Good shit man. I think we’re also missing how weirdly, psychosexually horny he is. I feel like he went all in on living in a genocidal apartheid state mostly because he married an Israeli.
Really great microscopy of one of our most morally inscrutable/incoherent artists, this was a wonderful read.
For sure. But there might also be some cause and effect in that. Did he start simping for Israel because he married that way or was the potential of simping for Israel a bonus?
I dont think it excuses him in any way, but if a group posed a danger to your children and your wife and their country welcomed you with open arms, wouldnt you feel the need to show support to their army when they needed it?
Again, Im not saying hes right in supporting the IDF and hes had plenty of time to realise whats going on but I think that one photo in the early days of the genocide strikes me more as clueless concerned dad behaviour than anything else.
I really dont think Tarantino thought about Israel at all prior to being married and living there really.
Very well done piece here. I just deeply, deeply distrust Tarantino's "historical revenge" movies; there's a great old piece by Liel Liebowitz that points out that whatever Tarantino says about his motivations, Inglorious Basterds amounts to a long repudiation of the very basis of Jewish morality. Which is weird in a movie that supposedly valorizes Jews. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/inglorious-indeed
With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's just like, OK, you've engineered a cartoonishly violent reshaping of history in which Sharon Tate survives. You've managed to save that one pretty lady with cinema, just like you managed to free some slaves and kill some Nazis. But... to what end? For what purpose? Momentary catharsis? I'm pretty sure the Holocaust isn't supposed to be cathartic. What is the actual moral valence of those movies? I don't know; Tarantino is so habitually disinterested in moral dimensions of anything, it's like he just doesn't know how to do it. I was doing this big World War II movie summer a few years back and I happened to watch Come and See immediately after Inglorious Basterds and it was just such a deeply unflattering comparison for Tarantino. Because he can't do revulsion. Everything in his frame has to look cool on at least some level.
I actually like Deathproof the best of his movies. I like his dialogue and chill hangout parts the most. I also like it in part because of the bifurcation of the two halves here described - misogynist fantasy up front, feminist fantasy in the back. And I guess the gonzo decay into pure slapstick at the end has the advantage of leaving me uninterested in how sincere he's being about any of it; those ladies beating the hell out of Kurt Russell is just viscerally satisfying.
I agree entirely with the overall critique that Tarantino is historically and morally a deeply incurious guy. He's a stylist, a film encyclopedia, and that's more than enough. I think Pulp Fiction is his best most resonant work because of its overt pointlessness. Given enough form and craft, any random schlock can be made endlessly compelling. I like that idea a lot. But the minute he enters a realm of any significant moral seriousness, he looks like a kid trying on his dad's suit
Tarantino of course is an extension of exploitation cinema, a producer of elaborate peep shows. I think any moral dimension is in the audience’s reaction: do you allow this to push your buttons or not?
The mandingo fight scene in Django comes to mind as the closest thing he's gotten to something straightforwardly sickening, but it's ultimately lost in the sauce of how cool Jamie Foxx looks and how clearly Christoph Waltz relishes his 'witty' dialogue
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is actively hostile towards its female characters. Supposedly a celebration of Sharon Tate, he portrays her as a one dimensional bumbling toddler the whole film. The focus on the female Manson acolytes, the Brad Pitt character having killed his wife and the only person we see ostracize him because of it is treated like an obnoxious nag. Kill Bill and Inglorious Bastards are much better with their female leads - Tarantino definitely seems to be aging out of any progressive instincts he once had.
Arrested development can sometimes help artists, in that they retain their full creativity. But I have always felt that there is something perpetually adolescent about Tarantino. He is a great mirror for the American psyche, but he can’t wield it the way PTA does.
This! I’ve always found it deeply ironic how he is like, the least bad ass person ever. all of his films scream with a desperation to be cool. his paul deno comments betray a complete lack of self awareness
Good piece! I've always been a little bit of a killjoy on Inglorious. Not to present in an overly rosy picture of a WW2 that obviously included the destruction the civilian cities by the hands of Allied airpower and the late war rampages of the Red Army, but the broad morality of Allied forces relative to the horror of the war they endured and what they were fighting against and the precedents of the Nuremburg trials and rebuilding of conquered nations as fellow members of a global community stand among the greatest testaments to civilization in human history and are something worth honoring. But for Tarantino and imo a lot of others nowadays, that's not sufficiently cool, indeed it's soft.
