Quentin Tarantino is to cinema what Miles Davis is to jazz – the “King of Cool.” With his movies “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” Tarantino effectively reinvented cinema in the mid-1990s, setting unprecedented stylistic standards. His movies burst with cool dialogue and exaggerated violence and turned the former video store clerk into one of the most important living Hollywood directors ever.
In addition, as a screenwriter, he was responsible for the script of “True Romance” and wrote the plot for Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” – both films are also true milestones of 90s cinema. However, Tarantino’s work as a whole is still viewed critically. The accusation that the director has not yet made a film of his own, but has always chosen only the best from all his favorite films, is still around today. In this article, we want to take a look at the best Quentin Tarantino that you should watch before you die!
The Kill Bill films brought Tarantino back into the game after a break of six years – but with them, he almost immediately put himself out of business. His Grindhouse contribution (in a double feature with director friend Robert Rodriguez, who delivered worse with Planet Terror) has been misunderstood by critics and audiences. Some complained about the long dialogues, while others believed that the story was too short.
But here, we experience Tarantino as liberated as never before. In the trash field of the grindhouse genre, Tarantino plays with ideas that may or may not work, which is inherent in the subject matter. Lighting and color changes jump in quality in the film, and soundtrack interruptions form the framework for some of his most pointed ideas. In particular, conversations between women sound like they were thought up by women and not the male screenwriter.
Not least, “Death Proof” is a feminist film, a Revenge Movie with two groups of eight women (four of whom must die), headed by the as always competent Rosario Dawson. The chase scenes are curious, filmed entirely with stuntwomen, including the one who participates as an actress, Zoe Bell.
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The fun the car races must have given Tarantino is revealed in a making-of, where the director reports how Australian chase sequences differ from American ones in his own euphoric way. That difference is in the camera’s position – in the desert, no houses to put it on.
Tarantino had found an ideal cast in Kurt Russell as murderous stuntman Mike, capable of being playboy, creep, sunshine and victim all in one; it is hard to imagine that the originally intended Mickey Rourke would have done anything similar with his masked face. Watching Russell’s wink in the direction of the audience, of his breaking the fourth wall, might be the scariest shot in Tarantino’s oeuvre.
The director recounted the sober reactions to “Death Proof” in a more recent interview with “Vulture.” When people in Hollywood started sending him foreign scripts again so that he would act as a script doctor, as he had last done in the early nineties, he says he suspected: Now they want to banish him from the director’s chair for good. Fortunately, that did not happen.
