Quentin Tarantino – Page 2 – Press Play Video Blog

Quentin Tarantino’s DJANGO UNCHAINED and the Many Spike Lees

Growing up in the 1980's with the slave name Boone, I was delighted to hear the joke song my older brother brought home from school one day. He sang it to the tune of the Daniel Boone TV theme song in his best middle-school baritone, holding one arm out and extending his slight baby-fat belly like Burl Ives: "Daniel Boone was a man/He was a biiiiig maaan… But the bear was bigger/so he chased that nigga/up a treee…." This would thereafter cause me to choke with laughter whenever it was sung within my earshot. First off, there was the use of the word nigger as nigga, the way kids in my neighborhood used it, as a subversively goofy synonym for man. Second, the song turned a straightforward 1960's adventure show into an F-Troop-style lampoon, sending the kind of barrel-built frontiersman you'd expect to fight a bear one-handed scrambling up a tree instead.

The absurdity of the word nigger, and of the American empire that counted it as currency, inspire Quentin Tarantino nearly as much as Uma Thurman's toes. He marvels at a society that creates, perpetuates and forever fears a nigger class. In Django Unchained, we get to witness the entire nigger creation/perpetuation/demonization assembly line, and it looks like the most jackleg Rube Goldberg contraption you can imagine. It starts by showing slaves dragged along in neck and ankle chains; it proceeds to detail the auctioning, trading, policing and torturing of niggers. Greasy rednecks and pretentious Southern gennuhmen fumble at the levers of this ungainly contraption all the way along, spitting tobacco and ducking its blast of dirty locomotive exhaust.

We know, thanks to a voluminous amount of reporting, that Tarantino has filtered this view of American capitalism through his film critic lens, referencing Sergio Corbucci Spaghetti Westerns and blaxploitation, and, less frequently noted, Blazing Saddles and The Skin Game. I also spied the kind of anachronistic postures and quips that made Wild Wild West, Hogan's Heroes and, yes, F-Troop dietary staples of Tarantino's (and my) generation.

Now, there is a certain type of African-American intellectual whose grasp of the brute facts of history is firm but whose funny bone goes dead numb at the sound of the word nigger; whose measure of artistry in any film approaching the vast subject of "us" is whether it uplifts or insults us. These are the niggas that would stare sourly at my brother's rendition of the Daniel Boone theme song and at Django Unchained's approximately 115 utterances of nigga.

Spike Lee is one of those niggas. A talented filmmaker and brilliant businessman, his imagination often seems atrophied when he tries to build up his ability to choose topical, incendiary subject matter. In Malcolm X, he staged one of the most vivid, vigorous passages in X's autobiography, the Roseland ballroom dance, as a stagy, choreographed number with canned music—PBS Black History Month stuff. Later in that film, he recreated Malcolm's magical realist encounter with the specter of Elijah Muhammad as an interview with a glowing Yoda in his prison cell. The lowest point in the history of Spike's imagination was the scene in Summer of Sam where serial killer David Berkowitz's dog Sam, sounding like Jon Lovitz and moving his lips with the help of Purina-commercial CGI, ordered his master to "Kill, Kill, KILL!!!"

Spike brought that kind of imagination to a recent Tweet-review of Django Unchained, written without having seen the movie: "American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them."

Not to say that Django is an exceptionally subtle piece of work. Both Spike and Quentin have a Sam Fuller tendency to go all-caps, tabloid large when staging bits of provocation that would be juicy all on their own. But let's just lay it on the table: Tarantino is the better filmmaker, by many miles. His ability to organize screen time and space is more assured and rhythmic than Spike's generally antsy, grab-bag approach. Certain sublime stretches of Do the Right Thing, Clockers, 25th Hour and his lovely documentaries nothwithstanding, it's hard to imagine Spike sitting still for the carefully timed and detonated jokes built around Django's initiation into the bounty-hunting business. Both filmmakers are terrible actors who have trouble getting out of their own way, but Tarantino, more often than Spike, redeems his indulgences with scene-making that simply rewards close, patient attention. Both filmmakers quote the films and pop culture totems that inspire them; Tarantino just tends to do it more elegantly and purposefully (Radio Raheem's lyrical Night of the Hunter quotation in Do the Right Thing and Kill Bill's sometimes ungainly kung fu Orientalism notwithstanding).

