{"id":336909,"date":"2025-12-10T13:57:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T13:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/336909\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T13:57:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T13:57:07","slug":"quentin-tarantino-needs-to-stop-criticising-films-and-start-making-them-again-quentin-tarantino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/336909\/","title":{"rendered":"Quentin Tarantino needs to stop criticising films and start making them again | Quentin Tarantino"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did Quentin Tarantino<\/a> just put Paul Dano<\/a> into the alpha league of the world\u2019s most loved and admired movie actors?<\/p>\n

His recent insults aimed at Dano<\/a> counterprovoked a flood of defensive praise, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Dano\u2019s costar in There Will Be Blood, publicly endorsing it<\/a>. But was Tarantino\u2019s pronouncement just bluster and flex? Will he end up casting Dano in his next film \u2013 a turnaround like Donald Trump making nice with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after pretty much threatening him with nuclear war? Or are we witnessing a kind of midlife emotional crisis in the heart of one of the most brilliant directors of his generation? I speak as a superfan with reservations.<\/p>\n

In his recent podcast interview with the legendary controversial author Bret Easton Ellis \u2013 and therefore perhaps in a mood to provoke and \u00e9pater les bourgeois de la critique \u2013 Tarantino unveiled his top 20 best films of the 21st century. Asked why Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s There Will Be Blood<\/a> was only at number 5, Tarantino declared that Dano was the problem: \u201c[Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister \u2026 He\u2019s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hmm. This isn\u2019t an accurate assessment of Dano. But it could be that Tarantino\u2019s feelings about Anderson are in any case more complicated than that.<\/p>\n

The top 10 half of his picks is an almost ostentatiously normie list, a Letterboxd civilian list, in reverse order: Woody Allen\u2019s Midnight in Paris, Edgar Wright\u2019s Shaun of the Dead, George Miller\u2019s Mad Max: Fury Road, Tony Scott\u2019s Unstoppable, David Fincher\u2019s Zodiac, PTA\u2019s There Will Be Blood, Christopher Nolan\u2019s Dunkirk, Sofia Coppola\u2019s Lost in Translation, Lee Unkrich\u2019s Toy Story 3 and Ridley Scott\u2019s wartime action-thriller Black Hawk Down at the very top. Well, OK. No one should patronise a cinephile connoisseur like Tarantino by dismissing this selection as populist \u2013 almost all of them are absolutely great, although I am baffled by the inclusion of Tony Scott\u2019s dire Unstoppable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is Tarantino trolling the wokesters by including Woody Allen? I would have gone for Allen\u2019s Blue Jasmine. I am not every bit as saucer-eyed about Miller\u2019s Mad Max revivals as other people, but they\u2019re certainly really good, and Scott\u2019s Black Hawk Down is a wildly impressive two-hour-plus action sequence \u2013 but, please, Scott\u2019s Gladiator is surely a better film. As for the others: yes, absolutely great \u2013 and on a patriotic note, it\u2019s nice to see Wright\u2019s Shaun of the Dead, which way back at the beginning of the 00s revived self-respect for the British film industry.<\/p>\n

It is certainly not the hipster-obscure selection that you might expect, certainly from, say, reading Tarantino\u2019s fascinating memoir Cinema Speculation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The more recondite titles (and non-English-language titles) come in the 10 lower down, in reverse order from 20 to 11: Steven Spielberg\u2019s West Side Story, Eli Roth\u2019s Cabin Fever, Bennett Miller\u2019s Moneyball, Prachya Pinkaew\u2019s Chocolate, Rob Zombie\u2019s The Devil\u2019s Rejects, Mel Gibson\u2019s The Passion of the Christ, Richard Linklater\u2019s School of Rock, Jeff Tremaine\u2019s Jackass: The Movie, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado\u2019s Big Bad Wolves, and Kinji Fukasaku\u2019s Battle Royale.<\/p>\n

That seems more to be the QT we know and love. There\u2019s Fukasuku\u2019s badass survival-reality masterpiece Battle Royale \u2013 which Tarantino correctly says was ripped off by the Hunger Games franchise \u2013 the Thai martial-arts actioner Chocolate and the Israeli horror-thriller Big Bad Wolves. I agree with Tarantino that Spielberg\u2019s West Side Story is great (although here too Tarantino is a bit salty about the cast: \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe I liked the lead [Ansel Elgort] as I didn\u2019t like him in anything else\u201d ). I like his praise for Brad Pitt\u2019s movie-star mystique in Moneyball, although Pitt is far better in Tarantino\u2019s own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I\u2019m not down with Roth\u2019s Cabin Fever or Zombie\u2019s tiresome Devil\u2019s Rejects, and Gibson\u2019s Passion is a non-sacred turkey fit only for the culture wars. Linklater\u2019s School of Rock is great fun, but only a contorted inverse snobbery pose can put that in there and not Linklater\u2019s real masterpiece, Boyhood.<\/p>\n

Paul Dano and Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s There Will Be Blood, 2007. Photograph: Collection Christophel\/Alamy<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re back to Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a> and There Will Be Blood; Tarantino wouldn\u2019t be human if he wasn\u2019t aware of PTA\u2019s status as a rival to his own and of Anderson as a film-maker who seems to be creating work with more fluency and productivity than Tarantino right now, and he might have picked a quarrel with Dano on the spur of the moment just to take PTA down a few pegs.<\/p>\n

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Tarantino recently said that his next film and perhaps his last film would be a project entitled The Movie Critic \u2013 now reportedly shelved \u2013 inspired by the LA Times\u2019s Kevin Thomas, who Tarantino loved growing up: the guy entrusted with the popcorn fare that the main critics wrinkled their noses at. This intriguing and amusing list, in which commercialism and cinephilia are such a complex mix, may in fact constitute the \u201cmovie critic\u201d performance that his abandoned film was going to be.<\/p>\n

So how does Tarantino see himself now? Does he think he has one big masterpiece left in him? I think he does. More than one, probably. He has said he doesn\u2019t want to go on past 10 films, having so far made nine, and said that a great master like Don Siegel should have quit while he was ahead after Escape from Alcatraz in 1979.<\/p>\n

But the time has come for QT to stop sulking in his tent, stop making irrelevant pronouncements on podcasts. Tarantino created this 10-film idea; he certainly can\u2019t quit at nine films \u2013 but there\u2019s an enormous amount of self-imposed pressure. This 10-and-no-more thing has pointlessly paralysed him, and his Dano outburst is just a symptom of that. My prediction is that Tarantino will go for an adaptation, his first since Jackie Brown: he will find a novel and supercharge the pulp with shock and flair. And Paul Dano<\/a> will be in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did Quentin Tarantino just put Paul Dano into the alpha league of the world\u2019s most loved and admired…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-336909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}