Continuing my countdown of the films of Quentin Tarantino:
The movie that started it all. 1992’s Reservoir Dogs is one of the most exciting and assured cinematic debuts in history, a brutal but clever bit of cool-guy showmanship.
I remember seeing this movie in a theater where they had posted a note in the box office window saying the film contained intense scenes of violence and refunds would not be granted to people who walked out. That was an eye-opener.
Continuing my countdown of the films of Quentin Tarantino:
Surprisingly, of all the Tarantino films I rewatched, the 1994 classic Pulp Fiction fell the most in my estimation.
Don’t get me wrong. It remains a crackling pop art masterpiece, filled with memorable dialogue and visuals indelibly seared into my brain. It’s an all-timer, no question.
But 25 years later, in light of all movies Pulp Fiction inspired, it feels less revolutionary. Or maybe its revolutionary status becomes more a simple fact and less a reason to love it.
It’s always a treat when a Toad the Wet Sprocket song pops up on Random Weekends. With so much else to listen to, it’s too seldom that I fire up their albums on my own.
This song comes from Toad’s 1997 album Coil, their fifth, and their last before a reunion album 16 years later.
I recently saw the film Blinded by the Light, a movie about a young Pakistani teen in London who finds creative salvation in the music of Bruce Springsteen. It’s a lovely, uplifting film that really understands the mind-blowing phenomenon of discovering an artist who speaks to your very core.
It also made me want to dig up some old Bruce Springsteen albums and pay my respects, though I haven’t gotten around to that just yet.
Continuing my countdown of the films of Quentin Tarantino:
The top six films on my Tarantino countdown are all stone-cold classics, and I’ve shuffled several of them around a few times before landing on my final ranking.
The truth is, whichever one I’ve seen most recently tends to move up the list, until I see another one and the process starts again. They’re all that damn good.
#7 – Death Proof
Of all the Tarantino movies I rewatched to create this list, 2007’s Death Proof is the one that jumped the most in my estimation.
Released first as part of the Grindhouse double feature along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, but later at a longer length as a standalone film, Death Proof is a grungy homage to the exploitation films Tarantino grew up on.
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.