The emotional pull of wanting Nazis who committed or abetted unspeakable evil to get their due is understandable, but framed as it is in the film, eventually leads to ugly conclusions. One of the most popular scenes of the film is our characters figuratively redeeming the 'passivity' of historical victims by murdering a POW (not even a particularly noxious character!) with a baseball bat! There are strong echoes of current rhetoric embedded in its worldview in this regard. It's a fine film in other areas and I don't think this is all it has going on intellectually, but I always felt people were being a bit deliberately dense in not seeing how it indulged the vigilante notion that strength is synonymous with war crimes.
The aims of Tarantino’s historical revenge movies are not catharsis for the victimized or comeuppance for the perpetrators. His project is the redemption of the medium of film and the systems that surround it.
“Inglorious Basterds” is Tarantino snatching modern film technology and distribution and the grammar of the modern blockbuster (codified through Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”) from the Nazis; “Django Unchained” is a corrective to the two pillars of pre WW2 American cinema, “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind”; “Once Upon A Time…” Tarantino’s first — and at present only — post Weinstein film is his grappling with #MeToo. Manson was a sex trafficker whose victims were mostly underage girls.
I don’t think the history (with the exception of the minutiae of ‘60s and ‘70s Hollywood) interests him very much. His concerns begin and end with how it informs his iconography.
Perhaps relevant that being a college student in the 90s the main impact of his cult status was it made hipster white boys feel they had a pass to say the n word if they were quoting his dialogue. And his record with regard to his pal Weinstein, who ruined the career of his one-time partner Mira Sorvino
I have always been a big fan of his style and approach to storytelling. I am glad it exists. It saddens me to see QT take shots at actors like that (especially ones I assumed everyone acknowledged were amazing), but I liked what Ethan Hawk said about that kind of negativity being a catalyst for waves of love heading Paul Dano’s way. That’s the purpose it can serve. Very cool.
Wada obnoxious bore Tarantiono comes off as during interviews. And please, he is not intellectually anywhere near such “depth”. Paul Dano is a terrific Artist as actor. Austin Butler would have been in his early teens during the filming of There Will Be Blood (2007 release). Can’t hardly wait for Quint’s next post Weinstein, fantasy film on the recasting of P. T. Anderson’s entire oeuvre. Let’s swap Michael B. Jordan for John C. Riley to really woke that early catalog up. And then on to Scorsese, Chalamet & Butler woulda really killed as LaMotta bruvs! Derivative, overindulgent, hammer headed, encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, & witty wordsmith of dialogue that produce protracted entertainment spectacle. One great film, Jackie Brown. And that has mostly to do with the Elmore Leonard source material & top flight cast. Pulp Fiction is good fun (top flight casting again) but not in the same league as Boorman’s Point Blank or Soderbergh’s The Limey to name just a couple of the great, non linear structured crime thrillers available.
Tarantino has used up many of the obvious hooks that justify his stylish uber-violent revenge porn - Nazis, slavers, rapists, murder cults. What's his next target? The armies of the Pharoah, Pol Pot, Vlad the Impaler, the Crusaders? (He can't do Kim Il Jung or Kim might hack his email as he did Sony). The Battle of Little Big Horn might be bloody enough for QT.
I appreciate the piece Mr. Sloan, as I do your podcasts.
Other than Jackie Brown, with its soulful performances, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with its loving testimony to a lost time, I’ve always been put off by Tarentino and his films.
Cruel, not cool. His style so hinges on visceral effect, as well as wordy puppet strings and homage referencing, that it lacks the restraint and satisfying enclosure that real cool demands, Delon, McQueen, or conversely the less envied but still cool “they are always themselves” authenticity of Joe Don Baker; by contrast, Tarentino’s films over strive, mistake mimicry for their own importance, theft for innovation, violence as adequate conclusion.
Is there anything as off putting and corrosive, or ill timed and less needed now in a Genocide, as violence intended as cathartic delirium? And is it any wonder that he resides now where he does, when he has always been heading there.
I love his movies but man, do I hate him. I hate his proxy use of the N-word because you just KNOW he wants to say it in everyday discourse, but can’t so has his films say it every other word. He thinks he’s got some kind of “hood pass” that gives him the legitimacy to use it by proxy and get paid for it. That’s just racism, plain and simple.
Good shit man. I think we’re also missing how weirdly, psychosexually horny he is. I feel like he went all in on living in a genocidal apartheid state mostly because he married an Israeli.
Really great microscopy of one of our most morally inscrutable/incoherent artists, this was a wonderful read.
