Bad Movies by Great Directors?

Totally agree. It's kind of amusing to me how much it's so obviously the student short film proof-of-concept to Pulp Fiction's making good on that proof.

The rawness of the film has an aesthetic quality of it's own. There is an earnestness and energy which makes us invest in it. There are rough edges here and there and these heighten our prospect of surprise; this could really go anywhere, as this is a novice telling the story. Thus, we kind of feel like that cop in the chair when "Stuck in the Middle With You" starts playing. Where is this going to go? What are the rules here? There is a kind of paradoxical vérité to it, if that makes sense.

Our opinions on this one are too far apart for me to even counter. I consider Django to just be me paying $12 to watch Quentin jerk off. Hollywood was virtually more of the same, just with some better scenes. Reservoir Dogs is tight and cutting and lacks almost all of what makes me question whether I should ever give QT my money again.

Amen to that.

Magnolia is probably the PTA film I would choose if I could only watch one for the rest of my life.

Interstellar is probably the only non-Batman Nolan film that I thought succeeded all the way through. Scratch that, including Batman.

Totally agree on The Hateful Eight, though he now has several films I can't imagine slogging through again.

Oh good, we will agree on something in this thread.

I like Death Proof. Now that's how a director masturbates on screen without being insufferable.

Magnolia is probably my favorite PTA film. Boogie Nights is a close second though.

That movie was just dreadful.

I think there's some of that in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There are a couple of times where you can see how he subverts his own tropes of violence in exchange for more calmer exchanges, while also giving us a wonderfully developed character in Rick Dalton, which he achieves "through conversations rather than bullets and blades".

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This is what we pay nearly any artist worth their salt to do. You don't think Godard and Cassavetes and Picasso and Coltrane and Joyce and The Beatles were masturbating themselves raw? Of course they were. And that's what I want them to keep doing. I want artists who know they are great. Who trust their instincts and who find their voice simply by putting on screen (or canvas, or on tape, or on page) what it is that they themselves want to see. What represents them. What explains who they are.



Yes, Tarantino indulges himself. Yes, he keeps circling the same revenge themes over and over again. Yes, his characters speak in a very specific idiom that we know is coming from his dopey view of adulthood. But this is rendered irrelevant when he has such a self assured voice as he does. He knows exactly what he can do, and he doesn't hold back because unrestrained is what he does. That's what people want to see. A man whose entire brain is a theatre of junk cinema and who is able to bend entire genres to his will, and make a kind of poetry on the screen. Maybe a sorta dumb poetry, but even that's better than no poetry at all.



Frankly, any time a masturbatory session provides loads of fantastic scenes, marvellously drawn characters, frequently great dialogue and a simple aesthetic of '**** you, I do this better than any one else', I'm always going to be on board. And I hope he never dials it back. Because dialing it back would be just as antithetical to him as going full throttle would be to Bresson.



The reality is I can't imagine how he could have ever mattered in any serious way if he had simply gone the Reservoir Dogs route and continued making these insular, crime films. Maybe he'd have less criticisms thrown at him. Maybe he'd appease those who want their art tidy and proper. But the fanaticism would have died away. Because restraint is not in QT's DNA. He's not Melville. That's not what he does.



All Dogs was, was a trial run for all that marvellous weirdness that was lurking in his head. And a brain that could transform it into cinema that seems complusively familiar and yet completely unique unto him, and only him. Dogs is just a glimmer of what he was capable of doing. And thank God good taste never kept him from pushing and pushing and pushing further into his geeked out id. Because that is what matters about Tarantino. For better or worse.

Well...
I hate Lost World and War of the Worlds from Spielberg.
Once Upon a Time in America is a slog.
Orson Welles' Lady from (or is it in?) Shanghai is a bore.
I don't like Strangers on a Train from Hitchcock (to be fair, the premise isn't weak, and the acting is good, and the story does well, but that ending is horrible and completely ruins it).

I know I'm missing some, but I'm not too bothered to make sure of what.

I couldn't mention some of the popular directors I despise because they aren't, in my view, great. My parameters are my most important.

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Thanks again, Mr Portridge.

Where is this attitude coming from?

Lumet is my favorite director and yet to make it through "The Wiz".

I don't exactly think the movie Reservoir Dogs demonstrated restraint. It's a wildly stylized film. I think it's less "insular" than Jackie Brown, if I understand how you're using the word there.
And look, I love Pulp Fiction and I love Kill Bill Vol.1. I'm a fairly big fan of Death Proof as well. I like Kill Bill Vol.2 but for me, where the excesses of both volumes seem glorious in the less dialogue-driven first half, the second seems to be where his excesses start to become a little silly (no, for some reason I did not find the Crazy 88 scene in Vol.1 silly despite its excesses). And then we get to Django and Basterds, both of which seemed like they lost their balance swinging so wildly from one self-winking excess to the next including excessive run-time. It's in the things like stunt-casting Mike Meyers as a quirky British officer or the Sam Jackson voice-over in Basterds or whatever the hell he was thinking casting himself in Django (which, in my opinion, worked in PF).
At some point, every star-director needs someone to tell them "no" and his movies just started to feel like whoever that person was they excused themselves from the proceedings. When you combine that with his tendency toward long run-times, it can really become a slog if you're not someone who enjoys being winked at for nearly 3 hours.

Who said it did?
This is a forum. The point of forums is to voice, discuss, and even argue opinions. In theory, that's why we're all here. I voiced mine, the same as everyone else here. I don't know why you're comin' at me but I don't appreciate it.

I agree with your basic premise here, but I'd hesitate to include QT in this company. He hasn't exactly "invented cubism", cinematically speaking. I'd be more tolerant of his shortcomings if that was the case.

I see that film as a bit of a course correction for him, even though it is still firmly in the "anti-history" of the Red Apple-verse (e.g., stopping The Family before they get to Sharon Tate). I liked it and hope he continues more in this direction.


I get the sense that Cliff Booth has something in common with Stuntman Mike and Zoe. Tarantino seems to appreciate the rugged authenticity of the unknown stuntman who makes Eastwood look so fine. This is not unlike Stephen King's noble small town sheriff character (his recurrent hero) or Cormac McCarthy's super-competent manly-man pedants (MacGyver with a Masters Degree). It is in these stunt characters I sense that this is who Tarantino expressing most directly who wishes he was--his exemplars of virtue.

You can attack peoples' opinions on a forum, that happens about 20 times a day here. You're not supposed to attack the person. But I agree with you, let's be done with it.

The Ladykillers - Coen brothers
Nymphomaniac I AND II - Lars von Trier
Park Chan Wook - Little Drummer Girl (OK not a film but I was so disappointed by it)

Christopher Nolan - Batman Begins. Watched it recently, couldn't get through it.

Alien Resurrection - Jean Pierre Jeunet
Nicolas Winding Refn - Only God Forgives. It looks amazing but it's probably not great. The rest of his stuff is excellent.