Introduction
Every now and then, a certain artistic style in the field of film-making emerges. It uses a consistent format or technique in its’ story-telling, as well as provide a fresh concept on characterization, plot, setting, or in any other way which has not been previously noticeable (used but not hyped).
Definitely, every viewer has seen and kept a favourite movie or film from one period to another. There are great movies, lots of them viewer cannot keep count. Many end up as collectors of films. Many return to their favourite movie from time to time. But there are those critics and some viewers question how a certain movie ticks.
Quentin Jerome Tarantino born March 27, 1963 is a film-maker, actor, writer director rolled into one that provided a fresh new look at cinema with his stylistic formats. This paper shall try to present Quentin Jerome Tarantino’s life and work and his influence on modern US cinema.
Discussion
Tarantino is an award-winning American film director, actor, and screenwriter whose rose to fame in the early 1990s as an auteur indie filmmaker is through the use of post-modern nonlinear storylines, and stylized violence interwoven with often-obscure cinematic references. It has been said that Tarantino wrote wrote his first script, The Amazing Adventures of Mr. Lee at the age of 14 (Bernard, 1995).
Tarantino’s film career started with the screenplay True Romance which was optioned and eventually released in 1993. In meeting Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party, Bender encouraged Tarantino to write a film which then became the Reservoir Dogs (1992), a dialogue-driven heist movie that is said to have set the tone for Tarantino’s later films. It was reported that Tarantino wrote the script in three and a half weeks (Dawson, 1995).
Tarantino’s second script sold was Natural Born Killers of which director Oliver Stone made a number of changes that made Tarantino disown the script. The success of Reservoir Dogs made Tarantino a Hollywood name, and he was offered numerous projects, including Speed and Men in Black. But tarantino retreated to Amsterdam to work on his script for Pulp Fiction which won the Palme d’Or or the Golden Palm in the 1994 Cannes film festival (Clarkson, 1995).
Pulp Fiction earned Tarantino and Roger Avary Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and was also nominated for Best Picture. He then proceeded to direct episode four of Four Rooms and “The Man from Hollywood” which is a tribute to an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode that starred Steve McQueen.
Tarantino’s next film was Jackie Brown (1997) which is an adaptation of Rum Punch, a novel by his mentor Elmore Leonard. It is a homage to “blaxploitation” films that starred Pam Grier. In 1998, Tarantino turned to the Broadway stage, where he starred in a revival of Wait Until Dark.
In 2005, Tarantino announced his next project would be Grindhouse, which he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. Tarantino’s contribution to the Grindhouse project titled Death Proof is a take on 1970s slasher films which evolved dramatically as the project unfolded. Quentin Tarantino won the Icon of the Decade award at the Sony Ericsson Empire Awards in 2005.
Tarantino’s popular television career had him direct the fifth season finale to the show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” The episode entitled “Grave Danger” is said to share very similar situation from Tarantino’s second Kill Bill film where CSI’s Nick Stokes is captured and buried alive in a Plexiglas coffin while an Internet camera broadcasts the whole thing to CSI headquarters. It is to be noted that in Kill Bill V.2, the Bride was also captured and buried alive in a coffin.
Other Tarantino projects on television include directing an episode of ER called “Motherhood” that aired May 11, 1995, an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, and an episode of then-girlfriend Margaret Cho’s show.
Messages, Subliminal or Otherwise
It has been said that “Kill Bill I & II” (2003, 2004) are hyperreal saga of a woman who overthrows patriarchal authority where protagonist Beatrix Kiddo is spared the divine punishment of experiencing labour while giving birth to her daughter, a story that is in many ways at the root of patriarchal hegemony. The film are seen as ideological fantasy of feminist retaliation dealing with the process of creation about the artistic agency of an auteur in a post-modern world (Gleason, 2004).
It was also noted that Quentin Tarantino’s characters spend a lot of time in the bathroom, pointing a dramatic centrality in his work (Willis 1997). Tarantino’s characters often go in there to pee such as in Reservoir Dogs where Mr. Pink asks Mr. White: “Where’s the commode in this place, I’ve gotta take a squirt.” Again, in Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega tells Mia that he has to go to the “john” to “take a piss” (script p. 67) where Mia replies that it “was a little bit more information” than she needed to know.
Gleason (2004) has commented that “By imposing the “cool gaze,” Tarantino makes us enjoy what would otherwise be unacceptable. Tarantino appropriates words (“nigger”) and themes (homophobia, S&M) by making them appear cool. He makes us laugh at or appreciate them and thus accept them. “This may pump us up with a certain elation, but can only be followed … by a bewildered sense of depletion as if we’d been talked into robbing a liquor store.” The “cool gaze” is Tarantino’s way of shocking and undermining social conventions, of making his audiences reassess their personal values.”
