Sophia Michaels
Before he was a superstar auteur, a Royale-with-Cheese rock star, the divisive and worshiped motormouth who launched a thousand dissertations and 10 times as many Film Twitter flame wars, Quentin Tarantino was a movie fanatic.
It pays to remember this fact — not that the raconteur would ever let you forget it. Read those early interviews, right as Reservoir Dogs was beginning to establish him as one of the exciting (and the most excitable) filmmakers of the 1990s, and you’ll hear him wax poetic about John Woo and Jean-Pierre Melville, Rio Bravo and Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, arthouse staples and drive-in classics. Whether it was high art or gutter-level trash, if he dug something, you’d hear why he dug it. When Pulp Fiction became a phenomenon, everybody talked about how Tarantino changed the way we watched movies. But even before that, this cine-geek obsessive had also changed what types of movies we talked about. His ride-or-die advocacy of blaxploitation entries and spaghetti Westerns and Shaw Brothers wuxia and obscure slasher flicks elevated them into the broader discussion. Suddenly, it was ok to namedrop Coffy and Sergio Corbucci in a conversation. You were almost expected to be as fluent in B-movie revenge thrillers as you were in Jean Renoir’s filmography.
It’s a key part of his origin story — former videostore clerk synthesizes a lifetime’s worth of genre references and influences into one high-wattage package, turns the cineaste world on its sliced-off ear — and his love of movies, expressed via a breathless patter, became the cornerstone of his celebrity persona as well. You could argue that the key scene to understanding Quentin Tarantino isn’t even in a Quentin Tarantino movie. It’s in another indie from the 1990s, Rory Kelly’s Sleep With Me. If you haven’t seen the whole film, you likely know this monologue. It was apparently a spiel that Tarantino used to do at parties and around the Video Archives store. (And yes, that is future Tár writer-director Todd Field he’s talking to.)
Cut to decades later, and Tarantino is as famous as anyone who stars in his films, an Oscar-winner, a theater owner, a married man, a father and one of the few directors left whose name above the title means something to both casual moviegoers and hardcore film nerds. You wouldn’t call him a cult filmmaker, but you could credibly call him a cult leader, given the way several generations of disciples consider his shout-outs and big-ups to be gospel. Once upon a time, he made a remark about making 10 movies and then bowing out of the game; as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was number nine, the expectation is that his next big-screen work will be his last. A retirement from moviemaking, however, doesn’t signal Tarantino saying goodbye to sharing his passion for cinema. In fact, he may be pivoting into a new phase of his career as someone who pontificates fulltime about the long history of the moving pictures. Tarantino is one of the last American auteurs left standing. But what he really wants to do is become a film critic.
Call it the Reverse Cahiers Shot: A man becomes an established, celebrated, world-class filmmaker with an eye towards eventually getting a plum perch to write about his personal film-geek canon. And should you wonder whether his years of putting in the serious work of being a movie fanatic, searching high and low for hidden treasures and screaming “attention must be paid” to forgotten actors, neglected directors, disreputable genres etc., has prepared him for that type of transition, you’ve got several Exhibit A’s at the moment that provide an answer to that question. Mileage may vary, but no one would doubt Tarantino is dead serious about all of these projects when it comes to sharing his thoughts on movies, 24 outbursts per second.
For example, should you hop over to Netflix, you can check out Django & Django, Luca Rea’s documentary on the life and work of Sergio Corbucci. Sometimes referred to as “the other Sergio” in relation to his fellow countryman Sergio Leone — Tarantino says he’d long contemplated writing a monograph on Corbucci using that exact title — the Italian director behind The Mercenary and The Grand Silence and the original Django created some of the single best Spaghetti Westerns to ever bless a grindhouse screen. Tarantino has been a talking head in numerous docs before, but Rea essentially hands the Corbucci superfan the keys to the film and lets him rip.