For sure. But there might also be some cause and effect in that. Did he start simping for Israel because he married that way or was the potential of simping for Israel a bonus?
I dont think it excuses him in any way, but if a group posed a danger to your children and your wife and their country welcomed you with open arms, wouldnt you feel the need to show support to their army when they needed it?
Again, Im not saying hes right in supporting the IDF and hes had plenty of time to realise whats going on but I think that one photo in the early days of the genocide strikes me more as clueless concerned dad behaviour than anything else.
I really dont think Tarantino thought about Israel at all prior to being married and living there really.
Very well done piece here. I just deeply, deeply distrust Tarantino's "historical revenge" movies; there's a great old piece by Liel Liebowitz that points out that whatever Tarantino says about his motivations, Inglorious Basterds amounts to a long repudiation of the very basis of Jewish morality. Which is weird in a movie that supposedly valorizes Jews. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/inglorious-indeed
With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's just like, OK, you've engineered a cartoonishly violent reshaping of history in which Sharon Tate survives. You've managed to save that one pretty lady with cinema, just like you managed to free some slaves and kill some Nazis. But... to what end? For what purpose? Momentary catharsis? I'm pretty sure the Holocaust isn't supposed to be cathartic. What is the actual moral valence of those movies? I don't know; Tarantino is so habitually disinterested in moral dimensions of anything, it's like he just doesn't know how to do it. I was doing this big World War II movie summer a few years back and I happened to watch Come and See immediately after Inglorious Basterds and it was just such a deeply unflattering comparison for Tarantino. Because he can't do revulsion. Everything in his frame has to look cool on at least some level.
I actually like Deathproof the best of his movies. I like his dialogue and chill hangout parts the most. I also like it in part because of the bifurcation of the two halves here described - misogynist fantasy up front, feminist fantasy in the back. And I guess the gonzo decay into pure slapstick at the end has the advantage of leaving me uninterested in how sincere he's being about any of it; those ladies beating the hell out of Kurt Russell is just viscerally satisfying.
I agree entirely with the overall critique that Tarantino is historically and morally a deeply incurious guy. He's a stylist, a film encyclopedia, and that's more than enough. I think Pulp Fiction is his best most resonant work because of its overt pointlessness. Given enough form and craft, any random schlock can be made endlessly compelling. I like that idea a lot. But the minute he enters a realm of any significant moral seriousness, he looks like a kid trying on his dad's suit
Tarantino of course is an extension of exploitation cinema, a producer of elaborate peep shows. I think any moral dimension is in the audience’s reaction: do you allow this to push your buttons or not?
The mandingo fight scene in Django comes to mind as the closest thing he's gotten to something straightforwardly sickening, but it's ultimately lost in the sauce of how cool Jamie Foxx looks and how clearly Christoph Waltz relishes his 'witty' dialogue
does it matter that tarantino in real life could probably be played by paul dano? is his own weak dorkiness part of this!
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is actively hostile towards its female characters. Supposedly a celebration of Sharon Tate, he portrays her as a one dimensional bumbling toddler the whole film. The focus on the female Manson acolytes, the Brad Pitt character having killed his wife and the only person we see ostracize him because of it is treated like an obnoxious nag. Kill Bill and Inglorious Bastards are much better with their female leads - Tarantino definitely seems to be aging out of any progressive instincts he once had.
Arrested development can sometimes help artists, in that they retain their full creativity. But I have always felt that there is something perpetually adolescent about Tarantino. He is a great mirror for the American psyche, but he can’t wield it the way PTA does.
No matter how hard he tries, Tarantino is also painfully uncool.
This! I’ve always found it deeply ironic how he is like, the least bad ass person ever. all of his films scream with a desperation to be cool. his paul deno comments betray a complete lack of self awareness
Rare to see novel and interesting film criticism these days. Well written, glad this popped up on my timeline.
Good piece! I've always been a little bit of a killjoy on Inglorious. Not to present in an overly rosy picture of a WW2 that obviously included the destruction the civilian cities by the hands of Allied airpower and the late war rampages of the Red Army, but the broad morality of Allied forces relative to the horror of the war they endured and what they were fighting against and the precedents of the Nuremburg trials and rebuilding of conquered nations as fellow members of a global community stand among the greatest testaments to civilization in human history and are something worth honoring. But for Tarantino and imo a lot of others nowadays, that's not sufficiently cool, indeed it's soft.