What Spike had over Quentin, up until Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, was a political passion that made headlines. Tarantino, who had once criticized Oliver Stone for turning his nihilistic crime script Natural Born Killers into a bludgeoningly political "Oliver Stone Film," seems to have emerged as a junior Stone, speaking out with a strong liberal voice about how today's prison industrial complex is essentially "modern day slavery." His two most recent films are complicated reflections on American evil. The massacre of mostly civilian moviegoers in Basterds was uncomfortable even before the Colorado Dark Knight shootings; we could recognize ourselves in those doomed Nazi sympathizers and appeasers. We are the good citizens who sit by when our government and corporate elite commit crimes that we believe won't touch us, up until the moment the chickens come home to roost. The insurgent heroes in Basterds and Django don't discriminate much between active combatants and their abettors—a quality that resonates in all directions, at modern-day terrorists, soldiers, CIA torturers, tribal warlords and regional militia. A scene where freed slave Django argues with his bounty hunter mentor, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), over the prospect of sniping a wanted man in front of that man's son, might as well be between two Defense Department employees pondering the morality of extrajudicial killings by aerial drone. Their view of the man pushing a plow on his quiet farm even resembles the kind of perspective drones and attack helicopters get on their Eastern prey.

Through Basterds and Django, Tarantino states that all power that dehumanizes an Other is bloody and treacherous, and that when it's performed in our name, we should know exactly what it looks like and anticipate tasting similar treachery in retaliation. A certain non-violent, ingratiating character in Django Unchained gets swept away in a cartoon-like gun blast. She flies back like a rag, as weightless as her convictions. At both screenings I attended, the audience roared with laughter in that moment—but it was an uneasy laugh.

So Tarantino has more interesting things on the Django plate than the ugliness or savage beauty of the word nigger, but they all orbit around the global condition for which that word is merely a place card. Daniel Boone was a big man, as 60's television taught us, but he also owned slaves, as I learned when I was a teen, digging for some link between my family name and a glorious American past. In history, the niggers are the ones you have to do some digging to find, typically under rubble or unmarked graves. To do this kind of digging as a filmmaker, a really fine-tuned sense of humor helps a heap.

Spike Lee showed that kind of raw but humanistic wit on Do the Right Thing and in great documentaries like Jim Brown: All-American. That guy would enjoy Django Unchained, I'll bet. The other Spike Lee, the one who Tweeted a psychic review of a movie he hadn't seen, has already spoken, inanely. Yet another Spike Lee, the one who has shown, in films like She Hate Me and the shallower portions of Bamboozled, a sense of humor every bit as trivial and callous as he claims Django to be, reminds me of that Lucille Clifton poem about Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor:

eddie, he a young blood

he see something funny

in everythin ol rich

been around a long time

he know ain't nothing

really funny

Steven Boone is a film critic and video essayist for Fandor and Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. He writes a column on street life for Capital New York and blogs at Big Media Vandalism.

ON THE Q.T., CHAPTER 3: JACKIE BROWN: Quentin and Pam’s Big Score

[A script of the video essay follows:]

Quentin and Pam’s Big Score, Part 1

Things don’t look good for Beaumont Livingston. His self-proclaimed benefactor, Ordell Robbie, has just posted $10,000 to bail bondsman Max Cherry in exchange for Beaumont’s release. Armed with a pump shotgun and way too much information about Ordell’s gun-running business, Beaumont faces not only the inside of a trunk, but a potential 10 year rap unless he cooperates with the Feds. Ordell bails him out because he believes “Beaumont’s going to do anything Beaumont can to keep from doing them ten years, including telling the Federal gov’ment any, and every motherfucking thing about my Black ass.” Beaumont already has, and ATF agent Ray Nicolet is laying in wait for yet another of Ordell’s “employees,” a flight attendant with $50,000, an unbeknownst 42 grams of blow and no intention of declaring either at customs.

