So I guess I'm more or less on record as liking the talkier Tarantinos. This one qualifies. And I love it for its dialogue. Even more than most of his movies, this one loves its beautiful women, and their dialogue (meaning their minds: Tarantino is a well-known feminist) is as sexy as their bodies. And, particularly on a second viewing, everything Stuntman Mike says is brilliant, brilliant verbal foreplay for his twisted jouissance to come.But that's not what I love this movie for most. I love it most for its structure, its almost classically simple parallelism. The way it divides so neatly into halves, with the plot in each half almost perfectly mirroring the other (up to the point where Zoe Bell starts to kick ass); the way each half has such a slow, languid, sensual buildup, peaking in a big champagne pop of action. It's an elegant movie, if I may be permitted to describe a Tarantino that way. I find it very beautiful, on a structural level. As well as cool as hell on most other levels.
What I don't love it for is its musical philosophy. Actually, I do - mostly. Joe Tex? Check. Staggolee? Check. Jack Nitzsche? Check. Insisting that Pete Townshend made a mistake in not quitting the Who to join Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich? Insufferably hipsterish. (Is QT trying to make us hate Jungle Julia at this moment, right before the crash? Discuss.)
3 comments:
You should read this:
http://johnzkomurki.blogspot.com/2009/03/banality-of-violence-and-violence-of.html
Hey, thanks for the link. Interesting article, although I'm not sure I'm smart enough to follow all the postmodern twists in its thought.
I'm not sure I agree about the dialogue in Death Proof being banal... And I think the same thing goes for Pulp Fiction (although it's been many, many years since I saw that - I'll probably get to it later this week). For me, at least, there's an intrinsic pleasure in the dialogue in Tarantino's movies, and I don't think it's just a function of it often being placed in the mouths of killers; that is, it's not (just) an ironic pleasure. Tarantino has a real ear for dialogue, for human speech, and he knows how to cast/direct actors to bring the most out of it. As a result dialogue that may at first blush seem banal seldom plays that way, at least for me; rather, it plays as witty, or character-revealing, or musical, or some combination of those things. It's a source of pleasure in and of itself...
Pleasure, I think, is the thing that's really missing from this analysis. I wouldn't suggest that Tarantino isn't "problematis[ing] and play[ing] with...referential ambit[s]," at least on some level, but any analysis that only uses his films as tools "to think with" is probably missing a very important dimension to them, which is that they're meant to give pleasure.
I don't want to be misunderstood as saying, like so many do, that "it's only a movie, dude, don't think about it so much." Rather, I think what I'm saying is that the pleasure a movie gives can and should be part of what we think about. That Adaptation (I haven't seen Dogville) "explores the usual postmodern/deconstructionist problems more coherently" may be true (interestingly is debatable), but to my mind that's only important if the truest measure of both films is the degree to which they succeed in doing that. With Adaptation that may be the best measure - that may indeed be what Kaufman most wants to do. With Tarantino I'm not so sure.
True, too true. But it's a lot easier to drag on about deconstructionalist problems, for example, than it is how much you enjoy something. The latter usually begins and ends with something like "it was awesome."
The whole academic game, I suppose, builds on the premise that what's being studying is awesome. The hard part is coming up with them fancy words...
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