Quentin Tarantino (1963 - )
Related: American cinema - postmodern cinema - "post-VCR" cinema - film
Titles: Kill Bill series (2003 - 2004) - Pulp Fiction (1994)
Tarantino is widely known as a director who is very much a "film-geek", with an astonishing, encyclopedic knowledge of movies, film criticism, and film history. Particularly, he has a vast knowledge of foreign films, genre films and little-known pieces of cinema. He is a declared lover of exploitation films, Hong Kong action cinema, Spaghetti Westerns, giallo horror, French New Wave, and British cinema. His love of those genres is mirrored in his works — all of his films regularly quote other movies and genres in their styles, stories and dialogue. He once summed it up by saying, "I never went to film school; I went to films." [May 2006]
Biography
Quentin Tarantino (born March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee) is an American screenwriter, film director and actor who rapidly rose to fame in the early 1990s as a fresh and gritty storyteller who brought new life to the most familiar American archetypes.Influences
Tarantino is widely known as a director who is very much a 'film-geek'. He has a vast knowledge of foreign films, genre films and little-known pieces of cinema. He is a declared lover of the exploitation genre, the asian cinema (especially from Hong Kong) and the italian Western. His love of those genres is mirrored in his works; Kill Bill for example features a long list of movie references; and his movies, at least according to him, are homages to all his idols. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Tarantino [Dec 2004]
Postmodernism in Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino, in his film Pulp Fiction, has created the ultimate formula, example, and critique of postmodernism. Every person, line, and scene in the film is not only self referential, but refers to a larger sense of tradition and formula, while at the same time supposedly breaks that formula and creates an originality that has brought Tarantino, deserving or not, to the forefront of current “auteur-star-directors.” The film is seen as a statement, made by Tarantino, that must be unwrapped by its audience in order to discover the whole of Tarantino’s “genius.”While he really only has about three major motion pictures in the can, his work is so incredibly self-promotional that it has become not only a part of pop culture, but of modern film discussion and critique. By promoting himself and his knowledge, his techniques have been followed many times over by other emerging directors: he has made himself and his success “hyperreal:” here is someone who once worked in a video store and now has full command of a 35mm piece of film. But is he as groundbreaking as we are led to believe? By recycling old theories and ideas, Pulp Fiction and the rest of Tarantino’s films, while using the label of “postmodern,” have claimed to become something original and unique, but are actually recycling old, overused ideas and repackaging them as ironic and retro. --Michael Schramm, "Tarantino: His Films, the Politics of Representation, and Postmodernism"
Grind House: the Sleaze-filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature (2006) - Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez
Grind House: the Sleaze-filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature (2006) - Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
This 250 page hardcover companion book to GRIND HOUSE offers fans an insider’s look into the making of the hotly anticipated double feature by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Filled with cast and crew interviews, hundreds of full-color photographs, never-before-seen conceptual art and an in-depth history of the grindhouse genre by the directors themselves, GRIND HOUSE: THE SLEAZE FILLED SAGA OF AN EXPLOITATION DOUBLE FEATURE is the essential fan’s guide to the two-fisted bloodbath of the year.
Plot Outline of the film: Two 75 minute horror movies written by Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez put together as a two film features. Including fake movie trailers in between both movies. --http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0462322/ [May 2006]
See also: grinhouse cinema - Quentin Tarantino - exploitation film
Reservoir Dogs (1992) - Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino came out of nowhere (i.e., a video store in Manhattan Beach, California) and turned Hollywood on its ear in 1992 with his explosive first feature, Reservoir Dogs. Like Tarantino's mainstream breakthrough Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs has an unconventional structure, cleverly shuffling back and forth in time to reveal details about the characters, experienced criminals who know next to nothing about each other. Joe (Lawrence Tierney) has assembled them to pull off a simple heist, and has gruffly assigned them color-coded aliases (Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink, Mr. White) to conceal their identities from being known even to each other. But something has gone wrong, and the plan has blown up in their faces. One by one, the surviving robbers find their way back to their prearranged warehouse hideout. There, they try to piece together the chronology of this bloody fiasco--and to identify the traitor among them who tipped off the police. Pressure mounts, blood flows, accusations and bullets fly. In the combustible atmosphere these men are forced to confront life-and-death questions of trust, loyalty, professionalism, deception, and betrayal. As many critics have observed, it is a movie about "honor among thieves" (just as Pulp Fiction is about redemption, and Jackie Brown is about survival). Along with everything else, the movie provides a showcase for a terrific ensemble of actors: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Christopher Penn, and Tarantino himself, offering a fervent dissection of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" over breakfast. Reservoir Dogs is violent (though the violence is implied rather than explicit), clever, gabby, harrowing, funny, suspenseful, and even--in the end--unexpectedly moving. (Don't forget that "Super Sounds of the Seventies" soundtrack, either.) Reservoir Dogs deserves just as much acclaim and attention as its follow-up, Pulp Fiction, would receive two years later. --Jim Emerson for Amazon.com
[this movie is very derivative; Postmodernism: Quentin Tarantino might make a new movie which is just a lot of scenes copied from old movies --jahsonic]