Mr. Livingston, I presume, expects Ordell to deliver on his promise of a late night chowdown at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. That Los Angeles institution is tasty enough to make a brother spoon with a spare tire in a vintage American automobile. But in his haste and hunger, Beaumont Livingston forgot two things: One, all that greasy, fried shit’ll kill you. And two, if you’re a character in a Quentin Tarantino movie, and Samuel L. Jackson shows up looking like the Crypt Keeper and offering you a ride,

Don’t get in the car.

The Beaumont sequence is pure Tarantino—comic dialogue, loopy situations, sudden violence. But this scene is lifted from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch. And as much as Jackie Brown feels like a Tarantino film, the plot is faithfully Leonard’s. Tarantino wisely pulls entire sequences verbatim from Leonard’s pen, adding his own dialogue as stand-in for the novel’s expert descriptions of action and detail. Leonard is a master of character creation, gritty conversation, and delightfully convoluted situation. A perfect match for Tarantino’s first, and thus far only, according-to-Hoyle adaptation, and the director is respectful to his source.

But like all great directors, Tarantino is a compulsive who must pay tribute to his obsessions. Obsessions like:

That last thing got him in some pretty hot water with Spike Lee.

With a love of Blaxploitation etched in his DNA, Tarantino had to notice that Rum Punch has elements of the genre. There’s a tough main character dame who’s strong enough to fend for herself, a hood criminal with a bevy of women and minions to do his business, and one final, big score designed to extricate the criminal from the ghetto for good. Blaxploitation movies rarely had all three of those things at once—a perfect opportunity for Tarantino’s brand of genre homage and transcendence.

The only minor issue was that Leonard’s heroine, Jackie Burke, was White. Tarantino needed Foxy Brown. The solution was obvious.

This, for the uninitiated, is Pam Grier. It takes Rum Punch 39 pages to introduce Jackie to us. Jackie Brown takes maybe 39 seconds.

Quentin Tarantino was 10 years old when Pam Grier starred in Foxy Brown, a film whose most unsavory plot aspect (and its resulting vengeance) he lifted for Kill Bill: Volume One.

Here, he lifts Foxy’s last name, her movie’s title font and her portrayer. Grier was the queen of Blaxploitation, wielding a shotgun, razors in her ‘fro and a take no prisoners attitude that was simultaneously terrifying and sensual. Jack Hill, who directed her in Foxy Brown, Coffy and two other films, said that Pam Grier had “that something special that only she has. She has ‘it’.” Hill could get a witness from any fan, for we knew: Not only did Pam Grier have “it,” she could whip your ass with “it” as well.

It’s obvious Tarantino wants to show the Grier toughness he loves, but he has deeper intentions. He wants to bring out her softer side as well. In her 70’s output, her vulnerability is physical. She is always abused yet always avenged. Outside of movies like Bucktown or Greased Lightning, she was rarely afforded a typical love story. We’ll talk about Tarantino fixes that next time. For now, flight attendant and money carrier Jackie Brown has to think quick and plan that big score fast. Ordell has bailed her out for the same reason he sprung Beaumont. Michael Keaton’s Ray Nicolet is breathing down her neck to squeal on Ordell, and Ordell has other intentions for her neck. Robert Forster’s Max Cherry, Jackie’s soon-to-be love interest, plays an unwitting part in the scene that got fans of Pam out of their seats in the theater. Herewith, the tough side of Pam Grier.

DAMN!

Quentin and Pam’s Big Score, Part 2

Welcome to the seduction of Max Cherry, writer of 15,000 bonds, survivor of 57 years on the Earth, newcomer to 70’s soul music. Male. Obviously not blind. Bearing witness to Jackie Brown, looking refreshingly like a normal human being and pressing a different kind of gun to his bone. She renders him helpless with the clarion call of her partners in crime,

“The Delfonics.”

