From Kirby Ferguson (Everything is a Remix), a short video essay about how Quentin Tarantino remixed reality in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino is well-known for mashing up different movies into his own. The peak of this method is Kill Bill, which is loading with bits taken from other films. Since then, Tarantino seems to have changed — there hasn’t been nearly so much obvious copying in his movies. But actually he’s still doing the same thing. He’s just copying in a different way, and the sources he copies from are less often movies and more often reality.
One of the (I would assume) many movie ideas from Quentin Tarantino that never quite got off the ground was a prequel about the Vega brothers starring Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs’ Vic Vega) and John Travolta (Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega). In this imagined trailer for The Vega Brothers, Luís Azevedo cleverly uses footage from older films starring Madsen & Travolta that Tarantino synthesized into Reservoir Dogs & Pulp Fiction as well as subsequent movies starring Madsen & Travolta that were in turn influenced by Reservoir Dogs & Pulp Fiction and fashions it into a coherent, fun narrative.
Geraldine Brezca has worked on several of director Quentin Tarantino’s movies,1 and for Inglourious Basterds, she was the slate operator — i.e. she clapped the clapper before each scene. And as this video shows, she was very entertaining and creative in her duties:
For each scene’s label, Brezca came up with something funny (A66F = “au revoir 66 fuckers”), ribald (29B = “29 blowjobs”), appropriate (39FE = “39 feet essential” on a scene featuring feet), respectful (4AK = “4 Akira Kurosawa”), or profane (79E = “79 fucking explosives”, which got quite a chuckle from Brad Pitt). See also Here’s Why Slate Operators Matter (And Why Quentin Tarantino’s is So Great).
Brezca’s IMDB page shows that the last movie she worked on was Django Unchained in 2012. Not sure if she left the industry or passed away or what…↩
Quentin Tarantino brings back two of his biggest stars, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, in his new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The teaser trailer is low on details, but we do know that Pitt plays stunt double to DiCaprio’s aging film star, the plot involves the murder of Sharon Tate by members of the Manson Family, and it opens on July 26. The film is also the last movie that Luke Perry made before he died.
Before I started making my own web pages, I spent a not-insignificant amount of my time on the Internet trawling the alt.fan.tarantino newsgroup for bits of knowledge about Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, and Reservoir Dogs. A big topic of discussion back then was speculation about the contents of the briefcase that Jules and Vincent were tasked to retrieve for Marsellus Wallace. Was it gold? Diamonds? Wallace’s soul? No one knew and Tarantino wasn’t telling. It was the most compelling MacGuffin since Hitchcock himself.
Now, after nearly 25 years, we finally learn what was in the briefcase:
David Ma is a food artist and director who recently made a series of four short recipe videos in the style of famous directors. There’s spaghetti and meatballs a la Quentin Tarantino (my favorite):
S’mores in the style of Wes Anderson:
What if Michael Bay made waffles?
And finally, here’s a pancake recipe in the style of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity:
Hopefully round 2 of Ma’s project will include the likes of Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, or Yimou Zhang.
Evan Puschak looks at Reservoir Dogs 25 years after it was released and analyzes whether the film still holds up. I’m probably not giving anything away by saying his answer is “yes” (with a small caveat). I’ve probably watched that movie more than a dozen times, but I hadn’t seen it in 10-12 years before a viewing a few months ago. It is very much a first film, almost like a student film — it’s definitely no Pulp Fiction, but what is? — but all of the stuff that makes Tarantino Tarantino is very much in evidence.
I was way into Quentin Tarantino in the mid-90s. When I was designing my very first personal homepage, a large part of it was going to be a Tarantino fan page. There were already several QT fan pages on the web, but I thought I could do better. While I dropped the QT content and went in a slightly more creative direction with my page back then, I eventually ended up making that fan page after all.
The Bear Jew. Hugo Stiglitz. The Jew Hunter. Bridget von Hammersmark. Names, identity, and personal reputation management are important elements in Inglourious Basterds, as they are in all of Tarantino’s films (Vincent Vega, our man in Amsterdam; Mr. Pink; The Bride / Beatrix Kiddo / Black Mamba). In this video essay, Drew Morton shows how Tarantino’s characters assert their identities over and over again, with varying results.
Quentin Tarantino is the type of writer/director who writes roles in movies with specific actors in mind. For Pulp Fiction, he wanted Harvey Keitel to play Winston Wolf, Tim Roth to play Pumpkin, and Ving Rhames to play Marcellus Wallace. But he also wanted Michael Madsen to play Vincent (with Travolta as a strong second choice), John Cusack to play Lance, Matt Dillon to play Butch, and Laurence Fishburne to play Jules. Another possibility for Jules was Eddie Murphy, and Tarantino also specified “No Rappers” for that role. Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman weren’t even listed for their respective roles. Gary Oldman, Nicholas Cage, Johnny Depp, and Alec Baldwin were considered for several roles but ultimately didn’t appear in the film.
The worlds in many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies are connected; here are ten of the biggest connections, including the Vega brothers, Red Apple cigarettes, and Big Kahuna Burger. Tarantino has even said that some of his movies are watchable within others…e.g. the characters in Pulp Fiction could have watched From Dusk Till Dawn in the theater.
This is the teaser trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, the movie whose script leaked, was cancelled, was planned to be released as a book, and then uncanceled.
