The second book by Quentin Tarantino is Cinema Speculation, a collection of nonfiction essays on 13 notable movies from between 1968 and 1981 mixed in with autobiography about his experience with these films. Let’s run through the checklist - how many of these have you seen?
Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Getaway (1973), The Outfit (1973), Sisters (1973), Daisy Miller (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Rolling Thunder (1977), Paradise Alley (1978), Escape From Alcatraz (1979), Hardcore (1979) and The Funhouse (1981).
For me it’s a paltry 3: Bullitt, Deliverance and Taxi Driver - to be fair the only other two I’ve even heard of are the Clint Eastwood movies Dirty Harry and Escape From Alcatraz! I’m just not a huge fan of movies from this era.
As a lifelong Tarantino fan, it was always going to be a pleasure to read about his enthusiasms and criticisms of these movies, whether or not I’ve heard of or seen them, and the additional memoir stuff is gravy. Some of the movie essays though are disappointingly dull - not quite having the same spicy behind-the-scenes stories, colourful characters, or interesting trivia as others, as are some of the nonspecific movie essays, and could’ve been excised for a snappier read.
Bullitt is compelling, unlike the movie itself, and Tarantino tries his best to finagle an explanation for why the movie is good in its badness - it’s a clever apologia but unconvincing, to me anyway. The best essays - Dirty Harry, Deliverance, The Getaway, and Taxi Driver - made me want to watch the movies, even if I’d seen them before. The Paradise Alley essay turned out to be a secret Rocky mash note that made me want to re-watch Rocky and Rocky II rather than Paradise Alley!
The lesser essays read like a list of meaningless names to little or no effect. Like The Outfit essay which devolves into Tarantino reeling off names of ‘70s actors who I didn’t know that he thought could play characters in the movie. This kind of stuff is fine if you’re someone reading this book looking to actively learn about actors from this time period, but that’s not me. I’m reading this to hear what Tarantino has to say about these movies and nothing more - if I learn something, whoopty doo, but it’s primarily entertainment to me, and reading Tarantino display his esoteric knowledge of little-known actors from this time wasn’t entertaining.
The Rolling Thunder essay was when the book started to become a bit of a chore to get through (it didn’t seem like it warranted the page count for the kind of story it was) while I remember little to nothing about his final movie choice, The Funhouse - except for when he says at the start that Tobe Hooper’s previous, and vastly more famous, movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is what he considers a perfect move. And says nothing further on that matter. So frustrating - write about that movie instead of The Funhouse!!
Tarantino’s really into Brian De Palma and I’ve never seen what other people see in this director - aside from Scarface and The Untouchables, he’s really bad (and I’ve not seen either of those movies in years). After his gushing over Sisters, I saw a couple of De Palma movies he’d mentioned: Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981). Don’t bother with either. Dressed to Kill has its moments but it’s really dumb and over-the-top - that’s what I thought until I saw just how dumb and over-the-top De Palma gets with Blow Out! Awful movies.
He carries on with his De Palma praise in his titular essay Cinema Speculation: What If Brian De Palma Directed Taxi Driver Instead of Martin Scorsese? which didn’t tickle me so much. I get that it would be different in certain ways but I’m just not such a cinephile that this kind of conjecture does anything for me.
The Daisy Miller essay is the shortest and features the first of the Tarantino flourishes that I expect in his movies, because it’s really about the little known actor Barry Brown, who appears in the movie, and who killed himself shortly after. Tarantino not only appreciated Brown’s acting but also his writing - Brown turned out to be a film journalist in his youth, writing a fine piece on Bela Lugosi’s drug addiction and sad final days that appeared in Castle of Frankenstein magazine issue #10 and is reprinted in full here.
