Quentin Tarantino

[black&huge]

A listing has been found for a 4K release of Pulp Fiction coming in November.

Hoping for the best, I never got the Blu-ray due to its waxy texture, and IIRC only one of the better picture options overseas didn't mess up the sound so that it was pitched up.

for a while I ranked pulp fiction pretty low on my fav QT's but I watch it now a couple times a year for the past few years. Among numerous things I have noticed and love about it, many of which have been praised since it's release the one thing I absolutely think it has is great cinematography. It's almost like a dimmed down Bob Richardson style lighting in most scenes before they would actually go on to collab from KB and still continuing. I can't find the words but the first 3 films (Res, PF and JB) have that truly hang out quality look to them from settings like apartments and bars, strip mall businesses, suburbs, etc. and the lighting emphasizes it all. It actually gives it a heightened tv movie look which def works for those first 3. That being said this likely 4k SHOULD (and hopefully) look amazing

[hearthesilence]

Tarantino's going on a book tour. There may be more dates, but tickets for a Town Hall appearance go on sale tomorrow.

[therewillbeblus]

There may be more dates

Hope so, I'd hardly call that a "tour"! More like stepping into your backyard twice and hopping on a plane for a NY day trip

[goblinfootballs]

There may be more dates

Hope so, I'd hardly call that a "tour"! More like stepping into your backyard twice and hopping on a plane for a NY day trip

He's in Portland after San Francisco.

[domino harvey]

The films discussed in Tarantino's new book:

Bullitt (1968)
Dirty Harry (1971)
Deliverance (1972)
The Getaway (1972)
The Outfit (1973)
Second-String Samurai: An Appreciation of Kevin Thomas
New Hollywood in the Seventies: The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. The Movie Brats
Sisters (1973)
Daisy Miller (1974)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Cinema Speculation: What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?
Rolling Thunder (1977)
Paradise Alley (1978)
Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Hardcore (1979)
The Funhouse (1981)

[beamish14]

The films discussed in Tarantino's new book:

Bullitt (1968)
Dirty Harry (1971)
Deliverance (1972)
The Getaway (1972)
The Outfit (1973)
Second-String Samurai: An Appreciation of Kevin Thomas
New Hollywood in the Seventies: The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs. The Movie Brats
Sisters (1973)
Daisy Miller (1974)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Cinema Speculation: What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese?
Rolling Thunder (1977)
Paradise Alley (1978)
Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
Hardcore (1979)
The Funhouse (1981)

He’s screening almost all of these films this month at the New Beverly, and all have been shown there in the recent past as well. He’s asked studios to provide him with new prints of certain titles he’s particularly fond of, and I know that Paradise Alley is one that he was able to procure

[therewillbeblus]

I'm really curious what he has to say about The Funhouse

[domino harvey]

I was surprised that for a guy who champions 42nd Street Forever-type films, this is a list of almost entirely mainstream popular films. Tarantino also made the rounds in interviews lately saying the 1950s were the worst decade for film, as if I needed more evidence that me and QT live in different worlds

[therewillbeblus]

Makes sense that he’d hold that opinion- the man loathes studio interference in moral terms and approaches discourse with rigid points of view, and I feel like his praise of 40s movies has been predominantly expressed by listing “cool” ways that film noir got away with brutal violence or referencing witty screwball dialog that most resembles his own sharp style

[Maltic]

It also makes sense in that I was born roughly two decades after QT, and I sometimes (well, rarely) think the 1970s were the worst decade for film.

[black&huge]

and everyone is still wrong. The worst decades for films is the 1910's and 20's. They didn't even have sound!

[Nw_jahrles]

I was surprised that for a guy who champions 42nd Street Forever-type films, this is a list of almost entirely mainstream popular films. Tarantino also made the rounds in interviews lately saying the 1950s were the worst decade for film, as if I needed more evidence that me and QT live in different worlds

I think it’s all a part of tying his business ventures together and monetizing them. He watches titles on VHS from the Video Archives library he purchased and podcasts them and screens them at the New Beverley. While his podcast episodes do feature some of the expected Tarantino fare (video nasties, blaxploitation etc.) it also has a lot more commercial stuff probably in part because he has to choose from a video store’s inventory from the 80’s-90’s, which even one as hip as Video Archives would have limits to what they can access.

[yoloswegmaster]

QT is going to be directing a limited series.

[therewillbeblus]

Of course, as expected, this will be the loophole he’ll milk to stick to his round number and avoid being called a liar (or humbled, since minds change..) I’m totally fine with that if it gives him a greater sense of freedom to explore and actualize projects, rather than leaving them on a notebook at home

[Guido]

I wonder if this is a covert announcement of him having directed the upcoming Justified miniseries. The timing does make sense.

