of cocaine from Alabama’s now dead pimp and they go to California to sell it. There are a bunch of people trying to kill them, but in the end they get away with the I enjoyed the movie all right up until the end, which is when I decided I loved it. The final scene, with the couple playing on the beach with their son… I don’t know. It was just adorable. I thought it was pretty sentimental of Quentin, but it’s nice to know he has a soft spot. There was some violence, naturally… but it wasn’t about violence. So many movies show the guy’s head blowing up when it gets shot, but this one doesn’t – because it’s more about the reasons behind the violence. Clarence kills Alabama’s pimp (the most hilarious and bizarre version of Gary Oldman I have ever seen) because he loves her and he wants her to be safe from him and his cronies. Clarence and Alabama are always motivated by their love for each other… and even though they know each other less than 24 hours before they get married, I still believe their relationship more than I believe 99% of the ones resulting from your average RomCom. Not that I waste much time on those.
Now, Reservoir Dogs I did not like. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to watch a movie about a bunch of dudes yelling and cussing and bleeding all over each other in a warehouse. I was bored and kind of disgusted at one point, when this one guy was torturing another guy trying to find out who sold them all out (they were robbing someone? A jewelry store maybe? I don’t think I was listening to the part where they explained that). He cuts off his ear, and then dumps a bunch of gasoline on his head. After a while they showed a closeup of him and I think something else bad had happened on his forehead, because like I said, I was disgusted, and was trying not to watch that stuff. What I did appreciate about the torture scene was the fact that when the guy actually cuts off the ear, the camera pans to the wall. And what the audience can imagine is infinitely worse than actually showing it would be. We’re so desensitized to violence in movies these days that really the only way to scare people with it anymore is to not show it. While I didn’t like this movie and didn’t pay hardly any attention to it while it was playing on my TV, I can still understand why other people like it. I just couldn’t get into it because I didn’t identify with a single person in it.
And please, please do not get me started on Tim Roth’s accent. I love him, he’s a brilliant actor, but wow. Listening to him talk like that was physically hurting me. I hated that a thousand times more than the ear torture scene.
Death Proof is probably tied with Inglourious Basterds as my favorite Tarantino movie. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack non-stop for the last couple days… that’s one thing QT knows how to do: make soundtracks. This one was just fabulous. I loved it. This one doesn’t really go with the “less is more” approach to violence, given that there’s an extremely horrifying car crash in the middle of it where the first four women are all killed in extremely graphic ways, but that goes along with what he and Robert Rodriguez (with Planet Terror, which I haven’t seen) were trying to do with the Grindhouse project, which was make an homage to B-movies and exploitation films of the 70s and 80s. Without knowing basically anything about those kinds of movies or having read any analysis on it, I think the first half of Death Proof is the homage part. The second half, which has a lot less scratchy film effects and gratuitous violence, is the chance for a different but similar group of women to get revenge on the murdering sexist psychopath on behalf of the women he killed in the first half and any time before the movie takes place. It’s awesome.
As much as I loved the people in Death Proof, my favorite QT character is absolutely Shoshanna Dreyfus in Inglourious Basterds. My favorite QT scene is when Shoshanna is getting ready for the premiere in her theater and she puts her blush on like war paint. Her death scene was oddly beautiful. The revenge she takes on the Nazi regime is perfectly executed… I kept worrying and worrying that something would go wrong and her plan would fail, and while something does happen that she hadn’t considered, she still succeeds. All the work that the Basterds were doing, finding Nazis and killin’ ‘em, the scheme they had put together to kill the same people who were going to the premiere… ultimately, it didn’t matter if they had been there or not, because Shoshanna had it covered. Frankly, I think she is the true hero in this movie, the most important and definitely the most interesting character. She never even meets the Basterds. She never knows a single thing about them. And she still manages to bring down the entire Nazi regime. Yes, there was that scene where we got to see Hitler get riddled with bullets, but that was more for the satisfaction of getting to see Hitler riddled with bullets. He would have died in the fire, but in this alternate reality WW2 movie, we didn’t just want to see Hitler burn up, we wanted to see him get shot a buttload of times and THEN burn up. Understandable. But Shoshanna still had it covered.
Here is a quote from a fantastic review of this movie that sums up my feelings perfectly:
I fail to see how it’s not awesome that Tarantino advertises a violent boys’ club movie, and offers up a movie about a woman who resists being objectified and underestimated.
Suffice to say, I’m owning this movie when it comes out. And if anyone feels like buying Death Proof for me…? Feel free!
Posted by sarahactually 
Posted by sarahactually 
Posted by sarahactually 