In Contention

Tag: True Romance

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Tarantino characters

    Christoph Waltz in Inglourious BasterdsIt’s been over a month since we cranked out an installment of The Lists, but with Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” set for release on Friday, it seemed a good time to cook up a new collective.

    When most people praise Tarantino’s skill as a screenwriter, they tend to focus on his well-honed ear for dialogue.  But I have always been much more enchanted by his ability to create a wide array of separately interesting characters that are nevertheless of a piece with the filmmaker’s pulp sense of the world.

    Each of Tarantino’s films are ensembles of one level or another, usually elevated off the page by the performances he gets out of actor eager to take on something fresh.  And no matter the quality of Tarantino’s work behind the camera, the material is always, if nothing else, unique.

    So a list of the greatest characters ever conceived by the man seemed to be the best course of action.  The list doesn’t merely include characters from Tarantino’s films as a director, mind you.  Those he conceived in original screenplays filmed by other directors were considered as well.  Eight films are featured on the list, two of them twice.

    The only Tarantino-affiliated films that don’t appear are “From Dusk Till Dawn” (a personal favorite that, if I was asked on another day, might show up somewhere) and the “Death Proof” segment of “Grindhouse” (which, if I were feeling particularly generous one day, might yield a mention for Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike).

    All other Tarantino extravaganzas are well-represented.  Let’s dig in here…

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  • How ‘Basterds’ fits into the Tarantino mythos

    Eli Roth in Inglourious BasterdsOne of the most exciting aspects of Quentin Tarantino’s breed of cinema for this cinema obsessive who held the guy in a rather glowing light back in the mid-1990s was the idea that all of the directors’ films were connected in some way.  It went beyond the simplicity of, “Hey, cool, Vincent Vega from ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Vic Vega from ‘Reservoir Dogs’ are brothers.”  It said something about the power of creativity, manifesting a vast fictional world and playing God with its characters.  It was something, for me, that defined Tarantino as unique.

    Perhaps because the novelty wore off, perhaps because he got slightly bored with it, Tarantino eased off the throttle on this particular aspect of his films somewhere along the line, leaving people to making stabbing guesses, such as the idea that Samuel L. Jackson’s piano player in “Kill Bill” is actually Jules from “Pulp Fiction” walking the earth.  Or perhaps it all just got a bit subtler, I don’t know.  I would have liked a vast expansion of all of this, however.  It could have been rather defining and exciting.

    Rodrigo Perez at The Playlist has stumbled onto a connection between “Inglourious Basterds” and “True Romance” that keeps the Tarantinoverse light burning a little longer.

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