Quintin Tarantino made one pretty innovative and interesting movie, Reservoir Dogs, and one classic work of genius, Pulp Fiction. All of his subsequent movies have been indulgences of his adolescent fantasies. There’s nothing wrong with adolescent fantasies, but there may be something wrong with being handed millions and millions of dollars to film them.
That is all.
Can I borrow that sentence to describe Guy Ritchie?
Replace Dogs and Pulp with Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Mukade
I’m watching Deperado right now. Anything that involves having me be able to look at Selma Hayek is brilliant.
Here resides a good point. Ms. Hayek’s brief but entirely memorable scenes in “From Dusk 'Til Dawn” might have redeemed that movie if it…could have been redeemed.
So I take it you weren’t a fan of Kill Bill or Jackie Brown?
Good point there Steamie..
I thought that Jackie Brown was like an understated version of Pulp Fiction..more style than substance, so to speak and Kill Bill was the peak of everything that came before. Kill Bill, I have always felt, is what all the previous work was building up to,a huge panorama of sound and vision which should never be watched on DVD because it belongs in a cinema, preferably one with a state of the art sound system.
The very last bit where the Kung Fu kid and the lovely Uma are chatting does tend to drag things out a bit..I will concede that.
Slan,
D. 
Jackie Brown was a good movie, not great.
I have mixed feelings about Kill Bill. I thought the Vol I & Vol II thing was silly and, of course, the kind of thing he never would have been able to do but for the success of Pulp Fiction. I thought the merits of the 2 movies were overwhelmed by the self-indulgences. And the Grindhouse thing was just…unpleasant.
I think his name is too long.
The two part crack with Kill Bill was down to his refusal to edit it down to a single, cinema friendly version. Agreed, not many directors would have gotten away with a two parter, but such is fame.
Where epic Cecil B. Demille (sp?) like self indulgence meets huge imagination and vision is something I am not really qualified to talk about, but I would be prepared to err on the Tarintino side.
Slan,
D. 
My favorite part of Kill Bill, besides Uma, is the bamboo flute David Carridine played and the nifty way he carried it. If I had a bamboo flute like that, I would wear and play it all the time.
Does the bamboo flute not hold any ground with you folks?
I’m sure the whistle forum deals in these matters..
I got delayed tonight, here in England..time zones..and all that.
Dale has raised a very interesting point here about artistic expression among filmmakers..and Tarintino is a serious filmmaker by anybodys reckoning.
I honestly believe that Kill Bill - both parts - is Tarintinos finest hour…but both parts must be taken in the context of one huge film, a film which is beyond DVD. I have all sorts of boxed editions and all that commercial crap that goes with that kind of stuff but nothing compares to being in the cinema and hearing, seeing and virtualy, feeling it.
There is a warmth about KB, and Jackie B. which does not realy extend into the convolustions and cleverness of PF. The Dogs should have been a stage play..a study into the mind of men..dodgy men at that.
Now that we’re talking..“No Country for old men”..or something close, titlewise..has Tarintino stamped all over it..wonderful movie..and Tommy was robbed for the best actor… a great movie..or fillum, as we say in Dublin.
Slan,
D.
I agree completely that Kill Bill (in its entirety) is what Tarantino was meant to do on this planet. Reservoir Dogs is very impressive, and Pulp Fiction is incredible.
The rest are not so hot. I didn’t even like Jackie Brown as much as Dubh did.
Um. Desperado is a Robert Rodriguez film. Written, produced, edited and directed.
Nevertheless I agree with you about Salma Hayek
I think some of the charm of the Quentin Tarantino films is the adolescent fantasies that he seems to relive with joy. He seems to love the cinima and borrows heavily from the styles he likes. Much like Bruce Campbell’s “Evil dead” and Rob Zombie’s “House of 10,000 corpses”, were a nod to horror films, Tarantino seems to look to the past for his movies in a wide eyed over romanticized way. Does he place himself in his films out of narcissism or as a nod toward Hitchcock? Did he choose Sonny Chiba for Kill Bill because he was the perfect actor for the role or because he wanted to work with the actor from “The Street Fighter”.
Even in the movies that he doesn’t direct, like True Romance and Natural Born Killers his style seems to come through in the films that he is involved with. The 1980’s had seen the rise of movies where body count seemed to be the goal. Robocop, Diehard, and others seemed to be made in a way that a committee sat around trying to find a new point in the film to kill someone. Where in the 80’s a walk down the halway involved shooting three unknown people, Tarantino would have the characters talking about their favorite music, reserving the killing for times when his plot dictated it. It wasn’t until Tarantino proved that his style was profitable that he was able to make larger “blockbuster” films.
It could have been a play, really.
Now that we’re talking..“No Country for old men”..or something close, titlewise..has Tarintino stamped all over it..wonderful movie..and Tommy was robbed for the best actor… a great movie..or fillum, as we say in Dublin.
Agree 100%. Including the idea that Tommy LJ was robbed. What an amazing performance.
He’s got a few good ones but I haven’t been impressed with his latest concoctions. After Kill Bill.
I thought the Kill Bill movies were great fun, but not film classics. I’ll have to disagree a bit about Jackie Brown, I thought it was fantastic. But, I’m crazy about Pam Grier so I’m a bit biased.
The last scene with Pam Grier and Robert Forster really gets to me.