Quentin Tarantino relishes putting a gun in Pam Grier’s hands, throwing us back to the good old days of Nurse Coffy, Sheba Shayne and Friday Foster. Her genre reputation precedes her, and one can almost hear QT cackle as he merges Brian DePalma’s split-screen, Jack Hill’s dialogue and an overzealous sound man’s rendition of that “CLICK” that accompanies that gun aimed at Ordell Robbie’s favorite toy. But this commandeering of DePalma and Hill serves the drama—Elmore Leonard crafted the Ordell-Jackie pas de deux in his novel, Rum Punch, to get us here. It’s Max’s gun Jackie’s stolen, and its retrieval leads not only to Max’s seduction but also to some of the most poignant dialogue Tarantino has scripted. Notice how delicately the camera moves in on Grier’s profile. It’s almost as if we’re eavesdropping on Pam and Robert, not Jackie and Max.

Jackie needs an ally like Max because The Big Score, that Blaxploitation staple designed to get one out of the hustle, involves Jackie smuggling half a million dollars of Ordell’s money from Cabo San Lucas. She’ll do it under the nose of ATF agent Ray Nicolet, tricking him with a visible $50,000 that distracts Ray from a hidden $500,000. Max decides to help because he too wants to get out of his hustle. That, and because the Delfonics–pretty fucking persuasive.

Whom you trust is essential in any heist, and Ordell trusts his right hand man Louis. He and Louis were in the hoosegow together, and Ordell believes in honor amongst thieves, a common mistake amongst thieves. Additionally, Ordell has his bevy of women primed to do his bidding and, true to Blaxploitation form, ready to assist on The Big Score.

There’s aging Motown wannabe Simone, whose impressions of Diana Ross and Mary Wells hint that, though this pussy may be old, it’s real and it’s spectacular.

There’s Sheronda, country as a chicken coop, naïve as hell, and recipient of Ordell’s most hilarious putdown.

Then there’s Melanie, his “little Surfer Girl” whose excessive drug use disguises a truly cunning and vindictive mind. Of the dope use, Ordell tells her “that shit will rob you of your ambitions.” Melanie’s ambition is to rob Ordell of his money. So maybe the dope use is a good thing.

Ordell thinks this is his game, but “The Money Exchange,” the codename for The Big Score, is designed to favor Jackie Brown. He let her create it, he’s entrusting her to screw over the Feds, and he’s unaware of how deep her alliance with Max Cherry runs. It’s going to work, though, because Ordell thinks his scary disposition will keep his bitches in line and they will not—repeat will NOT—betray him.

The logistics of The Money Exchange are faithfully recreated from Dutch’s novel. But its execution is pure Tarantino. Cutting loose and succumbing to his love of time manipulation, QT presents the money swap from three characters’ perspectives: Jackie’s, Max’s, and the comic duo of DeNiro and Fonda’s Louis and Melanie. Each depiction focuses on its protagonist’s traits. Jackie is in control in hers, with a great little dialogue about an even greater little pantsuit. Louis and Melanie are antagonistic in theirs, culminating in a very violent Abbott and Costello routine involving a lost car. And Max’s version is cool, suspenseful and exciting, because he’s the one left holding the bag.

When Ordell and Max drive to the final showdown with Jackie, the film uses The Delfonics’ 1971 classic, “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind,” as an almost subliminal reassurance that our heroes will succeed. Jackson uses silence to great ominous effect here, a visual terror undercut by the lovely musical accompaniment from the car stereo. This is Jackie and Max’s song, and Jackie Brown is a romance, or as close to a romance as its director has ever been.

Rum Punch leaves its final scene ambiguous. Jackie Brown puts a bittersweet, old-fashioned finality to the proceedings, with the duo finally doing what we’ve been waiting all film for them to do.

As the final scene mirrors the first, we Blaxploitation fans revel in seeing our heroine once again prevail. We’ve been amused by Tarantino’s shorthand. And we’ve confirmed what we’ve known all along: A woman can only be tough 23 hours out of the day. That last hour, even the toughest chick needs to power down and meditate on her emotions.