The emotional pull of wanting Nazis who committed or abetted unspeakable evil to get their due is understandable, but framed as it is in the film, eventually leads to ugly conclusions. One of the most popular scenes of the film is our characters figuratively redeeming the 'passivity' of historical victims by murdering a POW (not even a particularly noxious character!) with a baseball bat! There are strong echoes of current rhetoric embedded in its worldview in this regard. It's a fine film in other areas and I don't think this is all it has going on intellectually, but I always felt people were being a bit deliberately dense in not seeing how it indulged the vigilante notion that strength is synonymous with war crimes.
This piece from when it came out is really sharp on the questions you're raising https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/inglorious-indeed
The aims of Tarantino’s historical revenge movies are not catharsis for the victimized or comeuppance for the perpetrators. His project is the redemption of the medium of film and the systems that surround it.
“Inglorious Basterds” is Tarantino snatching modern film technology and distribution and the grammar of the modern blockbuster (codified through Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”) from the Nazis; “Django Unchained” is a corrective to the two pillars of pre WW2 American cinema, “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind”; “Once Upon A Time…” Tarantino’s first — and at present only — post Weinstein film is his grappling with #MeToo. Manson was a sex trafficker whose victims were mostly underage girls.
I don’t think the history (with the exception of the minutiae of ‘60s and ‘70s Hollywood) interests him very much. His concerns begin and end with how it informs his iconography.
Really interesting perspective and food for further thought when revisiting his work. Thanks for sharing this.
Perhaps relevant that being a college student in the 90s the main impact of his cult status was it made hipster white boys feel they had a pass to say the n word if they were quoting his dialogue. And his record with regard to his pal Weinstein, who ruined the career of his one-time partner Mira Sorvino
I have always been a big fan of his style and approach to storytelling. I am glad it exists. It saddens me to see QT take shots at actors like that (especially ones I assumed everyone acknowledged were amazing), but I liked what Ethan Hawk said about that kind of negativity being a catalyst for waves of love heading Paul Dano’s way. That’s the purpose it can serve. Very cool.
Personally I think his friendship with (and casting of) Eli Roth is very telling.
Austin butler instead of Paul Dano? lmfao
Wada obnoxious bore Tarantiono comes off as during interviews. And please, he is not intellectually anywhere near such “depth”. Paul Dano is a terrific Artist as actor. Austin Butler would have been in his early teens during the filming of There Will Be Blood (2007 release). Can’t hardly wait for Quint’s next post Weinstein, fantasy film on the recasting of P. T. Anderson’s entire oeuvre. Let’s swap Michael B. Jordan for John C. Riley to really woke that early catalog up. And then on to Scorsese, Chalamet & Butler woulda really killed as LaMotta bruvs! Derivative, overindulgent, hammer headed, encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, & witty wordsmith of dialogue that produce protracted entertainment spectacle. One great film, Jackie Brown. And that has mostly to do with the Elmore Leonard source material & top flight cast. Pulp Fiction is good fun (top flight casting again) but not in the same league as Boorman’s Point Blank or Soderbergh’s The Limey to name just a couple of the great, non linear structured crime thrillers available.
Tarantino has used up many of the obvious hooks that justify his stylish uber-violent revenge porn - Nazis, slavers, rapists, murder cults. What's his next target? The armies of the Pharoah, Pol Pot, Vlad the Impaler, the Crusaders? (He can't do Kim Il Jung or Kim might hack his email as he did Sony). The Battle of Little Big Horn might be bloody enough for QT.
I appreciate the piece Mr. Sloan, as I do your podcasts.
Other than Jackie Brown, with its soulful performances, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with its loving testimony to a lost time, I’ve always been put off by Tarentino and his films.
Cruel, not cool. His style so hinges on visceral effect, as well as wordy puppet strings and homage referencing, that it lacks the restraint and satisfying enclosure that real cool demands, Delon, McQueen, or conversely the less envied but still cool “they are always themselves” authenticity of Joe Don Baker; by contrast, Tarentino’s films over strive, mistake mimicry for their own importance, theft for innovation, violence as adequate conclusion.
Is there anything as off putting and corrosive, or ill timed and less needed now in a Genocide, as violence intended as cathartic delirium? And is it any wonder that he resides now where he does, when he has always been heading there.
I love his movies but man, do I hate him. I hate his proxy use of the N-word because you just KNOW he wants to say it in everyday discourse, but can’t so has his films say it every other word. He thinks he’s got some kind of “hood pass” that gives him the legitimacy to use it by proxy and get paid for it. That’s just racism, plain and simple.