[Pavel]

I think it might be that Bounty Law series he said he had planned a while back

[beamish14]

Of course, as expected, this will be the loophole he’ll milk to stick to his round number and avoid being called a liar (or humbled, since minds change..) I’m totally fine with that if it gives him a greater sense of freedom to explore and actualize projects, rather than leaving them on a notebook at home

I’ve always thought he would gradually pivot to mentoring and producing other filmmakers.

[therewillbeblus]

Maybe, but he's first and foremost a passionate artist who clearly has many, many ideas, and has always presented as more ego-heavy than a humble 'pass-the-buck' guy who wishes to slide into a supporting role. It seems like an unnecessary stressor for him to put on himself to stunt the actualization of that creativity, but we've already covered that enough. I do find it mildly amusing that he'll go on record professing that his last film was both his best and most mature work yet, but also that as good directors get older they produce worse work so he's gotta tap out soon

[domino harvey]

I wonder if this is a covert announcement of him having directed the upcoming Justified miniseries. The timing does make sense.

He for sure didn’t direct the entire series, I met someone a few months back who was working on the show

[flyonthewall2983]

I wonder if he’d throw in with Marvel on that

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Despite buying it within the week of release, I only got around to Cinema Speculation this week during my work holiday. Though I found his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel to be his weakest original work to date, I did find the last quarter of the novel to be excellent and a sort of weird spin as the book heads to semi-autobiographical and melocholy territory. Tarantino isn’t someone I typically associate with that level of personal introspection or nostalgia in their work. It took me off guard and found that aspect a successful and surprising inverse to the (very enjoyable) Grand Guignol massacre at the end of the film version. Despite that, the book desperately needed an editor to tell Tarantino to trim all the Bounty Law lore and needlessly expansive back stories for his characters. I associate the paperbacks he’s clearly influenced by here with brevity and tightness, something he’s incapable of when given the nature of a book versus a screenplay. The process of editing, working with others, and the realities of runtime clearly has him cut material from his films all the time (think of Maggie Cheung in Inglourious Basterds or all the Tim Roth/Emile Hirsch stuff from OUaTiH), something he seems incapable of here.

Cinema Speculation is unfortunately worse in these aspects. Not only does it feel like no editorial oversight was given to the book, there’s no fact checking. They take Tarantino’s word verbatim with zero oversight, which I feel is an insanely sloppy thing to do if you’re presenting a non-fiction book. Yes, it’s non-fiction as filtered through Tarantino, but he’s clearly doing some level of research especially when he reaches out directly to certain talent. He keeps referring to the book The Movie Brats by Michael Kay and Linda Myles, but only credits Michael Kay. At one point he references a book about B-movie cowboys called The Sunset Gulch, referencing the Gower Gulch location in Hollywood. I took a look online and could find the existence of no such book. Turned out he got the title wrong. It’s called Hollywood Gulch. I might sound prickly about it, but when it’s mixed in with some sloppily written passage and punctuation errors, you feel no one proofread the material.

His philosphy and expectations of cinema is outright inconsistent too. He chides Taxi Driver for its unrealistic creative decisions, which to make strikes me as silly as the Taxi Driver script as directed by Martin Scorsese is a very expressionistic work that has zero basis in reality. Clearly Scorsese is going for the dreamlike and nearly surreal culminating with a finale where Travis Bickle gets away with it all despite being clearly crazy! Tarantino complains that the film doesn’t go far enough in the direction Paul Schrader’s script went (mostly the racial aspects), but never acknowledges that the script is essentially a blueprint and that the film is ultimately Scorsese’s to do with it what he wants to do with it. Strangely, he compares it to William Friedkin’s Cruising and uses that as an example of a more realistic film. It’s a bizarre observation to make as one of the first elements that sprung to mind about innaccuracy of social-realist elements is that there’s no way gay clubs in that era would have a bunch of people dancing to The Germs. Cruising is another crime film bordering on fantasy and told from the perspective of men who are clearly hiding something. His brain clearly works on another plane of cinematic thinking with no connection to my world.

But what I loved about his previous book I found insufferable here. When he dips into personal stories, I found it incredibly clumsy and odd. He makes a concerted effort to express how much he grew up around black people and we he gets to the final chapter where he writes out long passages of 70s “jive” after trying to be taken seriously as a critic, it’s awkward. I don’t deny that he grew up in this sort of multi-cultural background, especially in the South Bay portion of Los Angeles that borders multipme black neighborhoods, the way he expresses it feels strange. It reaches its true climax of uncomfortable when he literally has a brief passage about performing oral sex on women. It literally made me frown while reading.