This is maybe what’s most laudable about Tarantino in this book: he champions great stuff, whether it’s high profile and well-known (Taxi Driver, Brian De Palma) as much as he does the lesser-known to completely forgotten. Who else would resurrect the memory of actor Barry Brown and underline his writing ability? Or, out of all the famous film critics of the 20th century - Pauline Kael, Siskel and Ebert, Richard Corliss - who would single out Kevin Thomas of the LA Times, as he does in his appreciation essay Second-String Samurai?
That’s a quality that makes for a great critic/reviewer - they’re discerning in their tastes but not in their choices. They’ll experience a wide range of both “high/low brow” content and have no problems in critiquing the former and recommending the latter if they find them so, regardless of whether or not it’s the prevailing view of the day.
Hence his essay New Hollywood in the Seventies: The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs vs The Movie Brats, that highlights the evolution in cinematic tastes (for the better, to make for more vital cinema) in how older directors adapted “literature” (eg. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon) while the younger directors picked the bestsellers of the day (eg. Spielberg’s Jaws). And it’s partly why Tarantino is critical of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, for that movie’s disdain towards adult entertainers, who he sticks up for in his essay.
(Complete tangent: Kubrick also directed The Shining, which was a bestseller at the time as well, which kinda upends Tarantino’s thesis. I wonder why Tarantino never comments on Stanley Kubrick in this book - there’s only a passing remark on Kubrick in The Funhouse essay but no opinion offered. Maybe because he’s an outlier who was “Old Hollywood” but transcended that label to become more popular over time, during “New Hollywood” and beyond? Maybe Tarantino is aware of how well-respected Kubrick is and doesn’t want to throw shade on him - out of respect for what he did for cinema, more than anything? It’s a strange omission that, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre comment, I wish he’d addressed in greater detail.)
Tarantino combines this adoration of the less-respected side of cinematic art in his final literary flourish of the book. There are footnotes throughout but The Funhouse has a footnote that requires an entire chapter(!), and is also the chapter that closes the book. It’s called Floyd, about a drifter who babysat Tarantino when he was a kid and who took him to see great grindhouse movies in black theatres - and was also an aspiring screenwriter whose magnum opus (never produced and forever lost) was about a black cowboy hero.
Years later, Tarantino would win the Oscar for the Django Unchained screenplay, which was about a black cowboy hero, and mentions in his essay that it was Floyd’s screenplay that first inspired him to start writing screenplays and get it into his head to write one about such a character. He regrets not thanking Floyd in his Oscar acceptance speech but acknowledges him here, keeping his memory alive (he died long ago), in this book.
As entertaining as some of the movie review chapters are, I liked the autobio essays the best. Floyd is a great closer, bookending perfectly with the opening chapter, Little Q Watching Big Movies, which really takes you into the cinema experience of the late ‘60s and ‘70s - its communal conviviality and its own brand of entertainment, like when audiences hated a movie and heckled it, much to young Quentin’s amusement.
It’s a shame he doesn’t write about modern movies but I understand why he doesn’t - he’s still a working director and knows many people within the industry and doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, or burn bridges for his final movie or other projects, etc. - and why he picked movies from 50 years ago where most of the people who worked on them are dead and can’t be upset with his opinions.
Tarantino also recently started a film podcast where he reviews old movies with his friend Roger Avary (the co-writer of Pulp Fiction, among other things) called The Video Archives Podcast, so if you liked what you read here and want a weekly dose, then check that out.
Cinema Speculation is an uneven collection of film essays, some of which are fun, some that are blase, and a few that are flat out boring. But, I found it worthwhile overall and also got some film recs that I’ll make an effort to see (Dirty Harry, The Getaway). Even if I read a lot of film criticism (and I don’t), I feel like I’d still appreciate this book because Tarantino has such a unique approach to film, in all its facets, and his genuine passion for and erudition of the medium comes across strongly on every page. He’s a really good writer too, as if you didn’t already know, who can write very enjoyably for the most part, educating and entertaining at the same time. If you’re a Tarantino or general movie fan, you’ll get something out of this one - if you’re neither, then prolly not.
Cut!
No comments:
Post a Comment