What we get is an insightful, and surprisingly measured breakdown of Corbucci’s work, from the early dabbling with Western stories that ape American horse operas to the surreal, down-and-dirty masterpieces he’d make throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s. Tarantino doesn’t just talk about the influence those movies had on his work, notably Django Unchained; he views the movies through the lens of Corbucci reacting to fascism, the Italian director’s cynical view of humanity, a doubling down on the “comic-book panache” of the genre’s antihero aspects. There’s a genuine deep dive happening here, with the sense that Tarantino has not just enjoyed and screened the half dozen or so movies that represent Corbucci’s heyday, but thought about them within a much larger scope. It makes you want to go back to (or seek out) these works with fresh eyes.
You can say the same thing about most (not all) of the films that Tarantino tackles on The Video Archives Podcast, which operates on a fairly simple principle. The Pulp Fiction director and his co-writer/fellow Best Original Screenplay winner Roger Avary watch several videotapes from their old videostore’s collection, which Tarantino happened to purchase in full when the shop closed down. Then they talk about them. At length. It’s both a celebration of a bygone format and, for these two men, a bygone era when sitting around and shooting the shit about, say, 1979’s Cocaine Cowboys (the tagline: “It’ll blow you away!”) was not just a past time but a whole lifestyle.
We suggest you go straight to the two-episode “American Giallo” conversation, which features the duo and special guest Eli Roth positing the concept of several Hollywood movies (Dressed to Kill, The Eyes of Laura Mars) being categorized as the American equivalent of the brutal, pulpy Italian thrillers that usually revolved around lurid, ultrastylish depictions of slasher-level violence. There’s a certain degree of alpha-nerd dick-measuring going on, which is to be expected. Yet there’s also a strong pang of nostalgia for anyone who not only grew up in an era of videostores being personal-consumer cinematheques but remember the joy of discussing and/or debating movies before social media. And it gives Tarantino an extremely informal platform for flexing his critical chops and taste, in the company of folks he has a long history with and respect for. He joked recently that if podcasts had been around in the 1990s, he might not have gone into filmmaking. The form suits him.
Yet the project Tarantino has put all of his chips on — the thing that suggests he wants to be taken seriously as a historian and critic — is Cinema Speculation. A 400-page collection of his nonfiction writing on 1970s movies, it’s a mix of memoir, rants, raves, interviews, trivia, tangential thoughts on movie stars and directors, snarky asides, and testimonials to the traditional theatrical moviegoing experience and the pleasure of witnessing flickering images as a whole. He had been promising (threatening?) such a book long before he became a published author with last year’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization, and he’s made good on his word. This is his I Lost It at the Movies. You wouldn’t exactly say he’s raising Kael here, however.
Should you read Tarantino’s screenplays, you’ll find yourself simultaneously impressed by what actors bring to his dialogue (the way that the right actors make his work sing), and the rigor with which he constructs his characterizations through baroque colloquialisms, pop-culture signifiers, street lingo, smack-talk. You get the sense that every word has been carefully placed, even the words many wish he’d stop using, and that he’s utilized his gift for gab as much for characterization as for showing off. (Sight & Sound ran a pre-release excerpt of the Pulp Fiction script back in the day, and even before you heard John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s voices saying the “Royale with cheese” banter, you still got a great sense of who Vince and Jules were on the page.)
There’s a rigor there, and “rigor” isn’t necessarily a word you’d use to describe a lot of what he gives you in Cinema Speculation. It’s a grab bag, and in terms of the writing, a slightly mixed bag. Sometimes you get a close reading of a single film (Dirty Harry, Deliverance, Rolling Thunder). Sometimes you get little more than claustrophobic opinionating, as if you were stuck in the corner with someone manically speaking at you and you can’t quite worm yourself away. No one would deny that Tarantino doesn’t know the movies or moviemakers he’s holding court on, but he’s not always great at forming arguments that rely on more than “I saw this, I love this, you shoulda heard the crowd go wild back then.” He’ll describe the infamous, traumatizing rape sequence in Deliverance with a keen sense of acuity and attention to detail, then say something like, “After [Ned Beatty]’s booty is penetrated and hammered from behind, he collapses into the loose dirt and dead leaves, his feminization inside the masculine dynamic now finally complete.” It’s hard to tell whether the first half of this sentence undermines the second half, or vice versa.
