To celebrate the release of The Ultimate Collection of Tarantino Films, and because we don't have the monkey power to review all 6 awesome films in the collection, I'm running down a list of what I consider to be Tarantino's 5 best movies.
5. Jackie Brown (1997): The pairing of Tarantino and Elmore Leonard was an “it’s about time” moment for a lot of people. With Leonard’s story at the foundation, a diverse array of characters and a complex set of double and triple crosses was lying in wait for QT to come in and add his signature touches. Unfortunately, one of those touches involved a protracted approach to dialogue and mise-en-scene which turned off folks who preferred the more accelerated pace and less subtle humour of Pulp Fiction.
Favourite character: Robert Forrester as Max Cherry – This was my first encounter with Forrester and he reminded me of Obi Wan Kenobi for some reason. I’m glad this role paved the way for his re-emergence on the scene. Also of note is that Michael Keaton played FBI Douchebag Ray Nicolette in both Jackie Brown and in Soderberg’s Out of Sight.
4. Inglourious Basterds (2009): Spike Lee might have ventured into the war genre ahead of Quentin, but QT certainly arrived with more panache, and more interesting characters. Brad Pitt might have gotten top billing, but the screen undoubtedly belonged to Christoph Waltz as Col. Landa. There’s a surprising lack of violence in this film, either for a war movie or for a Tarantino movie, but this is really QT acting more true to himself, creating a film where you could settle in, get to know the characters and spend some time within the film soaking it all in.
Favourite Character: Absolutely Hans Landa. I’d call him a divine sociopath, and certainly a villain that rises to the occasion of playing opposite to such a rogues gallery of heroes.
3. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003): While the second installment was more thoughtful and perhaps more artsy than the first, and certainly more conclusive, Kill Bill Vol. 1 had more momentum, more excitement and more scenes of The Bride fighting the Crazy 88. It was great to see QT finally manifest a slightly tweaked version of Fox Force 5 in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and to bear witness to QT finally having the honour of directing the legendary Sonny Chiba. This was QT at the height of his power and ambition, and he explores every alley and avenue of filmmaking at his disposal, Kill Bill in two parts or one is a masterstroke of cinematic excellence.
Favourite character: O-Ren Ishii. Not only does she have the coolest name ever, and perhaps the most effective way of running a board meeting since seppuku, but I really dug that you could tell that other than the whole betrayal and attempted murder thing at the wedding, that her and The Bride had been good friends back in their heyday in the Viper Squad.
2. Reservoir Dogs (1992): The film that put the world on notice that something incredible had just arrived on the scene. Tarantino blew everyone’s mind in Reservoir Dogs with graphic gratuitous violence, seemingly interminable humourous monologues, shady characters, and most of all, making it look like none of it had ever been done before. It was also an eye-opener for a people’s impressions of a director’s ability to create a great soundtrack, especially with music that nobody had ever heard before. There are tracks in this movie that are still getting airplay today that would otherwise still be collecting dust in some record store basement if it hadn’t been for QT’s intervention.
Favourite character: Mr. Pink. I think this still remains Buscemi’s greatest performance of his career. He’s wound up tighter than Cameron Frye at a parking garage, jabbers on incessantly and still manages to pull off the lamest gangster name ever.
1. Pulp Fiction (1994): I remember seeing this movie for the first time with my Dad. I had some free passes from the movie theatre I worked at, and both he and I had caught wind of the hype being spun out of this movie. It was actually a lifetime moment – and one to do with movies no less, that’s a special one indeed. Pulp Fiction will probably go down as QT’s greatest film ever, and rightly so. While movies have iconic characters, or iconic lines, Pulp Fiction has entire iconic conversations. Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Foot Massages, Your Grandfather’s Watch; this movie was written by a master, and has the photography to back it up. The scenes, locations, characters are all so new, yet so familiar. This was a film that changed the way people looked at both movies and the waking world around them – and it wouldn’t be until The Matrix 5 years later that a movie would have that effect on people again.
Favourite character: While Walken’s monologue in this film remains one of my favourites of all time, you have to hand it to Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in this movie. In every film he’s done subsequent, there’s a little bit of Jules in there somewhere, like at any moment Mace Windu could break out in a Ezekiel 25:17 rant.
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C’mon, this is kind of a cheat, no? What’s he have – 7 films under his belt?
Anyway, my list looks like this:
1. Pulp
2. Basterds
3. Jackie
4. Dogs
5. Death Proof
Confession: I totally hated Death Proof. I only watched it on Thursday – and it totally represented everything that I don’t like about QT. Pretty much the height of self-indulgence with the interminable go nowhere dialogue and references to all kinds of things I’ve never heard of. Making a movie outside the system sent him right out of control.