I’ll still read whatever he writes as I find these books an interesting extension to a writer/director I do love, but clearly his strength is in dialogue and narrative construction; skills not necessarily transferable to other types of writing.

[therewillbeblus]

That's disappointing, I only skimmed my copy so far but was also left unimpressed. I'm most interested to see if he reads any wild subtext into Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse like I did, but from a quick sampling, I'm not holding my breath

[hearthesilence]

Re: the lack of fact checking, I bought Lenny Kaye's book, Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, earlier this year. He's a excellent writer and it's a wonderful read, but there were also some egregious errors that popped out. Nothing that seriously undermines the book, but the inaccuracies were immediately apparent and it just seemed like no one had bothered to go through it, just to do some basic fact checking. IIRC a few high profile memoirs of recent years were also known to contain egregious errors - when you consider how these books are being written by celebrities known outside of the literary world, I wonder if it's just a sloppy practice (or rather lack of one) that's become commonplace with books like these?

[Maltic]

Thanks for the write-up, Dandy Fop.

Doesn't the story go that Cruising turned out so weird and incoherent in part because Friedkin made "concessions" like Scorsese did with Taxi Driver on touchy issues?

Some of Cinema Speculation is copy-pasted from the New Beverly blog. As you say, without much editing.

This made it into the chapter about Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs Movie Brats.

As usual, he's simply looking for an easy way to disregard films he happens to not like for other reasons, particularly pre-1960s classics (films which aren't "badass" or whatever). So he ignores the revisionism in Fort Apache, and suggests that Ulzana's Raid is progressive in the way of Little Big Man. "Fort Apache from the Apaches perspective" To me, it's reactionary compared to many heyday Westerns, including some made by Aldrich himself (and some by Ford).

[ford]

His philosphy and expectations of cinema is outright inconsistent too. He chides Taxi Driver for its unrealistic creative decisions, which to make strikes me as silly as the Taxi Driver script as directed by Martin Scorsese is a very expressionistic work that has zero basis in reality. Clearly Scorsese is going for the dreamlike and nearly surreal culminating with a finale where Travis Bickle gets away with it all despite being clearly crazy! Tarantino complains that the film doesn’t go far enough in the direction Paul Schrader’s script went (mostly the racial aspects), but never acknowledges that the script is essentially a blueprint and that the film is ultimately Scorsese’s to do with it what he wants to do with it. Strangely, he compares it to William Friedkin’s Cruising and uses that as an example of a more realistic film. It’s a bizarre observation to make as one of the first elements that sprung to mind about innaccuracy of social-realist elements is that there’s no way gay clubs in that era would have a bunch of people dancing to The Germs. Cruising is another crime film bordering on fantasy and told from the perspective of men who are clearly hiding something. His brain clearly works on another plane of cinematic thinking with no connection to my world.

But what I loved about his previous book I found insufferable here. When he dips into personal stories, I found it incredibly clumsy and odd. He makes a concerted effort to express how much he grew up around black people and we he gets to the final chapter where he writes out long passages of 70s “jive” after trying to be taken seriously as a critic, it’s awkward. I don’t deny that he grew up in this sort of multi-cultural background, especially in the South Bay portion of Los Angeles that borders multipme black neighborhoods, the way he expresses it feels strange. It reaches its true climax of uncomfortable when he literally has a brief passage about performing oral sex on women. It literally made me frown while reading.

I’ll still read whatever he writes as I find these books an interesting extension to a writer/director I do love, but clearly his strength is in dialogue and narrative construction; skills not necessarily transferable to other types of writing.

I read it the week it came out so it's not quite as fresh in my mind but I took from what he said regarding Taxi Driver that Hollywood, even in the 1970s, forced changes that -- even if it made something unrealistic (he specifically cites Harvey Keitel playing a street pimp) -- was done for antiracist reasons. I think that's a totally fair point. And he's not saying it makes it a bad film, he clearly loves it.

I gotta say I loved the book. Really surprising selection of films for the most part too. I enjoyed the autobiographical bits and I don't think he was trying to make some point that he like "got" black people in a way no other white kid would. Considering that most directors these days are white men from upper middle class (or upper class) backgrounds, it is in fact an unusual background for perhaps the most successful and acclaimed American director of his generation. So I enjoyed hearing about it.

As for the mistakes in the book, honestly, that's at the publisher's feet even if, yes, QT ideally should have taken the time to factcheck his own manuscript. Publishing is in major decline with most books being outsourced to freelance editors and factcheckers these days.