Quentin Tarantino has been tickling press and fans for three years with thevow that he will stop at ten films. After the age of sixty, the jeu is overfor directors, he believes. “Time to wrap,” 59-year-old Tarantino recentlyrepeated on CNN. He doesn’t want to waste like Hitchcock in increasinglymediocre films. His next is his last.
The good thing about such resolutions: everyone shouts cheers when you go backon them, while you generate maximum attention for movie number ten. Becausewhat will Tarantino’s swan song be? Kill Bill 3? Something new?
He seems to have landed in calmer waters. Described by former girlfriends asan unwashed, maniacal cave bear, he now looks quite groomed. He marriedIsraeli singer Daniella Pick in 2017, has a son and a daughter, livesalternately in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv.
But he keeps popping up in the media all the time. __Tarantino can ‘t helpthat. He’s not so much an attention junkie, he’s a born storyteller. Also inhis collection of essays Cinema Speculation he just seems to be talkingabout it, although that is probably an appearance. Such a spontaneous text ishard work.
In Cinema Speculation Tarantino showcases his encyclopaedic cinephilia: youwant him on your team at the pub quiz. It is a loose, autobiographical andself-justification-drenched tour of the American cinema horizon of the 1970s,when his film education began.
Chapter 1 – Litte Q Watches Big Movies – is about his childhood in LosAngeles as the precocious son of a party girl, with ever new, temporary fatherfigures. His mother takes him to movies full of sex and violence: this savesyou a babysitter. Those films touch him less than Bambi said Tarantino. Hisclassmates are jealous.
Movies full of sex and violence touch him less as a child than ‘Bambi’, says> Quentin Tarantino
No ‘whigger’
Here Tarantino also claims good faith against the criticism of colleague SpikeLee in particular for his frequent use of the N-word. Nota bene: he is not a’whigger’ who fetishizes black culture, he grew up among black people. As ateenager, Tarantino is said to have spent many weekends in the blackneighborhood of Compton with his mother’s best friend, “Aunt” Jackie. With herchildren he scoured black movie theaters for blackploitatiton and kung fufilms.
His mother had a three-year “once you go black” phase with all-black lovers;nine-year-old Tarantino had his “most masculine experience” with the film_Black Gunn_ with such an Ersatz father, football player Reggie. The onlywhite kid in a room full of rowdy black men he desperately wants to impress.
14-year-old Tarantino sees in 1977 Taxi Driver in such a black cinema thatScorsese’s masterpiece initially perceives as a comedy. The room is crooked atRobert De Niro’s bumbling as Travis Bickle: taking a fancy date to a pornmovie, and that mohawk haircut! But as soon as Jodie Foster enters the pictureas underage prostitute Iris with her pimp, the mood changes. Only then dopeople realize that Bickle is a twisted avenger.
In black cinemas Taxi Driver sold as an ordinary revenge film, according toTarantino. The fact that the film saw the light at all is partly due to thepopularity of the revenge genre after Charles Bronson’s hit Death Wish.Tarantino gloats over Scorsese’s hypocritical claim that he was deeply shockedby the howling halls at the gory climax of Taxi Driver. As if Scorsese, wholearned the trade from exploitation king Roger Corman, envisioned somethingother than a violent catharsis.
Cinema Speculation contains striking analyzes and spicy opinions: about thecharisma of Steve McQueen, about the young Sylvester Stallone, about the clashbetween the Anti-Establisment Radicals who wanted to destroy Hollywood in the1970s versus the Movie Brats – Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg – who wanted todestroy Hollywood wanted to modernize.
Tarantino’s somewhat defensive, but also current preoccupation with race oftenreturns. He tells how screenwriter Paul Schrader Taxi Driver modeled onwestern classic The Searchers : Travis Bickle is a twisted John Wayne on anIndian hunt in the urban jungle. In the original script, his racism isexaggerated much more, after which Bickle saves the white child prostituteIris by murdering her black pimp and he thus grows into a folk hero: an evenmore bitter finale than the final version. However, the producers thought thatwas too risky – race riots were feared – and Scorsese was persuaded to castHarvey Keitel as a pimp. An unforgettable role, according to Tarantino, but_Taxi Driver_ could have been much more disruptive.
Speculation abounds in his book. What if Brian De Palma Taxi Driver hadmade: he was offered the script first. Then Travis Bickle’s failedassassination attempt on politician Palantine would have been blown up into a’set piece’ with complicated camera movements, crane and dolly shots or splitscreens, Tarantino speculates. De Palma, a celebrated hippie filmmaker in the1960s, then plunged into Hitchcockian thrillers like Dressed to Kill. He didnot like thrillers, but he did like the film budgets that enabled him todesign his complex bravura scenes. The camera is the star with De Palma.
Cinema Speculation is full of bold, sometimes merciless but alwaysinteresting opinions. Tarantino is a fan of the pessimistic Hollywood of theearly 1970s, but writes aptly of his youthful euphoria as he saw SylvesterStallone’s boxing flick. Rocky saw in 1976. Beforehand, it could have beenregarded as yet another film about ‘a man and his problems’, but ends, to theastonishment of the audience, not in tears, but in triumph. That was the wayforward; the morbidity in the cinemas had become unbearable.
Relentless
There is something ruthless about Tarantino’s love of cinema: what he loves,he bones. At survival classic delivery (1972) he analyzes how the masculine,homoerotic tension finds a way out in the shocking rape of the fat Ned Beattyby two hillbillies – after which the film bloats like a balloon. SteveMcQueens bullet (1968) has an incomprehensible plot, but that’s irrelevantin a movie that revolves around action, chase, San Francisco, and SteveMcQueen—who personally ripped entire pages of dialogue from the script.McQueen generally found talking superfluous. And Dirty Harry (1971) is oneof the best action films ever, but also extremely cynical: the “progressive”director Don Siegel incites Nixon’s “silent majority” against homosexuals andBlack Panthers.
Tarantino concludes that directors should not strive for perfection at all.Amen. Perfect movies are boring, slightly out of balance movies usually moreexciting.
Cinema Speculation is part one of Tarantino’s film education. He can go manybooks ahead: the cinematically catastrophic eighties are now beginning, in hiseyes. When he continued his education behind the counter of the video store.Please also some more humorous film exegeses that he used to bring up infilms. Which Top Gun actually is about homosexual attraction ( Sleep WithMe ) or Madonna’s song ‘Like a Virgin’ about a slut who hits a hung man (Reservoir Dogs ). Here he pleads for the aliens in a footnote Invasion ofThe Body Snatchers. Whoever ends up in their pods is not killed so much asreborn as a better life form. Much more of that please.