The Film Thread: Page 294 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

The Film Thread

jones

I don't like Tarantino fans who treat his every fart like a piece of art but "utter dogshit" is a little harsh maybe. 😆

Segway

Tarantino is not for everyone but for me there is no other film maker out there who can make a 3 hour long film with so much dialogue without me ever getting bored.

marv3llous

Tarantino isnt my favourite as he has too many misses, but Basterds and Pulp Fiction are absolutely brilliant movies. Reservoir Dogs is not bad either. Rest i dont really care about.

QuincyAbeyie

I'm the opposite. Inglorious Basterds was pretty good, but Django and Hateful 8 are the two Tarantino films I've enjoyed the most.

jones

Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, then everything else. Thought Basterds was meh outside of Waltz' performance.

Coombs

Can't stand anything the guy does. Trite, self-aggrandizing, racist, sexist, derivative, hackneyed, and condescending. To each their own I guess.

jones

A lot of that is certainly true for the latter movies, especially the self-aggrandising part. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction however are fun movies imo.

Klaus

I think Tarantino made two bold, culturally relevant films in Kill Bill 1 & 2; particularly the latter. I'm with Coombs on this one for the most part though (although perhaps for a different reason) - most of Tarantino's backlog is completely unwatchable. It's painful to sit through.

What surprised me the most is how poor the texture in practically all his films (aside from the two I mentioned) is. For someone who has profiled himself as a stylistic filmmaker there's such an abject absence of style to the whole thing. The payoff is traditionally more about how the story is presented than what it is about or how it is portrayed through the medium itself. The big hooks in both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown are editing tricks, for instance. Reservoir Dogs is the locked room murder mystery; a trope that has been done infinitely better in other books and films. The hook in Basterds is the unannounced, sudden altering of the course of history. Django I suppose you can say is built around the same thing from the ground up, making it not only expected in that case but also giving it a sense of being flat and stale. In Django's defence it did have some beautifully framed shots in DiCaprio's mansion of horror though.

Mirth

Haven't watched Reservoir Dogs but, aside from Inglorious, I don't get the hype around his work

GaelForce

Burnwinter wrote:
It's been fucking ages since I saw a film that had real cool, instead of feebly parodying, echoing or imitating cool.

Kingsmen, Django, John Wick, these films just aren't cool. It's like everything's preemptively Blazing Saddles-ised.

Did you not find anything 'cool' in;

Inherent Vice
Birdman
Whiplash
Ida
Sicario
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
The Revenant

Not sure what you're meaning/ looking for exactly though. Imagination in writing/ direction? Pure charisma?

GaelForce

I also don't understand how (even if you don't like it), someone can call Pulp Fiction not culturally relevant, innovative or interesting film making. It's the way that Tarantino's repeated his same ideas, stories and innovations in each of his recent films that's most disappointing. Feels like he's stuck in a creative rut. Would be great to see him play with someone else's story again, a la Jackie Brown.

QuincyAbeyie

The Revenant disappointed me. Excellent cinematography and Leo is great. Still the story was pretty mediocre, so was Hardy's character,

Irishgunner

jones wrote:
Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, then everything else. Thought Basterds was meh outside of Waltz' performance.

Agreed, basterds was disappointing.

Pulp fiction>reservoir dogs>django>kill Bill>>>>>>>>Basterds

RocktheCasbah

Blown away by Room last night. I don't have much else to say about it, because I think I'm still, sort of, processing it. Took a while to speak after I left the cinema last night!

Side note: I don't understand how anyone could watch Jackie Brown and not love the fuck out of that movie. Whatever you think about the rest of QT's output, THAT is a genuinely great film with heart and soul in spades.

Qwiss

Yeah I think Jackie Brown is right up there with Pulp Fiction. Everything after has been lacking that magic.

GaelForce

Soundtrack of Jackie Brown is probably my favourite ever.

Coombs

I did find Jackie Brown to be his most watchable film, but that was a long time ago. Kill Bill 2 would be somewhere in the half-decent category as well, but it is also mostly just a faint memory for me. Have a feeling that if I rewatched them I'd instantly lose any good feeling I did have towards them.

Burnwinter

GaelForce wrote:
Burnwinter wrote:
It's been fucking ages since I saw a film that had real cool, instead of feebly parodying, echoing or imitating cool.

Kingsmen, Django, John Wick, these films just aren't cool. It's like everything's preemptively Blazing Saddles-ised.

Did you not find anything 'cool' in;

Inherent Vice
Birdman
Whiplash
Ida
Sicario
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
The Revenant

Not sure what you're meaning/ looking for exactly though. Imagination in writing/ direction? Pure charisma?

I suppose I was talking specifically about pulp fiction and how it traditionally functions emotionally - whether it be hard-boiled, western, science fiction, pseudo-medieval fantasy, gangster stories etc.

Often, the reader or audience is invited to identify with the (potentially flawed) protagonist as the dispenser of justice, violence, retribution, or as the man who beats impossible odds, or the capable leader or ship's captain. There's many different modes of this, cathartic revenge, whimsical genius, and so on, but you're able to immerse yourself in a fantasy that's about being different and in some way better than you are.

There are a huge number of quasi-pulp TV and film stories being produced at the moment, but currently there's a penchant for severing the emotional connection with the central character through parodic or overblown plotting and characterisation, or just generally adopting a tongue in cheek attitude about the protagonist.

Out of the list you provided The Revenant is the only one that really fits the bill, the other films aren't really the kind of story I'm talking about. The Revenant has a bit of cool to it. Kingsmen, Django, John Wick, The Equaliser are in the screwed-up cool slot.

For an example of a character and film that have coolness, consider Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer.

Tarantino's a bit like this, he keeps making films that cut across pulp convention in the same way, featuring repellent or cartoonish leads or ensemble casts. Kill Bill's one of relatively few exceptions in his output.

Hateful Eight takes the "everyone's an awful cunt" principle to extremes and I find it distasteful, partly because of its boringly pessimistic and nihilist view of human nature, and partly because of the flat emotional tenor it induces.

If I'm going to watch a lot of pulp fiction, and it seems I am, I wouldn't mind the stories being those ones where you feel a little thrill of delight about how awesome the characters are whenever they appear on screen.

Segway

You didn't find Sam Jackson cool as fuck in Hateful, BW? I found the end of this film made me feel conflicted about whether to feel disgusted or whether to laugh. Then I found myself wondering whether I should feel disgusted by myself for laughing. Don't agree that it's emotionally flat.

Burnwinter

No, he's not cool at all, he's a grotesque old motherfucker isn't he?

In Pulp Fiction he's got a bit of cool, so much so that I had a mate who used to recite the "path of the righteous man" speech when I was in high school.

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