Quentin Tarantino made headlines earlier this month when he unveiled his definitive and divisve list of the 20 best films of the 21st century — one pick per director — and it certainly got people talking, that’s for sure. The director dropped his favorite movies since January 1, 2000, while appearing on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, where he explained what it was most that mattered to him as a movie watcher as well as an auteur. Surprisingly, or perhaps less so, if you know his style, there were no arthouse picks. Instead, we saw films like Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, Toy Story 3, Midnight in Paris, and Zodiac.
Tarantino tried to explain that making the list wasn’t about being definitive or having consensus with others, it was just about what stuck in his brain. As Bret Easton Ellis observed, the list reveals a taste obsessed with irreverence and entertainment value — films that are bold, aggressive, and stylistically commanding.
Why Does Quentin Tarantino Love ‘Black Hawk Down’?
Tarantino launched into a passionate description of what made him love Ridley Scott‘s war epic Black Hawk Down so much, saying:
“I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve […] Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is […] this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an ‘Apocalypse Now’ sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it. It keeps up the intensity for 2 hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is, and I watched it again recently, my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie; it had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”
Josh Hartnett leads as Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann, alongside Eric Bana as Delta Force operator Hoot Gibson and Ewan McGregor as desk-bound Ranger John Grimes. The film also features a large, now-A-list cast: Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard, Jason Isaacs, Ron Eldard, Ewen Bremner, Orlando Bloom, Tom Hardy, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jeremy Piven, Ty Burrell, Ioan Gruffudd, Kim Coates, Gabriel Casseus, Hugh Dancy, and Glenn Morshower.
Black Hawk Down is streaming now on Pluto TV.
Release Date
December 28, 2001
Runtime
145 minutes