Review: The Hateful Eight (2015)

* * *
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Jason Leigh

The Hateful Eight begins perfectly, concludes reflectively, and contains an incredibly mixed bag of elements in between. All things told, it's one of Quentin Tarantino's most thematically ambitious features, but it's also one of his least successful films and winds up feeling a draft or two shy of the Tarantino we know and (many of us) love. I'm not sure when, exactly, this western turned locked-room mystery started to lose me a little, but I definitely never felt anything like the level of exhilaration and engagement I've felt when watching Tarantino's best movies, including his two most recent efforts, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained. The thing is, if this exact movie came from a different director, I'd probably have walked away from it thinking that that filmmaker was someone to watch going forward; it's only because it's from Tarantino that I found it kind of disappointing. Not bad, just disappointing.

Review: Death Proof (2007)

* * *
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson

Death Proof may be the least, and the least loved, of Quentin Tarantino's features as a director, but it's obvious in every frame of the film that he had a blast making it. The joy of creation that shines through it is enough to make much of Death Proof entertaining as hell, although there are stretches that can be frustrating as hell, too, with Tarantino's customary self-indulgence feeling more draggy than exhilarating. In comparison to the director's other works this is a trifle of a film, but this slick little genre piece, which was part of a collaborative double feature experiment with director Robert Rodriguez, is a fun diversion that still manages to be more artful than a lot of what comes and goes from the cineplex on any given weekend.

Review: Jackie Brown (1997)

* * * *
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro

I love Jackie Brown. It became an instant favorite when I first saw it back in 1997 and has remained my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie. Despite that, it had been a couple of years since I'd actually sat down and watched it. Sometimes in a situation like that a movie ages better in your memory than it does in actuality, but in this case Jackie Brown remains as effective and perfectly pitched as was 16 years ago. Whether this is, in fact, Tarantino's best film is probably up for debate, but I think it's certainly his most mature and grounded film - which may or may not have something to do with the fact that it's the only adaptation he's directed.

Review: Django Unchained (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson

If there's any one thing you can say about Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker, it's that he always seems to be having a good time making his films, and that his joy in making a film becomes the joy of the audience in watching it. I have never seen a Tarantino movie that didn't leave me thoroughly entertained and Django Unchained is no exception. Forget about the manufactured controversy surrounding its subject matter. This is a film very much worth seeing.

Review: Inglorious Basterds (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Laurent

Tarantino’s latest is a glorious mess of a movie that plays entirely by its own rules. It isn’t a film of any great depth, but as glossy summer entertainment goes, I don’t know that you can do much better than this one. It’s a violent, darkly comic, beautiful looking film that occasionally goes off the rails but ultimately makes for a great time at the movies.

The film begins like a western, immediately evoking early scenes from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (it begins, in fact, with the words “Once upon a time... in Nazi occupied France”). In the distance a dairy farmer sees the SS coming down the long dirt road. He sends one of his daughters to get water so that he can wash up. They wait anxiously as the Germans take their time and eventually the farmer finds himself sitting at his table with Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in a disarmingly and sinisterly joyful performance), who coaxes him into revealing the whereabouts of the Drefyus family, whom he has been hiding. The family is slaughtered save for Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), whom Landa allows to escape and who lives for years by hiding in plain sight in Paris.

Elsewhere a group of Jewish soldiers, mostly American, have been assembled under the command of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) for the purpose of killing Nazis. Dropped into occupied France in 1941, the group quickly gains a reputation for brutality and the Nazi high command becomes increasingly desperate to catch them. By 1944 the group is in league with British film critic turned soldier Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German film star/spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) in a plot to take out some of the major Nazis at a Paris film premiere. The premiere, as it happens, will take place at a theatre which Shosanna has inherited and she has a plan of her own to kill some Nazis.

