Last movie you watched......

You say Tarantino's movies have no story.

You say Tarantino's movies have no heart (or, when pressed, very little heart).

I'm not sure you've ever watched a Tarantino movie.

 

I've seen them all.

Again and again, in fact.

I enjoy them, for the most part.

But there's a reason literature abandoned the sort of winking, self-referential postmodernism Tarantino employs.

Without a heart, earnestness - and thus authentic sadness or joy or love - becomes impossible.

 

I just cannot fathom you saying there is no heart.

The first chapter alone is pure heart not to mention sets up the entire story.

 

I've said before that's a great scene.

And it is.

But it has more to do with the manufacture of movie tension than it does with 'heart.'

 

LOL now your definition of heart gets single quotation marks. OK then.

 

Then by all means eliminate them.

 

I've considered reading up to Children of Dune, then reading summaries for the rest in the series.

 

Jackie Brown has heart. A pretty big one in fact.

And I think this movie does even if Tarantino’s heart isn’t much like mine. I really do. I think that scene on the ranch, when the villains of the picture are rendered exactly as unpleasant as they surely were, Tarantino is saying something there. They could be villains with a flourish. They’re not. That’s Tarantino’s heart. Even he has a limit for what he’ll kick up a notch with dialogue and humor, and it turns out to be the Manson family.

I’d agree that most of Tarantino’s work is about a love of movies. Once Upon A Time is about a
love of *the* movies - the making of them and the men and women who made them - and, well, he doesn’t portray that the best. The first hour of the movie was kind of - perhaps quite a bit - boring.

 

Miller’s Crossing.

I’m still trying to sort out how I feel about it, and especially Byrne’s character. Dark as a Coen movie should be, but different, too.

 

I liked Once... I saw it as a film about violence on film and its relationship to us, the viewer. I trust QT enough as a writer/director to think that he deliberately wanted us to question our knee-jerk responses. Like

Spoiler

....I obviously don't condone anything done by the Manson family but as fictional characters, within this meta world, the trio at the end was sorta right. American TV is permeated with violence. Why not get rid of one of the avatars of violence?

Moreover, are we really want meant to cheer at the end when Brad Pitt's character beats a woman to death? After all, it's strongly implied that he'd already murdered his wife. And when another woman - evil, yeah, but also pretty much helpless - gets burned to death?

 

The heart in Jackie Brown may be Elmore Leonard's.

And agree that the Spahn ranch sequence was a nice ratcheting up of dread - without turning the sequence into a cartoon.

One of the things I was kind of surprised by in "Once . . ." was how little effort QT made to shoot the 'Bounty Law' sequences in the manner of those times. The lenses and the lighting and the camera angles and the look of the film stock were all wrong. As was the 'Hullabaloo' sequence, which didn't look anything like kinescope.

Which is unusual in the sense that one of the recurring knocks on Tarantino is the movies are all about art direction and set decoration. This seemed a little sloppier in that regard than usual. The car sequences are all lovingly managed, for example, but there's a background Chrysler Imperial that shows up more than once.

And I know QT loves the 747 - it recurs and recurs in his work. But it wasn't in service in 1969.