T for Tarantino0

Chapter 1:Introduction Living a life in film is like liv­ing many lives. That is some­thing I’ve sub­con­sciously lived by, lived for, and real­ized when I first started out on this road to becom­ing a film­maker. Many peo­ple warn me of how shaky the path is when desir­ing a career in Hollywood. What keeps me going isn’t the grow­ing tech­ni­cal achieve­ments in cin­ema, nor the grow­ing box-office achieve­ments each sum­mer. What keeps me going is not even the grow­ing appre­ci­a­tion of for­eign films and art-house movies. What keeps me going is that some­thing dif­fer­ent, in all these aspects. That’s when I met Quentin Tarantino’s work. I first came across Kill Bill Vol.1 in the early 2004, only being able to sal­vage a copy of it due to the cen­sor­ship in Singapore (psst! reminds me of sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences among young film­mak­ers when Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange came out in Britain). Assuming with it’s R-rating, that the film would be a blast of porno­graphic or extremely gore visu­als that any young prê-teen would enjoy, I slipped the DVD into the player and… had the biggest shock of my life. Uma Thurman (psst! the sexy, hot red-head from The Avengers and Batman & Robin) became a vis­cious, tough, Bruce-Lee suit wrapped samu­rai bride roar­ing on a ram­page of revenge. In it even had animé sequences behind Lucy Liu’s char­ac­ter Oren Ishii pro­voked my knowl­edge of pri­mary con­tent in Japanese Animation. The film was a blast to watch! Every frame was just ooz­ing with style, loud music, unfor­get­table sequences and shots. I could not get my mind of Kill Bill Vol.1. (psst! I had a tough time con­vinc­ing my par­ents that the film was art) I went on in search for Pulp Fiction and his ear­lier works—the orig­i­nals this time. (psst! Kill Bill Vol.1 looks amaz­ing in the Japanese DVD Cut due to the extended sequences and fully-coloured fight scene at the end) In film­mak­ing jar­gon, he’s con­sid­ered an auteur/author. Tarantino’s some­one who lit­er­ally sub­ju­gates the mate­r­ial he works on, be it in the nar­ra­tive aspect, be it a pile-up of pop cul­ture style or a cast to-die-for. He is stud­ied by film­mak­ers and stu­dents, despite never being an actual pupil of film schools him­self. Quentin’s movies remind crit­ics why they love their job and teases ordi­nary cus­tomers in rental stores who they might actu­ally turn into. He never grows old. Chapter 2:Interlude I’m def­i­nitely not the first to write about Quentin Tarantino–that’s an obvi­ous. We all know he is dif­fer­ent. He likes being dif­fer­ent, he’s famous because he’s dif­fer­ent, but more­over he is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. Why author then? Since this isnt a biography-related essay on Tarantino. ‘Author’-labelled because we know a Tarantino film when we see one. We can even tell of a rela­tion to Tarantino when he pro­duces a movie. Critics use jar­gons like ‘Taratino Film Style’ or ‘Tarantino-ish’ to describe his movies or other imi­tat­ing wannabes that try to be like Quentin. So let’s run through some exam­ples of these film styles that he claims as his own in Hollywood History today. Chapter 3: The Crazy Fan Boy Tarantino is like an exam­ple of a crazed fan-boy before his title. He injects Self-Reflesive cin­ema into the works that he does. So in one Tarantino movie, you will be able to dis­cover tie-ins with many films. This is an exam­ple of a Tarantino film style, he MUST have ref­er­ences to SO many movies that the movie expe­ri­ence lit­er­ally becomes some­thing that he intri­cally chooses what to thrill you with. He con­trols the art, or the arrange­ment of recy­cled art that he was inspired to begin with. Chapter 4: The Deadly Self Relflex Self-Reflesive cin­ema either ref­er­ences actual movies, within the movie, or let’s the audi­ence mem­ber real­ize that they are watch­ing a movie. This hap­pens through­out Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Jackie Brown. Title Cards before each scene in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. How about the Bleeping out of the Bride’s name (Beatrix Kiddo) In Kill Bill Vol.1 so as to pre­pare his audi­ence to watch the sec­ond half of the film, Kill Bill Vol. 2! He lit­er­ally con­trols the film­mak­ing aes­thet­ics. Another exam­ple of a clas­sic taran­tino trait is some­thing I read from a book about him “Vision