Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Posts
But the movie's a lot of fun and what a great opening shot. And I love how long Tarantino is willing to linger on stuff - the bag-swapping-at-the-mall sequence is so gloriously long.
I have a tumblr.
Check it out.
I mean, no one messes with Mr. Blue.
I can't think of any deaths that don't spring from character rather than forced plot progression.
All completely justified by characters the film has painstakingly built up. And Jackson isn't lame at the end. He's just not some cardboard cutout badass villain. He's got depth. I think it's one of Jackson's best performances, not as fine as Jules, but close.
I adore reservoir dogs, the goddamn commode story is maybe my favorite sequence in any of his movies, but I don't think it touches Pulp Fiction.
But underneath all this "Cinema! Fuck Yeah!" celebration, I've always felt let down by what the films actually delivered, said or even failed to say at times. I've read a great number of essays of people trying to analyse and deconstruct Tarantino films as some sort of feminist, post-feminst, patriarchic or even consumerist critique of movies... but they seem to construct a position of intellectual depth, textual density and complexity that I find very hard to reconcile with both the craftsmanship in the films and the persona of QT.
Tarantino's movies strive to be cinematic delights, but I don't see anything in them that convinces me of them carrying some kind of elaborate critique of anything. The feminist subtext in his films isn't particularly deep or complex. The Bride is a woman/mother who is proficient in violence, with a very basic - if not primitive - sense of morality that drives her actions. All the female characters are predominantly proficient in violence and spectactular displays of power (O-Ren, for example.)
In fact, I've yet to find a character in any of Tarantino's movies who has a sense of right/wrong that goes beyond a very basic and almost instinctual level. I think this is partly down to the fact that Tarantino's stories don't really provide particularly complex moral situations for his characters. His characters are larger-than-life and by doing so their motivations are pared down to essentials, their actions to open displays of power and violence. (The one film that kind of differs from this is Jackie Brown and I think that has a lot to do with being an adaptation of somebody else's work, as opposed to Tarantino's own brainchild.)
This seems to have changed with Inglourious Basterds, as the situations became increasingly more convoluted and twisted and the question of right & wrong a more apparent challenge to the audience. I am very curious if this (very welcome) development will continue with Django Unchained or if Tarantino will fall back on cinematic spectacle, which we already know he's skilled in.
True, but his slate since OUATIM looks like this:
- Sin City
- Sharkboy & Lavagirl
- Shorts
- Machete
- Spy Kids 4
- Machete Kills
- Sin City 2
- Machete 3
So, fuck him, basically. That's the festival lineup they show on the third level of Hell nightly, and attendance is mandatory.
EDIT: I feel that Death Proof has the biggest disconnect between what the visual language of the narrative is going for and what I felt watching the end of the movie. I was actually quite repulsed by the girls' actions in that film.
It's acceptable to not like True Grit, but failing to enjoy The Big Lebowski or No Country for Old Men is a heinous trespass. And The Hudsucker Proxy is wonderful.
Anyway...The alien in Alien was a Queen Mother rather then a normal drone, altered during gestation due to an absence of alien pheromones that signaled the need to start a new hive. It was stronger, faster, just all around better then the normal drones in Aliens and able to create/lay a single egg that would produce a true queen alien that would then start a true hive.
Yeah, Rodriguez's work reminds me of a diner that used to make really good food but somewhere along the way all the ingredients got replaced and now it's a greasy spoon not up to health code that's pretending it isn't trying to be a low-rent McDonald's.
Resevoir Dogs still holds a special place in my college dorm room heart, and I dig the hell out of the Bills as a goof, but those 3 stand way out ahead for me overall.
I'm very curious about DJango. I'm not entirely convinced that Jamie Foxx can exist seamlessly in the Quentinverse...but I guess people probably said that about someone like Pitt in Basterds, and he worked out [reasonably] well (as well as they least interesting character can).
Pulp Fiction is still my favorite QT, with Reservoir Dogs in a close second. But, I'm a sucker for snappy and quotable dialog.
Steam: DigitalArcanist | XBoxLive: DigitalArcanist | PSN: DigitalArcanist | Backloggery: Houn
Except that diner also thinks that being a "low-rent McDonalds" is some kind of clever piece of performance art, and brags to the food critics that they serve the most ironically "shitty" food in town.
"And our hamburgers? Made with 100% bacon fat, topped with Velveeta, smothered in Miracle Whip, sat between two funnel cakes. Doesn't that just sound like a "terrible" idea?"
I think you're absolutely supposed to empathize with Tarantino's characters but I don't think you're supposed to think they're paragons of virtue.
And as for the "Stuck in the Middle with You"-scene in Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Blonde was hardly somebody you empathised with in any way. He was a surly prick that evolved into a sadistic villain. There's hardly any disconnect there.
Well, it really help make them not the villains, but just an overarching man v. nature conflict whereas the true bad guys
With something like Kill Bill all of the characters are villains, it's just that you empathize with the bride because she's less villainous if that makes sense, and her goal is to hang up her sword at the end of everything.