The film boasts a wealth of characters with the typical Tarantino flair. One of the things I love about Tarantino’s films in general is that you never walk away from one thinking about that one really memorable character because there are always about a dozen really memorable characters and the casting is always perfect. I went into the film with a bit of trepidation regarding Pitt because the trailers made it look like he was really hamming it up. As it turns out he is hamming it up, but it works well with the overall, over the top feel of the film and I really can’t imagine the character being played any other way or by any other actor. However, as good as Pitt is and as extraordinary as Waltz – whose performance has been garnering the most attention – is, the real standout for me was Laurent, whose Shosanna is the heart of the story. Her performance, which is very understated and grounded, is on the other end of the spectrum from Pitt’s, giving the film a nice feeling of balance.

The film has been accused by some of trivializing World War II in general and the Holocaust specifically because there is nary a mention of The Final Solution. I don’t really think this accusation is fair because, as anyone who has seen the movie can tell you, the war as we know it isn’t really the war being dealt with in this film. Inglorious Basterds exists outside of history and in an alternate reality. Besides which, any direct dealing with the Holocaust wouldn’t fit with the film’s overall tone, which is darkly comedic. One of my favourite shots occurs during a scene when Hitler (Martin Wuttke) rails at his officers to find the Basterds. In the background there's painter creating a giant Hitler painting who keeps turning to study him and capture some nuance of his person. As with all Tarantino’s films, the beauty is in the smaller details.

If there is an underlying socio-political meaning to the film, I would argue that it doesn’t have to do with the darkness of the human soul but rather with the power of film itself. Film was an invaluable medium for Hitler and the Nazis, particularly the propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who gets a few mentions here. The plot conceived by Shosanna involves locking the top Nazi brass in the theatre and then setting her stock of nitrate film prints on fire. Film, which helped give birth to the Nazi movement, is now tasked with being an agent of its destruction and thus Inglorious Basterds might be read as working to reclaim the medium from some of its worst abusers.

By and large, the film really worked for me, although there are two things that didn’t. First is the film’s use of David Bowie’s song “Cat People,” which I found jarring and really took me out of the movie, although this anachronism perhaps eases the way for the grand inaccuracy of the film’s finale. The second thing has to do with the film within the film. Much of Basterds is subtitled because the German characters speak German and the French characters speak French rather than falling back on the old movie standard of having characters speak accented English. Yet, in spite of this, the German propaganda film within the film is in English. That really bugged me. That being said, however, these are very small quibbles with a film that is overall incredibly entertaining.

Great Last Scenes: Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Year: 2003
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Great Because...: In a word? Awesome. At least that's the word my friend chose as the credits rolled when we saw this in the theatre. Sure, in some ways its a non-ending ending, but its purpose is not just to close one movie, but also to lead into another and it does that in an incredibly effective way.

So here's what we get at the end of Volume 1: after winning an epic battle with O-Ren Ishii, The Bride uses minor league henchman Sofie Fatale to convey a message to Bill: I'm coming, get ready.

We then cut to The Bride on a plane, making her Death List. With each name she puts down, we get a shot of that particular enemy with one exception: Bill. The man himself remains out of sight to the very end, a voice which nonetheless manages to create a presence in the film that it hard to escape. For all the intensity of the rest of the movie, I don't think there's any moment more frought with tension than when Bill walks up behind a disfigured Sofie, puts his hands on her shoulders and laments what has become of his "beautiful and brilliant Sofie."

And then of course there's the big moment, when Bill asks Sofie whether The Bride is aware that her daughter is alive. It is a brilliant moment, played to perfection. How could you not want to see Volume 2 after this?

100 Days, 100 Movies: Pulp Fiction (1994)

Director: Quentin Tarrantino
Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis

You don’t have to look far to see the influence of Pulp Fiction. It spawned any number of imitators, some good, many simply a pose of alt. filmmaking, and instantly became a pop-culture touchstone, it’s language seeping into our own. But even laying aside the way it changed how people made films - and how people watched them - it is, on its own terms simply as a film, an excellent one.

The film is split into three stories, which unfold out-of-sequence. We begin at the end – which isn’t really “the end,” chronologically speaking - with Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) holding up a restaurant. Hitmen Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), and Vincent (John Travolta) happen to be dining at this particular establishment, which is either good or bad news for Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, depending on how you look at it, because on the one hand Jules lets them have the loot and manages to calm the situation down so that no one actually ends up getting shot; but, on the other, he practically makes both wet their pants.