Damn.

A globetrotting computer programmer by trade and movie lover by hobby, Odie Henderson has contributed to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door since 2006. Additionally, his work has appeared at Movies Without Pity (2008) and numerous other sites. He currently runs the blog Tales of Odienary Madness.

Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. Follow him on Twitter.

On the QT, Chapter 3: THE MAN FROM HOLLYWOOD: The Pastiche Pique

Quentin Tarantino is pretty much the quintessential film-school darling, the sort of filmmaker whose work appeals most strongly to those in high school or college—but, to paraphrase Diane Keaton in Manhattan, you absolutely grow out of it. Or you mostly do, anyway. You might concede that, yes, Pulp Fiction is an accomplished work, though it was regrettable that it inspired a legion of poor copycats through the decade that followed. But there’s something vaguely irksome about how self-consciously a Tarantino film cultivates its aura of cool, how it panders to those in the know. The kind of pastiche in which Tarantino commonly trades results in work that’s only narrowly satisfying, hitting a few film-geek buttons but missing out on more meaty human drama.

This would be fine if he were producing quick-and-dirty exploitation flicks, or traditional genre pictures, running on cheap thrills. But even his purest genre-aping efforts—Jackie Brown and the first volume of Kill Bill being the closest he’s come to sticking with a straight-forward idea—are presented as major efforts, labored on for years and overstuffed with ideas. Tarantino isn’t making a lean fight picture like The Raid: Redemption or even a low-key alien invasion satire like last year’s Attack The Block, even though he’s a known fan of films like these. He’s making three-hour revisionist history war epics bogged down by a dozen stars and ten times as many cinematic points of reference. There are ideas in Inglourious Basterds as inspired as anything I’ve seen on-screen in years. But in one sitting, the film is a bore, and relishing the strokes of genius means slogging through everything else. Short of the fantasy wish-fulfillment of its historical revisionism, there’s no emotional throughline for us to follow, and no fully realized human drama to sink our teeth into.

In a way, this problem with dramatic situations in his work is a necessary consequence of the formal predilections that launched Tarantino’s career. When the most salient feature of your debut is that its characters spend a significant portion of the running time sitting around talking about pop culture, there’s a good chance that emotional depth is off the table altogether. The irony is that while Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were being hailed for their “slice of life” sensibility, they were really just trading one kind of artifice for another, less recognizably “cinematic” one. So while characters in a Tarantino film might just sit around talking about cheeseburgers or instant coffee, as real people are indeed wont to do, they were affirming themselves as fundamentally frivolous, which ultimately made it hard to care about their fates. Characters who resembled real people wound up feeling less fully realized than more conventional ones might have, which is the opposite of the intended effect. There’s no doubt that Pulp Fiction is a hugely enjoyable and inexhaustibly quotable film. But it’s not exactly emotionally rich or psychologically complex, either.

My point isn’t that Tarantino should stop writing his trademark dialogue or that his films should be less self-consciously cool. He will always use snatches of music from Leone Westerns or giallo horror movies, and there will always be a receptive audience of college students whose savvy will be validated through identification of those references. But I do think Tarantino has made one perfect film, and I wish he would return to the form to make another exactly like it. It’s called The Man From Hollywood, and seeing it all but requires that you sit through 80 minutes of the unfathomably terrible footage which immediately precedes it.

Released to widespread critical disdain in 1995, the multi-director comedy Four Rooms is, in many respects, one of the most egregious cinematic missteps of the 1990s. The concept must have sounded promising: four young, recently successful independent filmmakers would each contribute an original short to be worked into one bigger picture tying them all together, like a more deliberately integrated New York Stories with far worse filmmakers. In this case, the filmmakers were Allison Anders, director of the cult classic Border Radio in 1987 and recipient of a MacArthur genius grant the year this film was made; Alexandre Rockwell, who won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his film In The Soup in 1992; Robert Rodriguez, who of course made quite a splash with his micro-budget El Mariachi, also in ‘92; and finally Tarantino himself, who was just coming off an Oscar win for Pulp Fiction. Like a montage in a heist picture, the producers had assembled one hell of an expert team.

