Tarantino's Greek Chorus

By Steve Evans

Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino understand how to use songs in a film like no other living director. Take your pick: Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Casino, Jackie Brown, The Departed, Django Unchained. Brilliant music in every one. Great song selections underline the storyline without bludgeoning home the point.

Both men have new films coming out this year. Tarantino’s lands first. The full trailer for Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood dropped today and it promises amazing entertainment. A film about lost innocence along the boulevard of broken dreams. I encourage you to check out the new trailer on YouTube.

Back on point, one of the tunes he’s using on the soundtrack is by the obscure band Los Bravos. It’s a typical Tarantino choice: all but forgotten, catchy as hell, contemporaneous to the film’s setting and brimming with sly commentary about the onscreen action. Just like a great soundtrack should.

So if you know the fate of Sharon Tate and listen to the lyrics of Bring a Little Lovin', you’ll discover that Tarantino still brings a positively wicked sense of ironic counterpoint to his song selections. There’s a reason he has a rep as one of the hippest cats in the movie bidness. As for Sharon and bug-eyed Charlie Manson, whether Tarantino attempts to rewrite history à la Inglourious Basterds will be determined July 26. Unless you're among the fortunate who got to see the premiere at Cannes this afternoon, after which Tarantino and his cast received a six-minute standing ovation.


Cinema Uprising copyright © 2019 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

Another Tarantino Western? Is that all ya got?

By Steve Evans

Coming on the heels of his financially successful D'Jango Unchained, Quentin Tarantino revealed this weekend the working title of his next film: The Hateful Eight. It's another western. Word is, this won't be a D'Jango sequel. The title actually suggests nothing so much as a variation of Inglourious Basterds, which was, like most of Tarantino's work, a mashup of elements from long-forgotten films.

Maybe the title is a riff on John Sturges' western classic, The Magnificent Seven (1960), itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's tremendous action film Seven Samurai (1954).

I've long since lost interest in Tarantino's reworked homages to mostly obscure genre films. Were it not for his gift of writing dialog, I would probably stop watching his stuff. His best films, now two decades behind him, delight the viewer with non-linear plotting and a narrative structure that coils around itself like a snail's shell. It's no coincidence that Tarantino's major industry awards come from his writing, not directing and certainly not his acting.

Considering that dialog and narrative structure are his strongest traits, D'Jango was a surprisingly straight-line revenge tale peppered with as much violence as the current R rating can withstand. Basterds was told in a similarly linear fashion, with none of the meandering whoop-de-doo that makes other Tarantino films more interesting to watch.

I write this not to bash the guy, but to put forward the modest wish that if he insists on stirring up another cinematic equivalent of Mulligan's Stew, that he at least write a more engaging and clever script -- always his strong suit -- to justify another Tarantino trip down movie-memory lane. You've seen a lot of movies, Quentin, but so have I. Your work of late has the whiff of familiarity.

Honor and revenge are the thematic foundations of all Tarantino films. Especially bloody revenge. I suppose someone could make a career out of payback fantasies, culling the best parts from old movies that a majority of your audience has never seen. Truth be told, that's exactly what Tarantino's been doing for 20 years, to curious acclaim and great financial reward. Well, bully for him. It's getting stale.

What else ya got?

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2014 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.