![]() A lot of the things that didn’t sit right with me when I watched his last three features were also present, in some form, in Pulp Fiction. And they resurfaced again when I watched the Kill Bill movies. That nagging feeling came back years later as I was watching parts of Jackie Brown, which I think is still his most mature film, for all its problems. I remember on first viewing being bothered by certain elements of the movie, including pacing problems and the film’s attitude toward violence, which I thought was too comical-there wasn’t enough weight to it-and just a general sense that what I was seeing were not hit men and boxers and gangsters’ trophy wives, but rather a video store clerk’s conception of them based on having seen them in other movies.īut the movie was so exciting, and so interesting for the way that it merged Hollywood and American art house and exploitation and academic elements, that my review barely touched on the aspects that bugged me-maybe because I was young, the movie was being hailed as a masterpiece by much more established critics who I thought were quite smart, and I wanted to cover my ass in case my elders were drawing on a base of knowledge I just didn’t have yet, which seemed very possible, considering that I was still finding my way. I saw it several times in the theater, and I remember being very strongly influenced by a Sight and Sound article about Tarantino that hit newsstands right around the time of the Cannes Film Festival, which awarded the movie its grand prize. Then Pulp Fiction came out, when I’d been a professional journalist for about three years, and a lead film critic for about a year. I guess you could call the review backhandedly positive. It seemed to me an exceptional example of the tough guy movie, of the gangster film, but there was something glib about it that rubbed me the wrong way. ![]() I said at the time, when it came out after an advance wave of publicity declaring him the next great American filmmaker, that yes, it was entertaining, yes it was very clever, but there was something secondhand about it. And that’s OK, because what you’re describing is the crux of what I call “My Tarantino Problem.” We’ve been having this argument for about a year now, and at one point I told you that I was going to write a piece called “My Tarantino Problem,” and that you might as well follow it up with a rebuttal titled, “Your Tarantino Problem.” We never got around to that, but here we are now, so let’s just get it out here, and follow it at the very end with a discussion of Grindhouse.īy way of background, the first Tarantino movie I reviewed was Reservoir Dogs, back when I was a critic for New Times newspapers. MZS: Yeah, and we’re kind of jumping into the deep end of the pool. We’re entering into this conversation coming from antithetical perspectives. I relinquish my hope, so often unfulfilled, of being wrong.” ![]() ![]() Archaism and anachronism are literary modes too, I know, but to handle them intentionally is different from perpetrating them ineptly. Its ramshackle plot relies on the disjointed techniques of continuity from 20 years ago. Except for the luminous blind girl, extraordinary in her beauty, and for Charlie himself, always a rake, always disguised, all the film’s characters are recklessly normal. Not attaining such unreality, City Lights remains unconvincing. Chaplin’s early escapades belong to the second type, undeniably based as they are on depthless photography and accelerated action, as well as on the actors’ fake mustaches, absurd false beards, fright wigs and ominous overcoats. Some movies are true to life: For the Defense, Street of Chance, The Crowd, even The Broadway Melody, and some are willfully unrealistic, such as the highly individualistic films of Frank Borzage, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Eisenstein. Its lack of reality is comparable only to its equally exasperating lack of unreality. “Objections of a more general nature can also be leveled against City Lights.
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