Mike White (20070, however, have another opinion about Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs of which the the movie had been a ‘plagiarism” of Ringo Lam’s “City on Fire.” Other plagiarism questions include using concepts, scenes and dialogue from other films such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing as a direct influence on the fractured narrative structure. The idea of the color-coded criminals is apparently taken from “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” The ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs also resembles a scene in Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western classic “Django” where a man’s ear is cut off and fed to him before he is shot dead.
It was also said that the Don Siegel version of “The Killers” played an influence on Pulp Fiction. The adrenaline-injection scene closely resembles a story related in Martin Scorsese’s documentary “American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince.” Also, it has been pointed out that the line “to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch” is similar to “You know what kind of people they are. They’ll strip you naked and go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch” from another Don Siegel film, 1971’s “Charley Varrick.”
Pulp Fiction’s dancing scene in the diner is inspired by a scene in Godard’s “Band of Outsiders”, the film which Tarantino named his production company after. Another contented line is the misquoted bible verse Samuel Jackson recites in Pulp Fiction found in the movie “Karate Kiba” with the title crawl of the movie contains the line: “The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the iniquity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the father of lost children. And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them” (White, 2007).
Despite all that has been mentioned, however, the movies of Tarantino stand out for his characters in nearly all of his movies having aliases such as Honey Bunny and Pumpkin from Pulp Fiction, the heist crew in Reservoir Dogs, and many different characters in Kill Bill. “Mexican standoff” scenes are also frequently used, where three or more characters are simultaneously pointing guns at each other as a reference to typical spaghetti westerns such as those directed by Sergio Leone.
Tarantino also often use unconventional storytelling device in his films, such as retrospective, frequent flashbacks (Reservoir Dogs), non-linear (Pulp Fiction), “chapter” format (Kill Bill, Four Rooms), or time-twisting such as Jackie Brown showing what all the main characters did at the money drop in the mall or in Death Proof when the car accident showed one time per character involved in it. Flashbacks, according to Tarantino are recollections of an individual person but he uses the non-linear style just a different way of telling the story and giving the information like a book.
A variety of camera angles and types of shots are considered typical of a Tarantino movie that often frames characters with doorways and shows them opening and closing doors, and he films characters from the back. He also used widely-imitated quick cuts of character’s hands actions in extreme close-up, a technique reminiscent of Brian De Palma.
Long close-up of a person’s face while someone else speaks off-screen such as the close-up of The Bride while Bill talks, of Butch while Marsellus talks, Ted’s face when Chester talks in Four Rooms, are typical in Tarantino’s films. Tarantino also popularized the trunk shot although he did not introduce that style. This is featured in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill.
It was also noted that his lead characters usually drive General Motors vehicles or an old white Honda Civic. Cigarette smoking by main characters is a recurring element of his movies except for The Bride in the Kill Bill series and the name of a fictional cigarette brand called Red Apple is consistent. Also, briefcases and suitcases play an important role the films while every movie has one or two characters with a Zippo lighter.
Another review on Dusk to Dawn had the reviewer write, “I had heard only dialogue and a few sound effects like I was getting one or two channels out of a six-channel surround system. The presentation really makes a world of difference in assessing this film. That’s really stating the obvious, now, isn’t it? Not really. With a lot of movies I see they could be twelfth generation VHS copies, full-frame with mono sound but the quality of the intended direction and story come shining through all the muck. While FROM DUSK TIL DAWN didn’t rely on the sound track for all its scrumptious goodness, it certainly needed a kick in the pants,” (Cashiers duCinemart, 2007).
Conclusion
Many if not all of Quentin Tarantino’s movie characters have “ordinary” features in them that may include a hand gesture, a “lingo”, a pet name, a fetish (for the toilet, for example), and favourites, like a burger, or even marijuana. The almost if not “real” depiction of true humans in his films make the characters, and the entire film endeared to any ordinary viewer. His lead characters are very flawed, throwing racial slurs, with addiction to something, doing wrong if politically incorrect actions in the movies.
The stories, as well as the scenes, dialogues and takes have all been done before. What Tarantino brings to us is a story with characters that are so real it sticks on the viewer’s skin. Many times, we view great characters and great stories on films. Characters who are so great they are near if not perfect. Characters who are superhuman, something that we, ordinary viewers can never be. Very distant, and the viewer is left admiring.
Plagiarist, non-original, non-inventive and plain “cool”, Tarantino makes us the characters in his movies. And who would come to hate these movies?
References
- Bernard, Jimi (1995) Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies. Harper
- Cashiers duCinemart (2007). “What The Heck’s A Cinemart?”
- Clarkson, Wensley (1995) Quentin Tarantino: Shooting from the Hip, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY).
- Dawson, Jeff (1995) Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool, Applause Books (New York City)
- Film Reference. (2007). “Quentin Tarantino Biography.” Web.
- Gleason, Robin (2004). “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool.” Bright Lights Journal Is. 45.
- Willis, Sharon. (1997) “Borrowed Style: Quentin Tarantino’s Figures of Masculinity,” High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 189–258.
- White, Mike (2007). ‘The Anti-tarantino Page.”