Noted that I haven’t seen all of Tarantino’s film, but I would say:
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. Reservoir Dogs
4. Kill Bill, Vol. 1
5. Kill Bill, Vol. 2
Branden, based what I’m not seeing on this list, I’m guessing that you haven’t seen Jackie Brown yet. Not that I have anything against Kill Bill 2, it has a lot going for it, but I really felt that it lost its focus by the time the story spun out that far. Basterds at #2, eh? I dunno, I guess I’m a sucker for a good denouement, which wouldn’t explain why I put Pulp Fiction at #1.
I agree with Fletch that it’s too soon, but that didn’t stop him and it won’t stop me.
1. Pulp Fiction
His most freewheeling film but also one with deep affinity of character. Its non-linear structure adds some poignancy to the story, such as Jules’ desire to break out of crime (a Scorsesian theme that has been a part of Tarantino’s canon from the start) with Vincent’s doomed decision to stay in the game.
2. Inglourious Basterds
The perfect link between the subtly madcap PF and the mature, thoughtful Jackie Brown, it works as a Nazi revenge story but also comments upon the characters’ thirst for revenge. The juxtaposition between the German film audience and us is one of the most brilliant cinematic critiques of its audience since Peeping Tom.
3. Jackie Brown
There were moments in PF and RD that bordered on the racist (but I read a fantastic article that was reprinted on the PF DVD defending them), but I always thought Tarantino’s usage of a character’s bigotry against himself in the eggplant speech in True Romance was incredible (Hopper’s character exploiting Walken’s character’s racism by impugning his Italian heritage). But Jackie Brown is a marvel: Tarantino doesn’t simply regurgitate genre pieces like he did for Kill Bill but breaks down and recasts the blaxploitation genre. Greer plays the sort of character she used to portray in the ’70s as someone now looking wearily at what little it all amounted to. She personifies the failure of blaxploitation to really empower blacks and instead just offered empty hope. And then he makes a relatively upbeat story out of it. Plus, no one else is brave enough to tackle Elmore Leonard and actually change the dialogue to suit his own needs.
4./5. Kill Bill Vol. 2/ Vol. 1
The first was more fun and probably the most immaculately constructed film in Tarantino’s corpus and indeed just about all of contemporary American mainstream cinema, but Vol. 2 proved that this story had a point. If his earlier films were about characters trapped in lives of crime, Kill Bill was about the cyclical nature of revenge — in a way, you could read it as a commentary on the War on Terror, but I’m giving him enough credit as is — which informed the drama of Basterds.
What do you mean “haven’t seen Jackie Brown yet?” I put it at number 3. I used to go back and forth between it and PF for number 1. If you’re referring to Dogs’ absence, I just can’t see that film as much more than a fun debut that in every way resembles a debut. It’s trying to move with the mad pacing of Pulp Fiction, but it gets bogged down in its dissertations, almost as much as Death Proof, a film that is arguably meant to be protracted and boring for the most part. Well, Dogs certainly isn’t boring, but with the exception of the opening conversation and the ear sequence nothing in the film for me rises above the influences that shaped its image (those two scenes though are probably both in his top 5 best moments ever).
Yes, yes, Jake. I was getting to you. Responding to your comments require a great degree of pondering. After trudging my way through Death Proof, I came to the realization that while I felt totally let down by the dialogue overload and almost complete lack of plot points, he tends to make that a feature of all his films. It was QT’s adherence to a steady presence of violence in his earlier films that made it so I could cope. I think QT figured he could substitute violence with sex (or sexiness) and figure it would work. I don’t think it did. To be honest, I think that his style is a trap, he makes movie for “movie lovers” but if you don’t like his longer, slower approach, you can’t possibly like movies, you just like sex and violence. As for Dogs, for a first film it displayed a serious degree of confidence and brashness – kind of like Duffy’s Boondock Saints, but far less obviously derivative. An excellent point about QT changing around Leonard’s dialogue to suit himself – seriously presumptuous, but it’s not a problem of he can back it up, which he can.
How the fuck did I miss that that was addressed to someone? I guess I just saw a lot of that post lining up with mine and blanched at the beginning. Fuck, I feel like an idiot. My bad, yo.
Oh, and what I meant about Death Proof is that most exploitation movies are stretched out and boring because all the money goes into one or two big scenes and the rest is basically padding to bring it to feature length. It’s a back-handed compliment if ever one existed, but I thought that QT made a better parody than Rodriguez because Rodriguez’s looked like it cost millions to be a parody and DP looked like a conceivable B-movie, at least until the car chase when Tarantino decided he wasn’t going to simply sit back and let such an awesome opportunity slip by for the sake of making it intentionally crappy.
I actually rather like the film in the context of the entire Grindhouse experience, though I think that its slow-burn leading to an awesome climax should have been placed ahead of the balls-out gore-fest of PT because the comedown is brutal. But the long, Cannes cut of DP makes me want to stab myself.