It’s difficult to imagine now, but in 1995 the prospect of four upstart independents working together on a major Hollywood production seemed like a ready-made success story, and even though Rockwell and Anders haven’t done anything of note in nearly two decades now, they were, at the time, every bit the exciting new artistic voices that we know Rodriguez and Tarantino were. Along with Soderbergh and Kevin Smith, these guys were being touted as the faces of the American independent cinema, a revolution that would fundamentally change the landscape of Hollywood film production. So the fact that Four Rooms was terrible was doubly significant: it was both a clear-cut indictment of the failure of these filmmakers to resist the influence of Hollywood’s big-budget mediocrity and, more damningly, a compelling riposte to the very idea that independent filmmakers could start a revolution within an industry so all-consuming. Critics, naturally, were quickly swept up in the backlash against Hollywood’s new indie darlings, and Four Rooms was dismissed and rejected outright. And there are good reasons for doing so: the first two shorts–Anders’ The Missing Ingredient, in which a coven of witches attempt to procure a sampling of semen, and Rockwell’s The Wrong Man, in which a married couple play out a bizarre sex fantasy–are veritably unwatchable, not only mercilessly unfunny but abrasive and grating, too. I expect many walked out before the halfway point, and on video I wouldn’t be surprised if many more gave up even earlier.

Your reward for enduring half of an awful film, though, is The Misbehavers, a slender but funny slapstick piece involving children (by Rodriguez, no doubt devising Spy Kids in his head), and, if you get through that, The Man From Hollywood, by far the best thing Tarantino has ever worked on. Clocking in at just under 20 minutes but packing just as many ideas (and movie references) as any of his feature-length films, The Man From Hollywood proves conclusively that the Tarantino formula is most successful in small doses. Here his characters are allowed to have their depth only suggested—that’s the nature of the form—which alleviates the strain of actually having to flesh them out. And because Tarantino is infinitely better at suggestion than at explication or delivery, the little that’s implied in this short never has a chance to disappoint us. This all makes perfect sense, if you think about it: Tarantino tics have time to sink in but not to overstay their welcome; his characters get a chance to be funny and cool without being proven hollow; and his novel premise can fuel the action of the entire picture without spreading its charm too thin. Hollywood isn’t set up to sustain the model, but Tarantino should clearly be a creator of shorts rather than features. (It should come as no surprise that my second-favorite film of his is also his second-shortest: his half of Grindhouse, the stuntman slasher short “Deathproof,” is widely underrated.)

In The Man From Hollywood, our film-long hero, Ted the bellhop, played by Tim Roth, is asked to delivery a special list of seemingly random items to the big spenders staying in his hotel’s penthouse suite. The highrollers include Chester, a newly successful director played by Tarantino himself; Norman, played by Paul Calderon; Angela, the star of the second segment, played by Jennifer Beals; and Leo, played by Bruce Willis. Our introduction to them and to the room is formally virtuosic, an extended sweep through Chester’s rapid-fire expository monologue (which details, among other things, the nation’s lamentable dismissal of Jerry Lewis and the unbeatable taste of Cristal champagne) shot in one fluid, ten-minute take. It’s an ostentatious gesture, but short works need to be punchy, so in a way it’s the best possible opening–it’s funny, nice to look at, and rewarding to those paying attention. By the time Chester outlines the premise of the short—he and Norman want to reenact a bet made between Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and they want to pay Ted to be their game’s “hatchet man”—we’re totally hooked, and Tarantino milks the tension of the scene for all it’s worth.