Update: I’m getting emails and tweets saying this trailer is fake. And if it is fake, is there a non-fake leaked trailer out there or…?
Update: Just to be clear, this is totally fake and constructed from bits of other movies, etc.
A montage of hundreds of sounds from Quentin Tarantino’s movies, from Zed drumming his fingers on top of the gimp’s head in Pulp Fiction to the schiiiiing of The Bride’s Hattori Hanzo sword in Kill Bill.
So, a few months ago Quentin Tarantino scrapped plans to make what was supposed to be his next film, The Hateful Eight, after the script leaked. Which struck me as weird and petty, but Hollywood in general seems weird and petty to me. Turns out that Tarantino’s gonna do the movie after all.
During the Comic-Con panel, one of the audience members point blank asked Tarantino if he’ll be making the script as his next feature, following recent word that it could be heating back up again. Tarantino hemmed and hawed for a bit — before finally committing: “Yeah — We’re going to be doing The Hateful Eight.” So there you have it: The Hateful Eight will be the next Quentin Tarantino feature.
The photo at the top is the first official poster for the film.
If you took all the fight scenes from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies and turned them into a Double Dragon-esque video game, this is what it would look like:
When Pulp Fiction thundered into theaters a year later, Stanley Crouch in the Los Angeles Times called it “a high point in a low age.” Time declared, “It hits you like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart.” In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman said it was “nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream American cinema.”
Made for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the top-grossing independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the most influential” movie of the 1990s, “so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it — the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films.’ “
Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, gave Bruce Willis new muscle at the box office, and turned Harvey and Bob Weinstein, of Miramax, into giants of independent cinema. Harvey calls it “the first independent movie that broke all the rules. It set a new dial on the movie clock.”
“It must be hard to believe that Mr. Tarantino, a mostly self-taught, mostly untested talent who spent his formative years working in a video store, has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American filmmakers,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “You don’t merely enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction: you go down a rabbit hole.” Jon Ronson, critic for The Independent, in England, proclaimed, “Not since the advent of Citizen Kane … has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of movie-making.”
So many great things in this piece. Daniel Day-Lewis as Vincent Vega, Samuel L. Jackson had to fight to play Jules, how to replicate a heroin high (“drink as much tequila as you can and lay in a warm pool or tub of water”), Travolta’s contribution to the humor (and choreography) of the film, and the true contents of the briefcase.
I saw Pulp Fiction on opening weekend in a mall theater in Iowa. We had no idea what to expect going in and holy hell the drive home was a weird mixture of shellshocked and wired. (via df)
In the past day, I’ve run across two related theories of how all of Quentin Tarantino’s films are part of the same universe: this video and this post on Reddit. They differ slightly but the Reddit one is more interesting…specifically that Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc. take place in the aftermath of Inglourious Basterds and its unorthodox ending to World War II.
Because World War 2 ended in a movie theater, everybody lends greater significance to pop culture, hence why seemingly everybody has Abed-level knowledge of movies and TV. Likewise, because America won World War 2 in one concentrated act of hyperviolent slaughter, Americans as a whole are more desensitized to that sort of thing. Hence why Butch is unfazed by killing two people, Mr. White and Mr. Pink take a pragmatic approach to killing in their line of work, Esmerelda the cab driver is obsessed with death, etc.
You can extrapolate this further when you realize that Tarantino’s movies are technically two universes - he’s gone on record as saying that Kill Bill and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn take place in a ‘movie movie universe’; that is, they’re movies that characters from the Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Death Proof universe would go to see in theaters. (Kill Bill, after all, is basically Fox Force Five, right on down to Mia Wallace playing the title role.)
Following on from the Kill Bill section of episode 2 of Everything is a Remix, this video contains what feels like an exhaustive look at the movies that Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill.
According to Indiewire, Waltz’s character “joins up with former slave Django to save his wife from an evil plantation owner.” According to Deadline, Django will reunite Tarantino with Pulp Fiction producer Stacey Sher, and the movie will begin production as soon as this summer or fall.
Christoph Waltz, who was excellent in Inglourious Basterds, and perhaps Will Smith, who was excellent in the Parents Just Don’t Understand video, will star.
No, not Reservoir Dogs. It’s called My Best Friend’s Birthday, which he made for $5000 in 1987. Here’s the surviving 36 minutes of footage; the rest was destroyed in a fire.
Some of the ideas and material in this film would be recycled for the Tarantino-penned True Romance screenplay. (via sly oyster)
Tarantino doesn’t just explore language’s capacity to reveal and conceal motives and personality, he shows how people pick words and phrases (consciously or subconsciously) in order to define themselves and others, and describe the reality they inhabit (or would like to inhabit). Even low-key and seemingly unimportant exchanges are as carefully choreographed as boxing matches. Clever flurries of interrogatory jabs are often blocked by witty responses; the course of conflict can be shifted by deft rhetorical footwork that re-frames the terms of debate.
Battle Royale
Anything Else
Audition
Blade
Boogie Nights
Dazed & Confused
Dogville
Fight Club
Fridays
The Host
The Insider
Joint Security Area
Lost In Translation
The Matrix
Memories of Murder
Police Story 3
Shaun of the Dead
Speed
Team America
Unbreakable
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