of Tarantino” where he likes to make char­ac­ters ambigu­ous. You want to know what hap­pens, next time. There might be a rev­e­la­tion, there might not be. But it leaves you want­ing more from the character–not out of des­per­a­tion due to lack of screen time, but because you end up lov­ing the char­ac­ter or sym­pa­thiz­ing with the char­ac­ter so much. Quentin brings these sup­port­ing char­ac­ters into full-fledged house­hold labels. (Example, After the Bride kills Vernita Green in Kill Bill Vol.1, the low-angle shot of the cam­era reveals Vernita’s daugh­ter, who wit­nessed the death of her mother. A line of dia­logue by the bride sug­gest­ing “if you feel raw about it, i’ll be waiting…”)—many fans are won­der­ing until today if there will be a KIll Bill Vol.3 to reflect that scene. He plays with fans with what he wants the audi­ence to see! (Kill Bill Vol.2, at the cred­its, we see a huge ques­tion mark on the char­ac­ter of Elle Driver, we dont know if she died). Only Tarantino knows this, we dont. Maybe he’ll tell us some­day. But like I men­tion over and over, it’s HIS movie and we are just tak­ing a peek. Chapter 5: A feast for the senses Tarantino never con­sid­ers if his movies should be quiet. Can you name one? You CANT! For one thing, the Pulp Fiction sound­track was enlisted even as one of the best sound­tracks in his­tory. Kill Bill had an awe­some track­list­ing as well. Were they all orig­i­nally com­posed? They were clas­sic tunes, often by Ennio Morricone like in the Spaghetti-Western inspired, Kill Bill Vol.2 (the music from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly). The whis­tle tune that prob­a­bly got stuck in the audience’s head dur­ing Elle Driver’s entrance in Kill Bill Vol.1 is com­posed from Bernard Herrmann (the mas­ter behind Hitchcock’s Vertigo & Psycho). RZA added the touch of a rough tough mod­ern street into the sound­track which took home numer­ous awards for the sound design. Kill Bill Vol.1’s mem­o­ra­bil­ity is due to the clas­sic melan­choly of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down”. What I find beau­ti­ful about own­ing Tarantino sound­tracks is how you can just lis­ten to the entire album and feel like you just watched the film again. This can be seen with the inclu­sion of inter­ludes and sound­bites from the movies, a cross mix­ture of the film styles reflected into the sound­track (psst! some tracks aren’t even in English, talk about com­pi­la­tion). Tarantino insists that his movies MUST have music. His movies are there­fore height­ened in its value as it becomes a slam-bang music & visu­ally clever fusion. Chapter 6: Bloody Revenge Tarantino movies involve vio­lence, sex­u­al­ity, pro­fan­ity, power and money. It’s always in his films, even if the film could do with­out it–he chooses to put them in. It’s HIS movie. Pulp Fiction’s open­ing scene show­cases a charged cou­ple ready to rob a diner, yelling out pro­fan­i­ties to those around. Violent shoot­ings through­out! Kill Bill is one of the gori­est, most vio­lent films in his­tory. Death Proof, his recent tie-in with Robert Rodriguez for the Grindhouse dou­ble fea­ture, is about a stunt­drivers using their adren­a­line skills to the vio­lent max­i­mum. You might ques­tion why the san­ity, inten­tions and state of these char­ac­ters, but Quentin doesnt want you to. Just like how Robert Altman deletes footage from his movies that offer pos­si­ble char­ac­ter truth relat­ing to the life of the char­ac­ter, he chooses to omit it out because it’s not the main focus of the film. Why focus on that? When you have all this style on screen! Chapter Interlude: The Formula Crazy Content + Loud Music + Familiar Visuals = Quentin Tarantino you’ll know it’s his movie! Chapter X: Inglorious Bastards How can I prove that this auteur­ship is still going on?! His new movie, The Inglorious Bastards—cue the High Concept title, is set in Nazi-occupied France dur­ing World War II. Focused on a group of Jewish-American sol­diers known as “The Basterds” who are cho­sen specif­i­cally to spread fear through­out the Third Reich by scalp­ing and bru­tally killing Nazis.—involving vio­lence, tongue-and-cheek jokes, ref­er­ences to clas­sic war movies, a smash­ing sound­track that I’ll pre-order as a pre­view to the movie. (psst! Brad Pitt and Mike Myers have been recently pulled into this project) Just like any of his projects on oper­a­tion, I can’t… wait. by Joshua Simon