It’s less often discussed than his gift for punchy dialogue, but Tarantino has always had a knack for mounting and releasing tension, and for doing so in what is essentially a classical style. Like Hitchcock, Tarantino likes to drag out silences unnecessarily, taking them from benign to portentous with little more than an extended long take. His longtime editor, the recently deceased Sally Menke, must be at least partly responsible for fostering this talent, but in any case the resulting work can be excruciatingly intense, and such sequences usually emerge as the highlights of whatever film they’re in. Consider the evidence: the most dramatically effective scene in Pulp Fiction is its bracing final one, when Jules Winfield faces down a robber and reconsiders his place in the world; likewise for Inglorious Basterds and both its opening, when Colonel Hans Lander calmly smokes out his prey, and the infamous “Mexican standoff” scene in the bar, which could stand as a study in high-stakes suspense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uldpQpoZQM

The Man From Hollywood hinges on precisely this sort of tension. It’s the best thing Tarantino’s done yet because it concentrates his best qualities into a form better-suited to maximizing their effectiveness, which means that it does what he does well, without the baggage of a feature. It’s a miniature masterpiece, and though it’s buried beneath two terrible shorts and a merely decent one, getting to it is well worth the effort (and patience) Four Rooms otherwise demands. This is a side of Tarantino that shouldn’t be relegated solely to college dorms; it’s a side that elevates him to the level of a true artist. It’s just too bad that nobody noticed.

Calum Marsh is a frequent contributor to Slant Magazine.

VIDEO ESSAY: ON THE Q.T.: Chapter 2: PULP FICTION (The Cool)

Quentin Tarantino’s films treat talk as action; torrents of words spill out of his characters' mouths, defining and redefining them, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. Words as clay, the speaker as sculptor, the rest of the world as spectator, art critic, vandal: this vortex of monologue and dialogue draws the viewer into the curiously theatrical spectacle of people attempting to create, refine, and propagate their own mythology. They are what they say they are, and more, and less. They build themselves up, and the film does, too; then somebody else tears them down, and the film grinds the last remaining pieces of their fragile self-images into powder.

Tarantino has been doing this from the start of his career, from the moment in Reservoir Dogs when the doomed Mr. Brown (played by Tarantino himself) waxed profane about the supposed true meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” then promptly died of gunshot wounds behind the wheel of a getaway car. His second film, Pulp Fiction, moves this tendency into the foreground. Nearly all of the movie’s 150-minute running time features characters talking, talking, talking, about their personalities, their values, their world views, and about other characters, some of whom we don’t get to know—or even meet—for an hour or more. All the film’s major characters are modern, workaday cousins of the Great and Powerful Oz; the film builds them up by having others repeat their (often self-created) legends until they loom in our minds like phantoms, then tears away the curtain to reveal panicked little people desperately yanking levers. “Come on,” Jules tells Vincent in the film’s opening section, “let’s get into character.”

The gang boss Marsellus Wallace is granted a Col. Kurtz-level buildup. Jules and Vincent’s early dialogue about how he threw Tony Rocky Horror out of a window for giving his wife Mia a foot massage establishes that he’s not a man to be trifled with. In the film’s second section, Marsellus orders the boxer Butch to throw a fixed fight, but remains tantalizingly undefined. He’s a big, bald head with a Band-Aid on its neck—a totemic abstraction on par with the fabled briefcase, contents unknown, that emits hellish light when opened. We see him again from the back right after Butch pulls a double-cross, kills his opponent in the ring, and flees with the money he made by secretly betting on himself: again, no face, just a voice and some words. When we finally see Marsellus’ face 95 minutes into the movie, Tarantino instantly demystifies him as a burly man standing in a crosswalk holding a box of donuts—whereupon Butch runs him over. Marsellus’ first close-up represents Pulp Fiction’s storytelling strategy in microcosm: after all that advance press, he’s just a stranger bleeding on the street, his face framed upside-down as if to certify what we already suspected, that his mythology has been suddenly and violently flipped.