The first story concerns Vincent’s “date” with Marsellus Wallace’s wife, Mia (Uma Thurman). This story unfolds like a dream sequence that turns quickly into a nightmare as Vincent and Mia’s troublesome attraction to each other gives way to near-death experience. We listen to them talk and are fascinated less by what they say, than by how they say it. Thurman, especially, has an interesting cadence to the way she utters her lines (“I do believe Marsellus Wallace, my husband, your boss, told you to take me out and do whatever I wanted”) and there's a naturalness to the way they - and all the other characters in the film - speak to each other, talking casually rather than in plot-driven sentences. They enter a dance competition then the film cuts away, showing them back at the Wallace house with trophy in hand (at another point in the film, a radio announcer states that a dance competition trophy was stolen from Jack Rabbit Slim's – just one of many little details that can be picked up through multiple viewings and make the film all the more rewarding). The attraction that has grown between them is, at this point, palpable and Vincent excuses himself, going into the bathroom to give himself a pep talk. Obviously, nothing can happen with Mia. She’s his boss’ wife, and his boss isn’t just anyone, it’s Marsellus Wallace, a man who may or may not have thrown Tony Rocky Horror out a window simply for touching Mia's feet. He reasons himself out of his impulse, rehearses his lines, then goes back out… to find Mia ODing on what she found in the pocket of his coat. The only thing worse than sleeping with Mrs. Wallace would be letting her die on the junk you bought.

The second story follows Butch (Bruce Willis), a boxer who was supposed to take a dive for Marsellus, but decides instead to win the fight then disappear with his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). Unfortunately, in her haste to gather their things, she forgot his prized pocket watch, the history of which is colourfully explained in a flashback where the indispensable Christopher Walken appears as Captain Koons. This leads to Butch going back home, killing Vincent, and then accidentally running into Marsellus. The two engage in an epic battle which ends in exactly the wrong place and sets the scene for one of the film’s many immortal lines, “Bring out the gimp.”

In the third story, we go right back to the beginning (of the film, at least). Jules and Vincent have retrieved a briefcase belonging to Marsellus and Vincent accidentally shoots someone in the back of the car (“Oh man, I shot Marvin in the face”), necessitating an emergency stop to the home of Jules’ friend, Jimmie (Quentin Tarrantino) and a call to The Wolf (Harvey Keitel), who will clean up their mess for them. Afterwards they go to the diner, which is where we came in.

The style of Pulp Fiction is very flashy, very post-modern in it’s intertextuality (everything refers to something else) and the way that it throws conventional narrative forms out the window and becomes its own distinct animal; but this isn’t just a film of high style, which is where many of its imitators went so wrong. The cast isn’t just an assembly of eccentric characters spouting quirky lines that digress from the plot – these quirky, digressive lines actually add depth to the characters. I’ve already mentioned the scene where Vincent talks himself out of trying anything with Mia, but there’s also, amongst many others, the scene where Butch and Fabienne lay in bed talking about how she wants “a pot” (“You want some pot?” “No, I want a pot”), and, of course, the Royale with Cheese and foot massage conversations between Vincent and Jules. For every bit of action in this film, there is twice as much dialogue, dialogue of the kind you hadn’t heard in films before, which is probably why it immediately became one of the most quotable movies of the last twenty years, if not ever.

Pulp Fiction is, in essence, a movie lover’s dream made by someone who obviously loves movies very much. There are so many little bits to pick out that you find something new with each viewing, and so much to dissect and theorize about from the Band-Aid on the back of Marsellus’ neck, to the contents of that mysterious glowing briefcase. It is also frontloaded with really stellar performances, most notably that of Samuel L. Jackson who gets to play arguably the film’s greatest moment, the Ezekiel 25:17 speech to Pumpkin which comes at the end. This film is endlessly watchable and always entertaining, often imitated, but never improved upon. In short, this is the real deal.