Continuing my countdown of the films of Quentin Tarantino:
Maybe it says more about my opinion of Westerns than about the films of Quentin Tarantino, but I just realized the bottom of my list is made up of QT’s explorations of Western tropes.
Django Unchained looks at American slavery through the lens of a Black bounty hunter on a quest to win back his wife from a plantation owner. And for most of its nearly three hour running time it is one of Tarantino’s best films.
Continuing my countdown of the films of Quentin Tarantino:
Though Tarantino considers the Kill Bill films one complete package, it is easy to consider them separately.
For one thing, that’s how they were released into theaters, with a delay between them of several months. But even more significantly, each film has a distinct style and borrows from specific and different genres.
My appreciation for Quentin Tarantino was recently rekindled by his splendid new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I decided to rewatch all of his films to revisit their pleasures, see how they’ve aged, and look at them in context of his entire filmography.
I spent a rewarding couple of weeks catching up with all ten films (including a rewatching of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and I am now ready to present my definitive ranked list of Tarantino’s movies.
I’m joking when I say “definitive” because I have shuffled this list at least a dozen times before settling on the order I’m going with here. I feel rock solid about the #1 and #10 movies but the rest are a little more fluid.
Here’s a track from David Byrne’s 2001 album Look Into the Eyeball, a record that represents the moment my fandom started to wane.
Prior to this, Byrne has released a string of four great solo albums between 1989 and 1997, culminating with Feelings, the best of them. That period also found me in my late teens and early 20s, a prime musical discovery zone.
I went five years between She & Him songs on Random Weekends, posting the first back in 2014 and the second earlier this month. Now, just three weeks later, the duo shows up again.
Little surprises like this that go hand-in-hand with mathematical randomness are the most satisfying part of Random iTunes Weekends. I love the anomalies and clusters that inevitably pop up when you repeatedly spin the wheel.
