The Complete Works of Quentin Tarantino (1992-2009)

Tagline: Pop culture reference!

Curiosity: With the release of the Quentin Tarantino Ultimate Collection, it’s pretty easy to scope out the controversial director’s entire filmography, outside of Four Rooms and Inglourious Basterds.

Plots: Witty characters try to kill each other while screaming racial epithets.

Thoughts: Along with the work Kevin Smith and George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino’s films are essential viewing for high school students. At that age, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction hit their hardest thanks to sensationalistic dialogue and violence. But unlike Smith or Lucas, Tarantino’s work ages with his audience, but I’ll get to that later.

Dogs and Pulp made Tarantino’s name and, for about a decade, were the only bright spots in his legacy. While he’s written some good scripts (From Dusk Til Dawn), ultimately his vision can only be distilled by the man himself. You recognize a Tarantino film when you see it – the dialogue snaps. It’s rapid fire and it’s packed with allusions to other work, either directly or symbolically. The violence is extreme. In every Tarantino movie, characters are perpetually about to be ousted, from the failed robbers (and one undercover cop) in Reservoir Dogs to the Allied spies and Nazis in Inglourious Basterds.

But you have to see those movies at a young age. Reservoir Dogs has some great, iconic performances, with Michael Madsen as the psychopathic Vic Vega standing out, although Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, and Steve Buscemi handle themselves nicely as well. But the film showcases Tarantino’s greatest weakness – he so badly wants to make a blaxploitation film. The almighty N word gets tossed around a lot in Tarantino’s dialogue, so much so in Dogs that it kind of derails the film once you get a little older. I always thought Spike Lee played the race card too much, but he was absolutely right when he called Tarantino racist, as far as Reservoir Dogs is concerned. The racial stuff doesn’t really contribute to the plot or all the all-white cast, so its rampant use is off-putting.

Everything else Tarantino did in the ’90s feels like an apology for his glib behavior in Dogs. Befriending Samuel L. Jackson was a good start. It’s great watching the interplay between Jackson’s fury and John Travolta’s more dialed down approach in Pulp Fiction as a couple of hitmen. Their stories bookend the film, which is broken up into three vignettes. In the middle is Bruce Willis, who tends to get the shaft when people talk about Pulp Fiction. And when fucking Bruce Willis can’t get top billing, you know a movie must be good.

Pulp Fiction is undeniably Tarantino’s finest moment in the ’90s. The pacing is tight, the cast is great, and the dialogue is simply amazing. It’s a pity, then, that Tarantino’s follow-up, Jackie Brown, isn’t as good. I found its bloated length, straightforward storytelling, and lack of violence underwhelming in high school, and while I found the film more compelling this time around, I still found it disappointing. Still, watching Pam Grier try to outwit Samuel L. Jackson’s gun smuggler is occasionally entertaining, and it arguably features one of Robert De Niro’s last great performances.

Tarantino needed time to grow as a filmmaker, and he came back with vengeance – literally. Kill Bill parts one and two tell the tale of the Bride (Uma Thurman), a former assassin left in a coma by her compatriots. Having lost her baby and the last few years of her life, she’s looking to settle a few scores, especially with the titular Bill (David Carradine). The first part is all action, the second mostly dialogue, but they form a cohesive, entertaining story, with knockout cast. Thurman stands out, delivering a performance that alternates from grief to rage in several shades. Never has an actor radiated so many different kinds of pissed, and it turns out she’s solid action chops too. On the flipside, Carradine is seductive as the bad guy, leading the movies from simple revenge fantasy to a more complex drama. This is Tarantino’s best work, although Inglourious Basterds might be just as good.



In between the two, unfortunately, is Death Proof. One half of a double feature with his friend Robert Rodriguez dubbed Grindhouse, Death Proof stars Kurt Russell as a murderous stuntman who hunts down women in his “death proof” car. It’s a jumbled uneven mess. Parts of the film nail ’70s Roger Corman-sploitation horror, and Russell is such a good villain and appears to be having a fun time, but the film has too many dry spells. Like all Tarantino movies, extreme violence punctuates lengthy scenes of dialogue, but this time out the lines really aren’t all that clever, which means the movie is often boring. Still, it’s got Kurt Russell. That dude rocks.

Death Proof was just a genre exercise, though. Tarantino got back to more epic storytelling with the war movie Inglourious Basterds. Set over the course of four years during World War II and told in four languages, it’s perhaps his most ambitious film next to Kill Bill. Each scene is fraught with tension. Granted, every Tarantino movie has characters who are perpetually about to either catch somebody or be caught themselves, but it’s most true and effective here. Spies and refugees try to hide from and blend in with the brightest of the Nazi army, resulting in a cat and mouse game where players frequently shift positions of power.

There are plenty of knocks against Tarantino – he borrows a lot from other movies. He exploits racial tensions. He was in Little Nicky. But he still creates adrenaline-filled, witty movies. If you get anything out of this essay, it should be this: Buy Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill parts one and two, and Inglourious Basterds. Everything else is up for debate, but these movies aren’t.

Reflection: I probably could have just done an essay on each film, huh?