The Fall of Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino has picked some interesting fights over the years, mostly with dead persons, but who would have figured Paul Dano to be his downfall. Reddit is alit with threads on QT’s latest misstep, yet bashing Paul wasn’t his biggest faux pas. I can’t imagine Sofia Coppola is very happy with the way he described Lost in Translation as a “girlie movie” or how he became obsessed with her and stalked her for months before finally making her his girlfriend. Neither Paul nor Sofia has reacted to QT’s comments. I don’t imagine Sofia would have spent any time with him if she had known she was nothing more than an object of his desire.

This admission was made even more bemusing by his reference to Jane Austin. Does anyone actually believe he read a Jane Austin novel? The closest he probably came was watching Gwenyth Paltrow in Emma.

It does make you wonder how a man who has had such a blessed filmmaking career could diminish those around him with such flippancy. After all, he fancies himself an auteur, offering up endless film reviews available on YouTube and for a while flirted with making The Movie Critic as the final film in his personal decalogue. It might have been interesting if the film was about Joe Bob Briggs, a self-proclaimed Drive-In movie expert, who loved assessing B-movies from the 70s and 80s. He was always good for a hoot. I was surprised to see he is still around.

Instead, we were to get Cliff Booth as a supercool stand-in letting fly on the cinema world, as if Once Upon a Time in Hollywood wasn’t enough. QT ended up packaging it as a novel based on the movie, further teeing off on Bruce Lee and taking exception to iconic directors John Ford and Francois Truffaut through the jaundiced-eyed view of Cliff as he drove around sun-drenched LA with the rolling hills reflecting off his aviators.

I suppose one can take it as comedy. QT couldn’t possibly mean all those nasty things he said, but sadly it turns out he did. He defended both his attacks on Lee and Ford in interviews and hasn’t backed down from his brutal assessment of Paul Dano’s acting abilities. Why this oversized chip on his shoulder?

Your guess is as good as mine but I think at the heart of all this inflammatory rhetoric is a deeply insecure man. A kind of imposters syndrome where he can’t believe he achieved this level of success and has to strike out against those he feels have been given too much credit.

His attack on Bruce Lee makes the least sense as one presumes Lee’s movies were a great inspiration for Kill Bill. Uma’s yellow jumpsuit coming directly from Game of Death. QT does list Fists of Fury among his favorite martial arts movies, but otherwise doesn’t give Bruce much credit. He seemed to think the Kung Fu legend was a blowhard and felt the need to take him down a notch by having the imaginary Cliff Booth kick his ass. It stemmed from the imaginary Bruce Lee claiming he could beat Muhammad Ali as the two stuntmen idled their time between takes on a movie set.

For the record Lee and Ali were good friends and had a couple of mock fights for the camera but Lee was never on record as claiming he could take down the GOAT. In fact, Bruce once said he avidly watched films of Ali in action and incorporated some of the GOAT’s moves in his movies. He was particularly drawn to Ali’s footwork, which he showcased in The Way of the Dragon.

QT had a lot of free time as a video rental store clerk, devouring movies, especially Asian action movies. City on Fire was the inspiration for his debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which premiered in 1992. It stemmed from a session at the Sundance Institute where Terry Gilliam gave him valuable advice on how to treat his cast and other tips to bring his vision to life, in case you were wondering why QT thanked Gilliam in the credits.

QT soon became the infant terrible of Hollywood, a huge fan favorite and could make just about any movie he wanted as his box office returns justified his wild turns. He garnered some controversy for never standing up to Harvey Weinstein, who bankrolled these early projects through Miramax, especially when it was revealed that Harvey was so abusive of his actresses, including QT’s favorite muse Uma Thurman. Not a peep came from the self-proclaimed auteur until after the fact. This may have led to Uma warning her daughter Maya Hawke when she nabbed a small role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “Keep your shoes on,” she said in jest.

This was probably a reference to QT’s foot fetish but I imagine Uma was still sore about her time on set, where she not only had to deal with Harvey’s unwanted sexual advances but the painful ordeal QT unnecessarily put her through on Kill Bill.

