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Once Upon a Time in the Grindhouse
2 years ago
General
A beautiful, sunny spring day -- the perfect time to pay my income tax! After that, I rewarded myself with yet another goddamn book. Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation (Harper, 2022) is the liveliest and most entertaining book of film criticism I've read in years. This is Quentin the movie fanboy, Quentin the analytical critic, and Quentin the filmmaker, with a professional's knowledge of what works in movies and what doesn't, all in one package.
He's writing about the 1970s movies to which he's been making homages since Reservoir Dogs, explaining why they succeed or fail (sometimes both) on their own terms. The filmmaker explains why Peter Yates and Don Siegel are great action movie directors; the fanboy bombards us with fascinating movie history trivia (Frank Sinatra was slated to play Dirty Harry before Clint Eastwood); the critic is very shrewd about, among other things, racial politics ("For many older white Americans, angry black militants scared them more than the Manson "Family," the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler combined.") There's not a dull page in this book, and even if Quentin's movie love (to borrow a title from Pauline Kael) is the polar opposite of the I-hate-entertainment ethos of a critic like A.S. Hamrah, it's because Quentin knows that the one thing no filmmaker can ever do is to bore the audience. (Hamrah's The Earth Dies Streaming (2018) is a riveting book, and his observations are marvelous -- "The happy ending in It is that a group of kids beats a clown to death. Today that qualifies as wishful thinking." -- but he and Tarantino are different kinds of intellectuals.)
He's writing about the 1970s movies to which he's been making homages since Reservoir Dogs, explaining why they succeed or fail (sometimes both) on their own terms. The filmmaker explains why Peter Yates and Don Siegel are great action movie directors; the fanboy bombards us with fascinating movie history trivia (Frank Sinatra was slated to play Dirty Harry before Clint Eastwood); the critic is very shrewd about, among other things, racial politics ("For many older white Americans, angry black militants scared them more than the Manson "Family," the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler combined.") There's not a dull page in this book, and even if Quentin's movie love (to borrow a title from Pauline Kael) is the polar opposite of the I-hate-entertainment ethos of a critic like A.S. Hamrah, it's because Quentin knows that the one thing no filmmaker can ever do is to bore the audience. (Hamrah's The Earth Dies Streaming (2018) is a riveting book, and his observations are marvelous -- "The happy ending in It is that a group of kids beats a clown to death. Today that qualifies as wishful thinking." -- but he and Tarantino are different kinds of intellectuals.)
Still, at least he admits in hindsight that one was something of a mis-step
Your disappointment with any given Tarantino movie aside, the book is a master class in film studies with an astute critic, a gifted raconteur, and an accomplished director -- and that's worth the price of admission.
Perhaps the issue is that he was TOO accurate in recreating the genre? I'm not old enough to remember the movies he's referencing, but I heard they were notorious for including large amounts of padding to stretch the runtime without increasing the budget.
That said,I still enjoyed it on a technical level.
https://collider.com/quentin-tarant.....ilm-interview/
I will have to check out that book. He's a fascinating person regardless. Not many filmmakers live and breathe the topic the way he does.