It sounds like a strange comparison, but Tarantino, in one way, reminds me of Spielberg, in that his movies are always thematically quite dense. Death Proof, like, say, Jurassic Park, features a strong theme that resonates down to the smallest of details, from broad story outlines to the tiniest of gestures.

( Read more... )

Quentin Tarantino's movies are explosions of meaning.  They spew significance of many different kinds in every direction on a shot-by-shot basis.  Every element of every shot is fraught with references, usually to other movies.  As such, they invite multiple readings from a number of different points of view and philosophical schools.  For instance, I just read a book-length monograph on Pulp Fiction that examined every aspect of the movie but one -- what the characters in the movie do and say.

I am not smart enough or cool enough to catch every one of the thousands of references that give Tarantino's movies their postmodern punch -- I've never seen a Shaw Bros kung-fu movie, for instance.  So I will limit myself in this analysis to what I do understand: characters and their motivations.  And I will leave the examination of angles, design choices, costumes, hairstyles, cultural freight and songs to others.

( Read more... )

Heads up, people: when I get done analyzing the screenplays of Steven Spielberg's movies (hey, I've only got nine more to go!) I plan to move on to general analysis of some of my favorite screenplays. Some of these screenplays are universally acknowledged as masterworks of the form, others are simply my personal favorites, screenplays that, for one reason or another, changed my understanding of what a screenplay is, or could be. There are many, many screenplays I admire that are not on this list, primarily because when I think of those movies, I think of the movie first and the screenplay second. A movie like, say, 8 1/2, I think of first as a triumph of filmmaking and secondarily as a work of screenwriting. A movie like Alien has a very strong script and is a wonderful motion picture, but didn't open my eyes the way that its sequel did. A movie like Seven has a solid script and a phenomenally talented director who really elevated it into another realm. These movies, for me anyway, are more successes of interpretation than of writing, whereas the movies on my list below I think would have been excellent, or at least watchable, no matter who was directing them. A few of them I admire in spite of, or because of, their flaws. All of them are movies I keep coming back to in order to steal things draw inspiration.

In the order their DVDs happen to be in on my shelf: