I can hear it already: “a film student who hates Tarantino?? Who is this buffoon? How could he possibly talk such rubbish?” Well, shut up, valued reader, and I’ll tell you. Firstly, every Tarantino character talks like Tarantino (i.e. a sarcastic, drawling, bit-of-a-dick). This is fine for characters like Mr White, or Vincent Vega (characters from Tarantino’s only two good films), but when you get to Uma Thurman’s appalling Bride in Kill Bill, the result is laughable. The only reason Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction worked so well was because the dialogue flowed readily in these seedy criminal underworlds. It flows less eloquently from the mouth of a sword wielding psycho bitch intent on killing the population of China. And as for WWII Jewish resistance fighters… “Oh but it’s a homage!” I hear you scream. “They’re homages to the forgotten cinema genres!” Bollocks. The only way Death Proof (the dead hedgehog at the bottom of Quentin’s cinematic compost heap) is a homage to “Grindhouse Cinema” is in its scratchy film effects, which are just fucking irritating. Now, I genuinely like Quentin’s first two films. In fact, this is what I hate most about him. The fact that a young director, who once showed so much promise, could get so caught up in his own fan boy image that he now thinks he can film whatever trash he considers “retro” and expect standing ovations at Cannes, just because he’s Quentin fucking Tarantino, makes me want to vomit all over my keyboard. So he made two decent films. Michael Bay made one decent film, I still hate his guts. (For more of my views on Michael Bay, I can usually be found crouching in a puddle of my own spittle and loathing just outside the UMSU.)
