Last movie you watched......

I don't know. I think the ultraviolence in Tarantino goes back to 'Reservoir Dogs.'

So I'm disinclined to believe his use of it is a commentary on anything.

 

RD wasn't even that violent. Kill Bill, on the other hand...

 

Cutting off the cop's ear (albeit with the camera turned away) and then dousing him with gasoline was pretty damn violent. I also don't think I'd ever seen as much blood in a scene before then as Tim Roth in the back seat after he got shot in the gut. Buscemi shooting cops in the street, him dragging a woman out of her car after breaking the driver's window. I think we've kind of become immune to mainstream movie violence, but that movie when it came out was considered next level.

 

Jackie Brown wasn't really violent. Beaumont and Melanie got shot, but you didn't really see them. Louis got shot, but you saw it from behind. There was blood-spatter on the windows but no visible bullet wounds. When Ordell got shot it was from behind again, but you did see a couple bullet wounds. And that was it.

 

There's a good chance I'm wrong but after that one scene in Basterds, I'll give him credit...?

Spoiler

...The one where the movie. audience of Nazis cheer on a sniper. They in turn get slaughtered from on high.... as the real life audience presumably cheers.

 

Agree with the last three grafs.

It's not a very well-made movie. It's choppily edited, poorly paced, the scene between the little kid and Leo is bad Kevin Smith from "Jersey Girl," the Pacino scene is downright awful. Yeah. It's not very good and that's two in a row. In some ways three, given the only thing saving Django is the acting.

Ironically, he's going to win Oscars for this. Like Scorsese did for The Departed, when it's about 19 rungs below Goodfellas.

 

This is, sadly, true.

I wonder what the Tarantino re-assessment is going to read like in 25 years.

 

To the extent there is one. The critique about Tarantino's handling of race was made in real time by Spike Lee, no less.

Mostly I suspect Tarantino's work will just be added to the catalogue of things no one bothers to see or pick apart. Movies are going the way of books. Ask a millennial journalist how much Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe they've read. Not much. Noooot much.

 

We saw Blinded by the Light tonight. Granted, I live in the great state of New Jersey, and I’m at 108 Bruce shows and counting, but it was a sweet and guileless movie. Utterly predictable and on the nose but still really good fun.

The place was sold out on a Tuesday night and had enough middle aged white guys in too small concert shirts that I thought that I was on the floor at the Garden.

 

True as this is in the mainstream sense of large scale moviegoing, I think there'll always be a boutique audience for films shown in a movie theater. Just as there is for vinyl records and rare books. People still go to opera houses and the philharmonic to see the old rites performed.

And there's always the academy, in which we'll find film scholars a quarter century hence arguing over the legacies and relative standing of Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone, et al., ad infinitum.

 

That's not wrong, but I'm not sure it's really a commentary on violence, either.

It's the infinite regress of the movie watching the viewer watch the movie. It's meta for sure.

When it comes to violence, Tarantino gets to eat his cake and have it, too. The movies are exceptionally violent, but we can all pretend it's somehow a commentary on violence in movies.

 

New movie about the scourge of Fox News with Theron/Kidman/Robbie.