Tarantino does this over and over again in Pulp Fiction. Mia Wallace is introduced as a sex goddess monitoring her date, Vincent, via surveillance cameras while mood-setting music (“Son of a Preacher Man”) thrums on the soundtrack, and then speaking to him through a microphone. Until Vincent’s car pulls into the parking lot of Jackrabbit Slims, she’s just a pair of lips and two bare feet, intriguing by virtue of her remoteness and sense of control. She seems a more strange and special person than the woman described earlier by Jules: a failed wannabe-star turned gangster’s trophy. “Some pilots get picked and become television programs,” Jules says. “Some don't, become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.” But the date proves to be a complete disaster, as Mia mistakes Vincent’s heroin for cocaine while he’s in the bathroom and nearly dies of an overdose. And about that needle scene: Vincent and his drug dealer Lance’s terrified babbling about the right way to administer a heart injection refutes an earlier conversation in which they tried to make themselves seem like world-weary bad-asses. (Lance on his smack: “I'll take the Pepsi challenge with that Amsterdam shit, any day of the fuckin' week.” Vincent: “That’s a bold statement.”)

Vincent Vega creates a mythology of a globetrotting hipster on a voyage of self-exploration, but as the movie unreels, it becomes increasingly clear that he’s a bullshit artist whose main target of deception is himself. He can’t take criticism, advice or even notes from other people (“You have to ask me nicely,” he tells the man entrusted with cleaning up Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin). And when the film’s fractured chronology is rearranged in linear fashion, we realize that the poor bastard learned nothing from the According-to-Hoyle Miracle that stopped the bullets and spared his life. He dies on the toilet reading Modesty Blaise while his buddy Jules—who had a religious experience after the near-miss, and pledged to stop murdering people and “walk the Earth, like Caine in Kung Fu”—lives on. “I was sitting here, eating my muffin and drinking my coffee and replaying the incident in my head, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity,” he tells his friend, who’s locked away so deep inside his own mythology that he doesn’t recognize that Jules has just handed him a second chance, an opportunity to escape, to be free, to live.

“There's this passage I got memorized,” Jules tells Pumpkin, the would-be diner robber who has dared to steal his “Bad Motherfucker” wallet. “Ezekiel 25:17. ‘The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.’ I been saying that shit for years. And if you heard it, that meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this morning made me think twice. See, now I'm thinking, maybe it means you're the evil man, and I'm the righteous man, and Mr. 9 millimeter here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd, and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is, you're the weak, and I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.” – Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is a co-founder of Press Play.

VIDEO ESSAY: ON THE QT # 1: RESERVOIR DOGS

ON THE QT # 1: RESERVOIR DOGS

Press Play launches its new director series On the Q.T., about Quentin Tarantino, with a look at his debut Reservoir Dogs (1992). Although it earned plenty of acclaim, the film also sparked two kinds of controversy. One had to do with the movie's content: its profanity, racial epithets, blood, and torture merged art house and grindhouse traditions in a fresh and unsettling way. The other controversy was aesthetic: Tarantino, a former video store clerk, quoted movie history so ostentatiously—even working pop culture rants into his dialogue!—that detractors accused him of being more of a gifted mimic than a real artist, a charge that has followed him throughout his career.

Funny thing, though: when you look back on the late '90s and early '00s, you see plenty of films that desperately wanted to be Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. Truth or Consequences, N.M., Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, The Usual Suspects, Two Days in the Valley, Mad Dog Time, and many others channeled what was presumed to be the Tarantino formula. Yet none of them has had the staying power of Reservoir Dogs. Why? The answer is contained in Reservoir Dogs' opening monologue about Madonna's "Like a Virgin"—delivered by none other than Tarantino himself—and in the scenes of the undercover cop, Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), getting into character as one of the crooks. Put these images together—a lover so good that he makes a sexually experienced woman feel like a virgin, and an actor so good that he fools hardbitten crooks into thinking he's one of them—and you have Tarantino's early career: a performance so extraordinary that it stops being performance and becomes an emotional event.

How does Tarantino do it? Press play to find out.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

Matt Zoller Seitz is one of the founders of Press Play. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, he is currently the TV Critic for New York Magazine.

Ken Cancelosi is a writer and photographer living in Dallas, Texas. He is the co-founder of Press Play.

VERTIGOED: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

Vertigoed: "Inglourious Basterds" from Brandon Brown on Vimeo.