BTW Jake, which Tarantino script did you like better? True Romance or Natural Born Killers?
That is probably the most important distinction to be made: that Death Proof was made as a salute to the old pulp films of yore. Seen out of context, like I saw it, it’s easy to forget there was an underlying theme behind the drawn out plot structure. Although I’d like to point out that I watched Planet Terror on its own too and I totally loved it. Also of note: the retro stylings of Death Proof had just a little too much in common with his new emerging style of “regular” directing, so while Grindhouse might have proved the perfect setting for this movie, it’s conceivable that QT would have wound up doing a film like this anyway.
Am I to understand that there’s an even longer version of Death Proof? Yeesh!
I think True Romance, which is largely intact in Scott’s version albeit played chronologically (which I think works better, to be honest), is far more developed than his NBK script, which is actually more subtle than the ultimate version that Stone came up with but really hits the wall in the second half. The same charge is leveled at Stone’s version, but I think that, like Full Metal Jacket, that’s the payoff that allows the more immediate and entertaining first half to have a real satirical endpoint. Tarantino’s script is more of a sly dig at media sensationalism, where Stone’s is a madcap frenzy all its own.
Basically, I usually lump True Romance in with QT’s directed work just to save myself time, but I never do the same with NBK.
I was reading a review on Foolish Blatherings (http://foolishblatherings.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/true-romance-1993/) where the movie is pretty much completely blown off as a waste of time. I couldn’t believe it. I think someone looking at it now, out of context, it would seem derivative based on all the copycat works that came after it… at least that’s what I think Branden’s problem was…
I completely agree with you – NBK is a little lopsided, and its actually the satyrical elements that stand up over time better than the mapcap elements that might have captured the public’s attention when it came out.
BTW: I watched Inglourious Basterds for the second time today, getting prepped for our review this weekend, and I think I might have to bump it up a spot on the top 5. Some of the things that bothered me about it still do – but as a total package it is so much better than I remembered.
Yeah, I think NBK has aged remarkably well and it’s weird that what is absolutely an avant-garde picture (I love that Stan Brakhage is a fan) now looks, well, still a bit crazy but oddly plausible and more enjoyable and inviting in its camera insanity than all these GD shakycam movies that promote “realism” (save Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow for her work with The Hurt Locker).
I actually came across that review back when he first posted it. Sometimes it’s difficult to gauge what Branden thinks about a film because his reviews tend to follow plot summary too much. I mean, he doesn’t really offer an opinion, much less an interpretation, until the last paragraph of that review.
I wrote one for the film back in July, though I think the opinions I express concerning Tarantino himself have greatly changed since Basterds reinvigorated my interest in him and even prompted a re-evaluation of his work (TR actually used to vie for my favorite work of his, but I’m planning to go through PF, JB and KB over my Christmas break to see how I feel about them now). I think TR’s got the best ensemble cast of any of his projects, and I tend to ape Tarantino’s own statement when people say they want him to make a romantic film: just respond with “True Romance.”
That’s actually one of the things I like so much about Branden’s reviews: I can just skim through the plot summary and head straight for his opinion nugget – it’s a great conversation starter and a nice break from plodding through some of the more loquatious blogs out there.
Basterds really was a refresher for Tarantino, but at the rate he puts out films, each one is pretty much a reinvigoration after the last. It’s a good thing he’s got such a good batting average, with such a longer stretch between films he could so easily be lost into obscurity by releasing an unqualified miss/mess. Not sure that would deter him though, I think I’ve figured out his MO: The man is trying to bring on a renaissance. His incurable habits of using old techniques to tell his stories, and weaning off one style (say, the heavy use of graphic violence and profanity) over to another (say, the use of subtitles and operatic scenes of catharsis that merely suggest or tease violence) constantly will hopefully indoctrinate the filmgoing public into a greater appreciation of what film is for… I dunno, that’s my new theory that I’ll be extolling on the airwaves this weekend.
I’ve got my fingers and toes crossed that Maple Pictures will hook me up with a screener or two for us to do a review on The Hurt Locker. Brian’s seen it, but I haven’t – I’ve heard nothing but good things, and I’m proud of Jeremy Renner for hooking this one up. He didn’t get nearly enough respect for The Unusuals (I swear, it was actually a good show) so it’s nice to see that this soufflé rose for him.
Mine’s a bit different from everybody’s because I’ve only seen 3 movies by him. Here’s my take on it
1. Kill Bill Volume 1 10/10
2. Inglourious Basterds 9/10
3. Kill Bill Volume 2 7.5/10
Based on those scores you’re posting, it looks like you’ve got more than adequate reason to dig a little deeper and see the rest of his work… starting with Pulp Fiction.