Ugh.
"Man, an economically relevant number of people sure love to watch me masturbate, gimme two or three years to build up an interesting new stack of my favorite (vintage cinematic) porn and I'll film it!"
In other words, some people like to watch the thing he likes to do. And that he does extraordinarily well.
Some artists are great refining their talent into a fine point. Like Alfred Hitchcock. Or Stephen Spielberg. Or Billy Wilder. Or even a really artsy farter like Robert Bresson. They have a specific thing they want to communicate. A message, a story, a mood. That is what they want to do. That is what they become good at.
Other artists are better served pushing everything past the edge. And thank Christ for them because indulgence is what allows cinema to take on increasingly weirder and shaggier forms. They are willing to let their wonkiest ideas take the driving wheel at times, trust their instincts, take risks, dare us to hate them. And as egomaniacal as this may seem, there is also tremendous vulnerability in them going to these places. They allow themselves to become ridiculous. Misunderstood. They give us not so great scenes that step on the toes of their best scenes. Are sometimes their own worst enemies.
And to all of that I say good, good and more good. Because for us that love them, this makes artists like this all the more endearing. It pushes everything else out of the way and allows us to just ride the wave of their pure talent. Weeeeeee! Why would we ever need anything else?
Tarantino, PT Anderson, John Cassavetes, Jean Luc Godard. All of them completely at ease becoming pure cinema. Putting everything of themselves there. Not hiding behind perfectly rendered narrative beats or worrying if everything adds up all nice and tidy at the end. It's just about those images they've got on the film, and letting them unspool all over the audiences faces. Believing in themselves completely even in moments where they maybe should have had pause. And bless their hearts for this (in particular, bless QT, as he's done this all in full view of the mainstream, and been tremendously successful at making his extraordinarily weird films become part of the zeitgeist...even people who hate him should be celebrating him for this victory, it's an absolute miracle)
Even though I get why people aren't all going to flock to his movies, its still weird to me that people want him to tone it down. To get back on track. And sometimes I wonder why people become so offended by his success at taking the kind of risks he does (and generally succeeding with them). I think the issue might be (outside of the fact that he's an ******* in real life) seems to be that we can sense the 'better' movie 'we want to see' amongst the clutter of all his thousands of ideas. It's clear he's not just a masturbatory, self obsessed artist, but also a craftsman in hiding. Could be a real crowd pleaser. And for those who love Jackie Brown, that more than any other film is the evidence that he could have made perfectly constructed films as well as anybody. Sober, reflective, melancholic. The kind of movie that resonate on the emotional scale, in a really honest, fairly unaffected way.
Now, would I trade in all of the great movies he made since then (and, yes, all of them are to varying degrees great). Nope. Not a chance. But does it make me pause for a moment and wonder what could have been if he had just dialled it back and showed restraint? Sure. It would have probably been pretty marvellous as well.
But generally, I think restraint mostly sucks and being economical with storytelling is usually a waste of my time. So I definitely don't lose any sleep over it.
Also, DeNiro is great in Jackie Brown. It's one of his last great performances.