The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
I was 16 when Pulp Fiction came out, the perfect age to become a devotee to all things Quentin Tarantino.
Pulp Fiction was gloriously disjointed yet interconnected, you watched it once to see it and then you watched it multiple times afterward to look in all the corners. It was instantly quotable, and gloriously vulgar. It was beautiful to look at, gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson, and yet it was completely grimy, the thing had texture. It had blood and guts, it had romance, it had non-sequiturs, it had dancing, it had a mysterious brief case with a light in it…
Pulp Fiction was a doorway. It led you to the corners of the video store you never entered because those were the places with the movies made before you were born. It expanded your musical horizons with names like Chuck Berry and Urge Overkill. It spawned a thousand imitators, including the film club kids like me who thought they could do their own version of Pulp Fiction.
And yet…
Quentin Tarantino was in the news this week, and this time it was for a movie he was not making. The Town was set a tizzy on Wednesday night when it was revealed that the filmmaker was going back to the drawing board for what is heralded as his “tenth and final film.” The Movie Critic, which has been the subject of fascination, speculation, and conversation for much of the last year, was supposed to follow a titular movie critic at a porno magazine in 1977 L.A.
That’s about all that’s firmly known about the film directly from Tarantino himself, but it’s been supposed at various times to be a story based on the life of Pauline Kael and/or the continuation of the story of Cliff Booth, the character Brad Pitt won an Oscar for playing in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. At other points, it was assumed that character actor Paul Walter Hauser would play the lead, and there was a rumour that Tarantino would be re-creating scenes from films made in the era, particularly John Flynn’s 1977 revenge thriller Rolling Thunder, and he was also inserting Leonardo DiCarprio’s Once character Rick Dalton into those movies.
But all that is irrelevant now because The Movie Critic, it’s development life and sudden cancellation, were always about one thing and it has nothing to do with making a movie: It’s about the self-mythologizing of Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino’s retirement talk dates back to 2009. "I'm going to write novels and cinema literature, stuff like that," he said that December at The Hollywood Reporter’s directors’ round table. "I would add more to that. If it actually gets to the place where you can't show 35mm film in theatres anymore and everything is digital projection, I won't even make it to 60."
Now announcing one’s retirement years in advance was all the rage at this time; Steven Soderbergh did it a couple of years later and he’s since retired and come back to making movies. It’s worth noting that Tarantino himself just turned 63, which means he’s surpassed his own supposed deadline still one film short.
Having said that, Tarantino has framed his future retirement as a matter of artistic limitations. “Directors don't get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end,” he said in a Playboy interview in 2012. "I don't want that bad, out-of-touch comedy in my filmography, the movie that makes people think, 'Oh man, he still thinks it's 20 years ago.' When directors get out-of-date, it's not pretty.”
Now, no one would ever argue that Hugo and The Wolf of Wall Street are better movies than Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, but you can’t deny that Martin Scorsese is still turning out sublime work now well into his 80s. I also don’t think anyone is calling Killers of the Flower Moon “out-of-touch” and no one’s looking at the latest works of masters like Steven Spielberg, George Miller, David Cronenberg, or Hayao Miyazaki and then saying it’s “not pretty” or “out-of-date.”
“He’s a writer,” Scorsese said when asked about Tarantino’s retirement last fall. “It’s a different thing. I come up with stories. I get attracted to stories through other people. All different means, different ways. And so I think it’s a different process…I respect writers and I wish I could. I wish I could just be in a room and create these novels, not films, novels.”
Unless you make a movie, you have no idea that finishing one is like getting away with murder, there are so many things that go wrong from concept to execution, and the whole endeavour depends on everything going according to plan, even if the plan is being improvised at parts. You can understand why Tarantino, a perfectionist with a very clear and specific vision, would find something like writing a novel more appealing, and you might understand why he’s set himself an artificial limit of 10 because there are only so many times you can get lucky, especially when the house always wins.
Having said that, I think Tarantino’s artistic limitations are best summed up in this line from the aforementioned Playboy interview: “I am all about my filmography, and one bad film fucks up three good ones.”
