Thursday, April 19, 2012

A-Z Challenge: Quentin Tarantino

I'm taking slight liberties again, using a person's name instead of a movie title, but this serves as a better movie-related Q-word than Quest for Fire, The Quest, or Q-The Winged Serpent...Let's face it, the pickins are slim when it comes movies with Q-titles.

Reservoir Dogs was the first Quentin Tarantino movie I saw.  It is intense with great pacing, and it's almost all dialogue-driven.  There are some flashbacks to the robbery and brief foot and car chases, but 99% of the movie is the characters trying to figure out what's wrong with their heist job and each other (there's a snitch in their midst).  The Mexican stand-off at the end is classic.

Pulp Fiction is easily in my top 5 favorite movies of all time. (NOTE:  How many times have I said that in this series?  Like six or seven?)  I first saw Pulp Fiction in the theater in college.  The opening dialogue made me wonder if I was going to like it...It was a little tough to figure out what the heck they were talking about.  Then Hunny-Bunny whips out a pistol and shouts something about executing every last one of you mother-f#$@ers and surfer guitar kicks in, and holy shit!  Hang on, it's a wild ride till the end, kind of like a shot of adrenaline to the heart, and the soundtrack is great.

Kill Bill (both volumes) is a terrific homage to the spaghetti western era of martial arts movies.  I like how Quentin showed off his chops by mimicking old film styles.  Plus the action kept things moving (NOTE: By "action" I mean lethal sword-fighting and gallons of blood), which is a nice touch considering how his dialogue drives so much of his movies' content.

I'm not a huge fan of Jackie Brown, and Inglorious Basterds was good but not phenomenal (with the exception of Christopher Waltz's villain, he played the overly-nice but scary guy perfectly).  Quentin has a new movie coming out this Christmas called Django Unchained, starring Jamie Foxx as a slave out for revenge on Leonardo DiCaprio.  Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Waltz, and Kurt Russel will also be in it.

I could go on, and talk about his writing credits for movies like Natural Born Killers and True Romance, but the former wasn't that great and the latter will be discussed when we get to the letter T...

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5 comments:

Laurel said...

Reservoir Dogs is hands down my favorite Tarantino. It had a subtlety to it that is hard to see through the action (read: violence). The "bad guys" are the actual protagonists, and they have a code of ethics. Remember the "no names?" The only ones who survive the movie follow their own rules. The ones who violate the code don't make it through.

Also. True Romance. Epic.

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

Reservoir Dogs was one of his best. Awesome movie. I'd probably take Inglorious Basterds as my second favorite.
And you didn't want to pick Q The Winged Serpent. That was one of my Q words for the first Challenge two years ago. Obviously I had no theme as one of the other words was Q*Bert.

D.G. Hudson said...

Natural Born Killers was creepy, and I only watched most of it.

Reservoir Dogs, I've seen, and I can appreciate the different technique. The actors made the difference in that one.

Haven't seen Kill Bill, but it's been recommended to me.

Nice Q post, Rick!

Annalisa Crawford said...

I love Reservoir Dogs. I watched it with a group of friends, and I was the only one to get the humour - I was laughing so hard in places while they stared in horror (at me and the film). It was only when we watched it again that they saw the it way I'd seen it the first time.

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