by Grania
Morning all! Welcome to a new week.
It’s the birthday of Quentin Tarantino (1963), director and actor who rose meteorically to fame with his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, which I still think is one of his best films out of a strong field.
In contrast, and I realise that my opinion is a minority one, Inglourious Basterds, although visually and stylistically arresting, was ultimately incoherent as it careened from genre to genre.
Today marks the death (1934-1968) of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, first human in outer space. The circumstances of his death in a MiG-15UTI jet accident was initially covered up owing to it being due to a pilot error in another plane flying in the area.
For your amusement, we have an example of genuine Irish internet today. It’s one of those quaint traditions in a country where the population is so very small that a sizable percentage of the population reads the Death Notices in the local newspapers as a matter of course every day. However, this page on Facebook had a bit of a strop-fest yesterday because their page wasn’t getting enough “Likes”. It reads like tasteless satire, but it is utterly genuine (and tone deaf). Some hours later the page offered a grunted Not-pology of the “sorry if you were offended, kthxbai” variety.
Today in Poland Hili is issuing instructions. But it seems that she may have somewhat missed the point of dog’s balls.
Hili: Don’t carry that ball into the garden.
Cyrus: Why not?
Hili: Because then you’ll have to run after it.
Hili: Nie przynoś tej piłki do ogrodu.
Cyrus: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo będziesz musiał za nią biegać.
Last of all, we have an appearance from Leon, who is being sulky today too.
Leon: I’m just looking, so what?
At the risk of sounding like Loki at the feast, the trouble with Tarantino is that he fetishizes guns and violence. There is an interesting article about Hollywood & guns in this week’s Sunday Times (Culture section), which discusses this & notes the body counts in films with ‘anti-gun’ Liam Neeson & Matt Damon…
This article is also of interest, on a similar slant- ” A 2015 report published by The Economist concluded that gun violence in PG-13 movies had tripled since 1985. And an analysis undertaken by THR found that the number of gun models pictured in big box-office movies between 2010 and 2015 was 51 percent higher than it had been a decade earlier, suggesting that the public’s appetite to see guns in entertainment is on the rise. (In the real world, research shows that the number of new gun owners is declining, while owners are buying record numbers of guns.)”
See here –
http://features.hollywoodreporter.com/the-gun-industrys-lucrative-relationship-with-hollywood/
I think you are right about Tarantino. About the public’s appetite, I am not sure whether it really wants to see more guns or is force-fed them. (Actually, what repulses me most in Tarantino’s movies is not the gun violence but the torture of bound defenseless people by other means.)
I thought Inglourious basterds was really funny, which is why I liked it. I love the way he rewrote history. That said, you are right about it’s changing genre all over the place. On the other hand, Django unchained and Jackie Brown were just too damn long, funny tho the latter was.
As for Cominic’s remark about violence, I also am worried about out getting used to that sort of thing from movies adn TV (thnk Game of Thrones or Black Sails), which leave little to the imagination any more.
Hollywood has long had a strange and dysfunctional relationship with content deemed censorship-worthy. Violence has always been deemed more acceptable than “bad” language or sex or nudity, especially male nudity.
For example, The CW bans swearing but is okay with decapitation on its shows. On any level that is just plain weird.
/Grania
This is very true, although I have just seen one recent release, a film for old romantics, The Time of Their Lives (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3415992/) in which we were treated to a full frontal from veteran Italian actor Franco Nero :-0.
I wasn’t even prepared for this by the censor’s notice, which simply indicated swearing and drug use! It’s a blow for Franco if they didn’t notice his, erm, part.
Male nudity is hardly unusual on HBO shows like Deadwood, Rome, Game of Thrones or Westworld and even more so in Starz shows like Spartacus.
There’s probably more nudity on TV than in the movies, possibly because it’s less embarrassing having a penis waved in your face in the comfort of your own home than in a cinema full of strangers.
I recently saw a preview where the green warning/rating label included “historic smoking”. I think it was for a western. But it raised my eyebrows – we now have to be warned when a movie includes smoking?
IIRC, one of the characters in Arthur C Clarke’s The Ghost from the Grand Banks made his fortune from an algorithm which digitally removes cigarettes from old movies.
I can’t imagine a film noir without cigarettes. That’s like making James Bond celebrate or teetotal.
Celibate.
See the Hays Code.
Sounds like Facebook. Please like our Obituaries.
Torentino is a fine film maker. He does violence well and the stories are gripping. But, I must say I don’t particularly enjoy his genre of hyper violence. I prefer films of Wes Anderson, P.T. Anderson, or the Cohen Brothers who are of the same generation.
“…she may have somewhat missed the point of dog’s balls.”
Licking, I’d have thought….
😀
cr
Should also note this is the anniversary of the worst accident in airline history – recall the Pan Am and KLM crash in the Canary Islands on this day. 583 out of 644 killed.
I’m in agreement with your minority opinion on Tarantino (and I think it’s an opinion shared by a substantial minority). There have been great scenes, and great strings of scenes, in Tarantino’s later films, but he’s yet to again match the heights he reached early in his career.
I have a theory (which is my own), that Tarantino’s writing has suffered from self-indulgence and lack of discipline ever since he stopped working with Roger Avary — like McCartney without Lennon. His individual scripts, like Inglourious Basterds and Django and Hateful Eight, don’t hold together the way they did with Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs and True Romance.
Avary himself went on to make a couple pretty good films on his own, Killing Zoe and Rules of Attraction. But the sum of their individual works fails to match the whole of their collaborative efforts.
I agree completely with your take on Tarantino.
The Hatefull Eight was Tarantino’s best for years. He deserves an award for the sheer cheek of shooting a film on 70mm film when it is set almost entirely in one room.
Contrary to popular belief he does leave violence to the imagination. It’s just that he takes you pretty far before your imagination takes over. You don’t actually see the cop’s ear cut off in Reservoir Dogs, for instance (unlike in the original Django film from which the scene is taken).
Some time ago in a talk-page discussion on Wikipedia over Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” the issue came up over whether Chaplin’s film was the only satirical Nazi spoof directed by a non-Jewish director.
(Jewish-directed Nazi spoof films included “To Be or Not to Be”, “The Producers”, and “Doctor Strangelove”.)
This then revolved over whether or not “Inglorious Bastards” counts or not. Most thought it did not.
I am in complete agreement with you when it comes to Inglorious Basterds. I found it tedious, dull, and ultimately directionless (in a narrative sense, not a visual one). Of course it had Tarantino’s usual flair for setpieces, intriguing camera utilization, editing, and cinematography, but it just doesn’t gel as whole.