I never watched Jackie Brown, exactly because I feared it would be like Kill Bill or some crap like that. I should give it a go one of these days.Jackie Brown is a pretty good movie.
IMO Tarantino has three kind of movies:
-The two pulp movies: Reservoir Dogs (which is a preparatory work for Pulp Fiction, his opus magnus) and PF itself.
-Jackie Brown: His least tarantinesque movie and maybe the best along with PF.
-The other movies: a lot of crap full of blood and nonsense where the only one having fun is Tarantino himself.
Death Proof was actually fantastic. It has one of those monologues (and I seem to remember the character actually said the words 'edgycool', I kid you not) but it's still phenomenal. The other one that was released with it as a double-feature was garbage in my opinion, however.Jackie Brown is a favourite of mine. A much more subtle and nuanced movie than his other work. Maybe because it's adaptation.
I think Reservour Dogs and Pulp Fiction are great works. Don't care for Kill Bill as much and even less for the nazi movie and the cowboy one. Haven't bothered to watch the latest one. I do like Death Proof. Simple, with a lot of room to breathe before switching into bloodcurling action.
That's neat, I'll have to see that one.Heh, a couple of years back I got Mark Kermode's autobiography, and he said Jackie Brown was his favourite film precisely because it's Quentin's only film where the characters aren't all mini-Tarantinos. Sadly, since it was such a departure from his usual fare and (in his view) was a commercial failure, he retrenched into the edgycool ultraviolence:
Objectively, yes that is a stupid reason for a religious awakening. However, it's also a realistic reason. People in the real world see all kinds of naturally explainable things as signs of divine intervention. I think that made Jules more believable as a character. I also saw it as Jules representing the irrational part of our minds with Vincent serving as the rational part debating with Jules in the diner.
He always glosses over the environment, the causes for those conflicts, or any complex characters.
Well put.Nor should it. Tarantino simply doesn't do character development. It's not what he's going for in his movies.
Well put.Frankly I think the Coen brothers do this same type of thing more effectively. The Big Lebowski is great because they recognize that the characters are just there to be characters, and they don't try to play anything that needs investment in the characters themselves. The director's self-awareness bleeds through into the movie to the point that everyone is in on it. Tarantino doesn't always seem to understand that, and some of his scenes fall flat as a result.
I think where his movies are weakest is where the story calls for investment in characters for maximum effect. In Pulp Fiction where they are trying to revive Mia, or they are trying to clean up Vincent's car before whats-his-name's wife gets home, the stories are flat because the audience just isn't invested in the outcome. If Mia dies, so what? We don't care that Marsellus will be sad or Vincent will probably get killed. It is ultimately an empty and pointless scene.
You still need some sort of investment in the characters for Schadenfreude to really work, though.
I could see that. For me it works better when, say, Blonde gets shot than it does when Vince nearly gets stuck with Mia having OD'd. Blonde deserves to have bad things happen to him, but I don't necessarily feel that way about Vince. And certainly not about Mia.
Nope from the bottom of a whiskey glassDid you get the insight from the cracked.com article? I even thought for a moment this post was a copy/paste.
It truly is. I enjoyed it. His only movie which is based on a book. Perhaps kis only "normal" movie. While still weird and Tarentino-esqueMaybe you'd like Jackie Brown, it's different from his usual shtick I'd say.