There it is. His 10 movies and done ethos is a legacy consideration, not an artistic one. It’s not about a limitation of ideas – hell, there’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to unrealized Tarantino projects, dozens of them – it’s about how film scholars in the decades to come will look back at him, the post-modern auteur. In his mind, there’s a film professor talking about the “Perfect 10”, which is why he was putting so much effort and energy into The Movie Critic, and its serenade about the New Hollywood era that Tarantino has deified for all its greatness, and none if its faults. He was trying to reverse engineer the perfect cap stone to his career like it was something he was planning the whole time.
It's incredibly self-indulgent because no one gets to decide how they’re remembered, but self indulgent has been increasingly Tarantino’s brand. Not only does he get to choose the studio and name his terms, from final cut to how the movie is marketed, he does things like use Ultra Panavision 70mm stock at great expense in order to film what’s essentially a chamber drama about eight cowboys in a Wyoming cabin playing a violent game of Clue. (And hey, I really like The Hateful Eight!) He’s living every director’s dream in terms of total creative control, and he’s earned it, but sometimes control is an illusion.
Or to put it another way, “A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” A 17th century French poet named Jean de La Fontaine wrote that, and it’s a quote that Tarantino should know well. He once famously threw away the script for Hateful Eight after it leaked only to come back around to it after a charity table read won widespread praise. It’s possible that Tarantino might come around again to The Movie Critic and this is just a typical moment of creative meltdown, perhaps there’s more cooking with Critic than he thinks. Stephen King had, at one point, thrown away his manuscript for Carrie until his wife pulled it out of the trash and convinced him he had something special.
Alternative, maybe Tarantino was right. It’s been five years since his last movie, the longest break he’s taken between films since Jackie Brown in 1997 and Kill Bill Volume 1 in 2003. Granted, there’s been a lot of disruption to the film business in all that time, but one might think that all the tumult and change might have been a creative inspiration for a man that’s always gone against the grain. On the other hand, maybe he’s just too far up his own rear to stop and count…
You can rent all the films by Quentin Tarantino on most VOD platforms.
The Bookshelf:
Food Inc. 2 (Sat-Sun, Wed)
Wicked Little Letters
The Story of Plastic (Mon)
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
2001: A Space Odyssey (Sun)
Abigail
Barry Lyndon (Sun)
Civil War
Dune Part Two (till Wed)
Aespa: World Tour (Wed)
Eyes Wide Shut (Sat)
The First Omen (Sat-Sun, Tues, Thurs)
Full Metal Jacket (Sat, Mon)
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Godzilla x Kong: New Empire
Kung Fu Panda 4
Monkey Man (till Wed)
Perugino. Eternal Renaissance (Sun)
Shayar
The Shining (Sun, Thurs)
Spartacus (Tues)
Spy X Family Code: White
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Sat)
Starting Thursday: Challengers, Unsung Hero
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
Abigail
Bob Marley: One Love (Sat-Sun, Tues)
Civil War
Dune Part Two
The First Omen (Sat-Sun, Tues)
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (till Wed)
Godzilla x Kong: New Empire
Irena’s Vow
Kung Fu Panda 4
Monkey Man
Starting Thursday: Challengers
Mustang Drive-In (Fri-Sun Only):
Abigail (early show)
Argylle (late show)
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
500 Days in the Wild (Sat)
Fantastic Fungi (Mon)
Irena’s Vow
Late Night with the Devil (Sat-Sun, Tues-Thurs)
Wicked Little Letters
Starting Friday: Alien – 45th Anniversary
Princess Cinemas – Original:
BIG SHARK (Sat)
La Chimera
Dawn of the Dead – 45th Anniversary (Sat, Tues)
Exhuma (Sun, Wed)
The People’s Joker (Fri)
The Room – 20th Anniversary (Sat)
Solaris (Thurs)
Apollo Cinema:
Aavesham (Sat, Tues, Thurs)
The Dark Side of Oz (Sat)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Wed)
Late Night with the Devil (Sat-Sun, Tues)
The People’s Joker (Sat-Sun, Thurs)
Varshangalkku Shesham (Sun, Wed)
This week on End Credits, Tim Phillips co-hosts as we look to the startling and immediate future as envisioned by Alex Garland as we tackle Civil War and the very particular discourse it’s inspired. That movie is the biggest release yet from A24, the little upstart studio that’s become the pre-eminent name in film snobbery in the last 10 years. We will talk about some of A24’s overlooked gems.
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!