You're the only other person I've seen say this.
So Tarantino's movies are an exercise in moral relativism?
Arguably (with, for me, at least, the exception of IB).
I watched Melancholia last night.
You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you're riding in an elevator by yourself and there's a sudden lurch before it stops moving? That weird heavy ball of lead that appears in the brief moment when the elevator stops, shudders, and makes that loud groaning noise like the opening of a rusty gate? Then it jolts. It's trying to start again, everything's going to be fine, or at least you keep telling yourself that. Somewhere in the back of your mind though, you've already started imagining what it will be like when the cable or whatever snaps or gives way and you start to fall. That brief moment of weightlessness, where you can't quite catch your breath and you aren't sure you would want to if you could, and then the impact when you hit whatever the bottom floor is.
That's how Melancholia made me feel for about two hours.
Nolan's movies I always want to see in the theater if possible, and all the way through in one go. I love getting mindfucked that first time, then coming back to it a few months later for the informed second viewing, but after I watch a Nolan movie it'll be a good 4-6 months before I feel the need to watch it again.
Honestly, I think a lot of guys struggle with (smaller) portions of what Fassbender's character was dealing with. I mean, I feel like the desire for sex has made me do some pretty stupid things over the years, and I don't feel like I've always been there for my little sister. I've had dates with that gorgeous, kind, and funny ladies that resulted in me being an asshole because I felt like they didn't deserve my bullshit.
Granted, I'm not as fucked up as that guy, by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn't mean that I can't feel like a scumbag after watching it.
Throw me on that pile. Yes, there are occasional things you can point to, but if you put the entire run of Cohen films in front of me and say "pick five and we're watching them all right now", it's absolutely going in the basket.
Where it would probably land on four copies of Miller's Crossing.
Last pint finished: Clusterf#ck - Double Mountain
Untappd: TheJudge_PDX
I love The Hudsucker Proxy. It's not up there with Barton Fink or O Brother, but it's damn good.
At first, it's kinda like "Why make him an android?". But then it kinda occured to me, he IS the company. He represents them in the movie. He's their face.
And that face is inhuman and uncaring. The company is fascinated by the alien and has absolutely no empathy for the humans at all.
Using Ian Holm for it also helped. He has that kind of friendly, unassuming face which makes his turns into monsterdom so much worse than if he was harsher looking person.
For me, it's one of those films that I feel is constructed perfectly, like Rear Window, in that every element works together to create a unified thematic piece from the sets to the costuming to the way the script itself is structured.
This analysis has been duly noted on your time-card and will be deducted from your pay.
Last pint finished: Clusterf#ck - Double Mountain
Untappd: TheJudge_PDX
He just plays it perfectly too. He's so bland and uncaring and unemotional except when it comes to the alien.
Yeah. He doesn't play it like the Alien just excites him, but like it sexually excites him. Like the amount of carnage it can wreak is arousing. It makes it very disturbing.
It's one of my favorites from them, no question. I find myself saying, "Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure," to people on a constant basis. It used to be ironic, but now it's just part of my everyday vernacular. Sort of like when I say 'word' rather than 'alright'.
Two of my favorite horror movies in the past decade were, Martyrs and Inside. Wonderfully transgressive. Anyway i've been following the directors next projects, and I'm pretty excited to see what they do next. I just got my hands on Livid directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, looks like it's going to be more atmospheric and a little less visceral. Pascal Laugier, who did Martyrs, is making a moved about a "thin man" who abducts children, staring Jessica Biel. Yeah, that will be one to watch. It has the baggage of some people saying its a rip off of the tall man meme, and others saying it fits motifs that were long here before that. You can pretty much bet it's not going to have the punch of Martyrs though.
What the hell is wrong with Sin City or Machete?
I have a tumblr.
Check it out.
Also the entirety of Grindhouse is one of the top five theater experiences I've ever had. It's an audience film if there ever was one.
Sin City is really good, and discarding his kids stuff, you're left with Machete, which I agree was pretty terrible, and sequels which haven't been made yet. It's about as unfair to judge Rodriguez on his Machete Kills as it would be judge him on his Barbarella.
Tarantino has some interesting moral situations in his movies. Fer instance:
Reservoir Dogs:
Pulp Fiction:
As for deeper meanings, I've talked at length on these boards about Death Proof (which has a tremendously complicated thematic structure, alternately arguing against and embracing the fetishization of movies and women) and Inglourious Basterds (which directly addresses the ambiguous audience response to cinematic violence). There's also Kill Bill (even if you don't believe it's a Buddhist parable in disguise, KB is still about the movie and its protagonist both trying on a series of identities before arriving at synthesis and catharsis).
I think QT's movies are so stylized, involving, and well-crafted that it becomes difficult to read beyond the surface, and Tarantino's irreverent attitude and reputation also help to discourage in-depth criticism. But there are complex ideas driving most of his work.