The fun of reading Tarantino defend film maudits, attempting to enter personal favorites into larger pulp canons, and simply going on digressions is seeing where he’ll end up. Every film obsessive worth their salt has hills they are willing to die on, and Cinema Speculation gives you a Monument’s Valley worth of Tarantino’s. His love letter to LAT‘s Kevin Thomas is heartfelt and unexpected. You may not agree with him that Paradise Alley is “the greatest directorial debut since Orson Welles,” or that Dirty Harry signaled the end of American innocence, or that Brian De Palma owes more to Polanski than Hitchcock and should have made Taxi Driver, but it will not be for the author’s lack of trying to convince you. (As for his suggestion that Point Blank is little more than a TV movie — well, I reject your hypothesis.)
The frustration comes from the lack of focus and construction in some of these pieces, and you dearly wish that there was an editor at hand to help craft the looser arguments and lose a few dead-end detours in the book — in the parlance of the book, there are times where this Rocky Balboa desperately needs a Mickey in his corner to add discipline. Film criticism without passion is simply an intellectual exercise; you need love and enthusiasm to go along with your analysis or else you risk writing that feels like it came from a brain in a jar. Yet enthusiasm trumping a deeper engagement with the work also runs the risk of being off-putting, and despite the nice turns of phrase, a number of the writings in this book feel like they needed to go deeper or least get another draft. Or that Tarantino’s cult-of-personality side is grabbing the wheel from his more thoughtful side. You want more of Django & Django Tarantino. You settle for a lot of the Top Gun monologue Tarantino.
Yet the pieces that do stand out are fabulous, and suggest that our man Quentin may want to keep treading down this path if he really is going to quit after another movie. There are three entries in Cinema Speculation that justify picking up a copy, and all of them suggest a synergy between a movie lover’s brain and heart and gut. The first is a comparative piece between the bratty late ’60s filmmakers who took on the studio system and the “Film Brats” who followed. Tarantino’s idea is that the former were coming from a place of destruction, where the goal was to tear the old guard and old genres down. The latter, he says, came from a place of appreciation: They didn’t want to destroy the old way, they wanted to pay tribute to it and make, say, the best monster or mobster movie imaginable. The only issue with this article is that it’s too short — ideally, it would be the first chapter of a longer survey on both camps. The second is a valentine to Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz draws from the director’s career, prison movies, Clint Eastwood’s persona and how the subject’s no-nonsense methodology mirrors Siegel’s final hurrah. It’s rock solid, and when this essay sticks the landing, you almost want to cheer.
The last one is the last entry in the book, focusing on a man named Floyd Ray Wilson, and is a companion piece to the book’s first chapter, covering Tarantino’s younger, formative filmgoing years. Here, Tarantino gives us a portrait of an older man who hung around the apartment he grew up in with his mom and her friends, a guy who also liked movies and took a teenage Quentin to see a lot of them. He quotes Floyd’s opinions on everything from William Marshall to Lash LaRue, and is both a father figure, an unreliable presence and a dear friend to this young film lover. Floyd has even written a few screenplays, which — along with the older man’s sensibilities about the joys of sitting in the dark with strangers — will have a profound effect on Tarantino’s future. It ends with one of the most heartbreaking lines he’s ever written. The mix of conversational jive talk, seemingly small exchanges that reverberate, movie love, wit, pathos, autobiography, and atmosphere almost make it seem like a short story, yet it also puts so much of what we’ve read before into context. It’s a beautiful capper to a sometimes baffling collection. And it would make a great farewell movie if Tarantino did it.
