Directors I Gave Up On: Quentin Tarantino

Like so many movie-goers in the mid- to late '90s, I became a bit obsessed with Quentin Tarantino. At the time, his movies were unlike anything I'd ever seen - jumping around in time, such a "cool" mixture of violence, comedy, and music, characters talking about innocuous things but moving the plot along just the same; it was a special time to be a movie-goer... But lately, I feel like Quentin Tarantino is just too busy being Quentin Tarantino. He seems more obsessed with being the hip filmmaker full of clever references and homages - a pastiche artist, in a word - than being the guy who took familiar elements and packaged them in a new and exciting way.

My love of Tarantino, like most people, started with Pulp Fiction. Truth be told, though, it wasn't until the second time I saw the movie that I could really appreciate it. The first time I think I was only ten or eleven years old. I got it on video because it was popular at the time, but I didn't really "get" it. It wasn't until a few years later that I really warmed to the movie and saw it for what it was: a brilliant, brilliant bit of comedy wrapped inside the trappings of fairly standard noir stories. Then I went Quentin crazy: I fastidiously and obsessively pored over Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown - picking up on the rhythms, the humor, the sheer effortlessness of the storytelling; it is thanks to Tarantino that I developed an "ear" for movie dialogue - prior to that, I just kind of passively watched and took in the expository stuff.

Unfortunately, it was only a few years after when things started to go downhill; and with Django Unchained on the horizon, it has become abundantly clear that Tarantino has given up trying to reinvent genre stories - he just wants to recreate them. It started with Kill Bill. And you know what? I liked Vol 1. I didn't love it, but I thought it was very funny, and I was really into Robert Richardson at the time, so it was nice to go into a movie theater and see expert cinematography on the screen. Then Vol 2 came out, and I distinctly remember sitting in the theater thinking, "Uh oh... something is wrong here. This is not working."

Tarantino has always been self-indulgent, but Kill Bill: Vol 2 really took it to a new level. Even in the terms of that particular story, the sheer vapidity of the whole thing just really turned me off. Looking back on Kill Bill as a whole, I find it to be a mixed bag: the cinematography and music are great, I love the sound design in Vol 1 (the cinematography is amazing, but it's the sound - the music, sound effects, and dialogue - that really drives the story), and David Carradine is fantastic... but everything with Michael Parks goes on too long, the whole Pai Mei thing doesn't really work, and Michael Madsen is a bore.

But even with that big mixed bag, I still called myself a fan. "No filmmaker bats a thousand," I told myself. It seemed like Quentin just kind of wanted to get away from seedy crime stories and have fun, so I gave him that indulgence... and then came Grindhouse. Entertaining, I'll grant you, but it's hard to get more self-indulgent and self-servient than that. I liked Death Proof more than Kill Bill (they're both mixed bags, but look at it this way - even if you hate both, at least Death Proof is short), but by this point alarms were going off. Death Proof came out in 2007 - ten years after Jackie Brown, Tarantino's last "real" movie - clearly this was not just about Quentin trying to change pace or "have fun"... this was not just a phase.

The last straw was Inglourious Basterds. Not a bad movie (I love the opening scene and everything with Cristoph Waltz), but this was the first time when Tarantino not only ripped off others, he ripped off himself. Compare that film to his earlier work - there are multiple lines, scenes, and music cues which come straight from his other movies. That is the tell-tale sign of a man who is running out of ideas; and for someone like Quentin Tarantino, who has yet to write a truly "original" story, that's not a good sign. I should say right now that I don't hate Inglourious Basterds - that just happened to be the movie where I finally threw in the towel and said, "Okay. I gave you four chances to prove me wrong and make a real movie like you did back in the 90s; now I'm done."

I worry some will read this as a tirade, but those who do are missing the point. Tarantino's story is not one of success undeserved or unwarranted, but rather potential wasted and unfulfilled. When he exploded on the scene in 1992, his goal was nothing less than to change the grammar of film (if not the language). Over the last decade, however, he has grown increasingly less ambitious, focusing instead on perfecting a particular dialect - variations on a theme. A pity. He could been remarkable.