I never much liked the Kill Bill movies. I thought they were a step back after three very good movies that showed a growth in both his direction and story telling. Yet, they became cult classics. My kids loved them for the same reason I loved Bruce Lee movies back in the 70s. I didn’t begrudge them for this.

I was happy to see QT return to more serious subject matter in Inglorious Basterds, but it seemed he had just transposed his revenge plot to historic settings. It was pretty much a Jewish Dirty Dozen led by an irascible goy lieutenant played by Brad Pitt, although Christoph Waltz ended up stealing the show as the cagy Nazi who nearly foiled their attempt to assassinate Hitler.

QT took his revisionist revenge porn a step further in Django Unchained, where Waltz played an unsuspecting dentist and reluctant abolitionist determined to seek out the infamous Calvin Candie who held Django’s dear wife Broomhilda. It was utterly crazy and over the top but massively entertaining to see all these nasty slave owners meet their unsuspecting deaths. I didn’t know it at the time but QT was making a thinly veiled jab at John Ford when one of the Klansmen couldn’t see through his hood and ended up being thrown from his horse.

It turned out this was a story John Ford often told about his brief role in Birth of a Nation. He was just trying to make his way into Hollywood at the time and allegedly signed on as an extra. He didn’t receive any film credit. Little would anyone know that QT would brandish Ford as a racist and called him the most overrated director in Hollywood, preferring the hitherto unknown William Whitney instead. Kent Jones can tell it better than I can on how QT massively misread John Ford.

Here again, QT seemed driven by some latent insecurity as he tried his hand at the Western genre in The Hateful Eight. Just about every director who has done a Western has paid homage to Ford, but not QT, unless you count that nasty little reference in Django. Here is Clint Eastwood recounting the first time he saw Stagecoach.

“Anyone would be flattered to be spoken of in the same breath as John Ford,” said a visibly touched Eastwood. “I remember seeing Stagecoach as a kid when it first came out. Ford had an influence on me subconsciously and I watched his films in a dark theater with my knees up on the chair in front of me, sometimes twice in a row.”

Undaunted and unashamed, QT continued to lash out at iconic directors. He showed a particular disregard for Truffaut movies, as if the iconic French New Wave director couldn’t hold Claude Chabrol’s jock strap. Where that came from is anyone’s guess? It’s pretty easy to kick a dead guy around as he isn’t able to respond like Jean-Luc Godard did when asked about Tarantino. Godard called QT a knave. That must have stung, especially after he had been named jury president of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

While there has been much talk about how QT heavily borrowed from the French New Wave, it is superficial. This was made particularly apparent in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which adopted the same laconic attitude but with none of the subtlety found in these classic films, whether it was Chabrol, Truffaut or Godard. None of them would have gone so far as to relish the violence that QT does because it simply didn’t matter to them. They were more interested in the characters themselves. Breathless as a case in point.

Despite over 30 years of making films, QT still resembles that video rental store clerk offering his unsolicited opinions on movies. His Top Twenty Favorite Films of the 21st Century is all over the place with no phantom thread binding them together. His attack on Paul Dano came out of nowhere and resulted in a massive backlash with many directors and actors hailing Dano for his body of work. Daniel Day-Lewis came to the defense of his co-star in There Will Be Blood, calling him “one of the best actors of his generation.” Certainly not “weak sauce” as QT unabashedly proclaimed, bringing down an otherwise great film in his addled mind.

QT has been hanging out in Tel Aviv, unafraid of the rockets glaring overhead according to his young wife, Daniella Pick. I guess he got ticked that Paul signed the pledge not to work for Israeli film groups while he cheered up the IDF. Apparently QT is now a Zionist.

He probably never imagined Paul Dano to have such staunch defenders and hasn’t found a suitable flippant retort. In the meantime he has become everyone’s favorite meme on social media. All this because he hasn’t figured out what to do for his mythical tenth film. Maybe a retro 70s adaptation of The Fall of Icarus, as the man who flew too close to the sun?