Films directed by Quentin Tarantino

292 quotes found

"During the 1970s there was a queasy urban myth that, in New York cinemas, drug dealers were skulking down the aisles at midnight shows jabbing innocent moviegoers with needles, so instantly enslaving them to heroin. After one single viewing of Kill Bill Volume 1, starring Uma Thurman - Quentin Tarantino's first movie for six years - I felt like the director himself had cacklingly jammed his hypodermic into my throbbing arm. Really, no one delivers that sheer, aneurism-inducing rush with the same intravenous efficiency as Tarantino. It may not be the best film of the year, nor the best Tarantino film. But it's sure as hell got to be the best way, the only way, to mainline pure adrenaline in the cinema. Whether this results in euphoria or nausea depends on the needle-user. Brutally bloody and thrillingly callous from first to last, Kill Bill covers its action in a kind of delirium-glaze. Its storyline rolls out in a simulacrum universe, a place which looks and sounds like planet Earth in the early 21st century, but isn't. It's a martial- arts movie universe where the normal laws of economics, police work, physiology and gravity do not apply: a world composed of a brilliantly allusive tissue of spaghetti western and Asian martial-arts genres, on which the director's own, instantly identifiable presence is mounted as a superstructure."

- Kill Bill: Volume 1

0 likesAction films2000s American filmsFilms directed by Quentin TarantinoMartial arts filmsScreenplays by Quentin Tarantino
"The movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers. The characters consist of their characteristics. Lurking beneath everything, as it did with "Pulp Fiction," is the suggestion of a parallel universe in which all of this makes sense in the same way that a superhero's origin story makes sense. There is a sequence here (well, it's more like a third of the movie) where The Bride single-handedly wipes out O-Ren and her entire team, including the Crazy 88 Fighters, and we are reminded of Neo fighting the clones of Agent Smith in "The Matrix Reloaded," except the Crazy 88 Fighters are individual human beings, I think. Do they get their name from the Crazy 88 blackjack games on the Web, or from Episode 88 of the action anime "Tokyo Crazy Paradise", or should I seek help? The Bride defeats the 88 superb fighters (plus various bodyguards and specialists) despite her weakened state and recently paralyzed legs because she is a better fighter than all of the others put together. Is that because of the level of her skill, the power of her focus, or the depth of her need for vengeance? Skill, focus and need have nothing to do with it: She wins because she kills everybody without getting killed herself. You can sense Tarantino grinning a little as each fresh victim, filled with foolish bravado, steps forward to be slaughtered. Someone has to win in a fight to the finish, and as far as the martial arts genre is concerned, it might as well be the heroine. (All of the major characters except Bill are women, the men having been emasculated right out of the picture.) "Kill Bill, Volume 1" is not the kind of movie that inspires discussion of the acting, but what Thurman, Fox and Liu accomplish here is arguably more difficult than playing the nuanced heroine of a Sundance thumb-sucker. There must be presence, physical grace, strength, personality and the ability to look serious while doing ridiculous things. The tone is set in an opening scene, where The Bride lies near death and a hand rubs at the blood on her cheek, which will not come off because it is clearly congealed makeup. This scene further benefits from being shot in black and white; for QT, all shots in a sense are references to other shots—not particular shots from other movies, but archetypal shots in our collective moviegoing memories."

- Kill Bill: Volume 1

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"[lighting up a cigarette after Budd has collapsed from a black mamba bite] I'm sorry, Budd. That was rude of me, wasn't it? Budd, I'd like you to meet my friend, the black mamba. Black mamba, this is Budd. You know, before I picked that little fella up, I looked it up on the internet. Fascinating creature, the black mamba. Listen to this. [reads from a notepad] "In Africa, the saying goes, 'In the bush an elephant can kill you, a leopard can kill you, and a black mamba can kill you. But only with the mamba' — and this is true in Africa since the dawn of time — 'is death sure. Hence its handle: Death Incarnate.'" Pretty cool, huh? "Its neurotoxic venom is one of nature's most effective poisons, acting on the nervous system, causing paralysis. The venom of a black mamba can kill a human in four hours if, say, bitten on the ankle or the thumb. However, a bite to the face or torso can bring death from paralysis within 20 minutes." Now, you should listen to this, 'cause this concerns you. "The amount of venom that can be delivered from a single bite can be gargantuan." You know, I've always liked that word "gargantuan," and I so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence. "If not treated quickly with anti-venom, 10 to 15 milligrams can be fatal to human beings. However, the black mamba can deliver as much as 100 to 400 milligrams of venom from a single bite." [puts out her cigarette and addresses Budd] Now in these last agonizing minutes of life you have left, let me answer the question you asked earlier more thoroughly. Right at this moment, the biggest "R" I feel is Regret. Regret that maybe the greatest warrior I have ever known met her end at the hands of a bushwhackin', scrub, alky piece of shit like you. That woman deserved better."

- Kill Bill: Volume 2

0 likesAction films2000s American filmsFilms directed by Quentin TarantinoMartial arts filmsScreenplays by Quentin Tarantino
"Kim is unapologetic about her gun, and Tarantino rewards her and her friends by ending the movie after they’ve killed Stuntman Mike, instead of portraying the consequences of their crime. But other films of the 1960s and ’70s — the B-movies that Death Proof riffs on — are not so eager to justify their female characters’ violent impulses. In The Warriors (1979), the title gang meets an all-female mob called the Lizzies who invite their male counterparts to hang at their apartment. This seduction turns out to be a ruse, and the Lizzies attempt to kill the Warriors. Of course, the women are all lousy shots, so the Warriors get away, but not before the softest and youngest among them is injured. Director Walter Hill doesn’t include one frame of a woman getting in a punch, but there are plenty of shots of the Warriors nimbly defeating their weaker foils. Tarantino allows his female characters to land more than a few blows. You could argue that he does something similar to what Steiner accuses Andrea Dworkin of doing in her 1990 novel, Mercy. That novel tells the story of Andrea, a woman who endures constant physical and sexual violence over her lifetime and eventually attempts to mitigate her agony by killing men. In her critique of the novel in The Scandal of Pleasure, Steiner points to an unresolved contradiction: The violence that men perpetuate turns out to be the only way to alleviate the protagonist’s pain. So Andrea kills men, a twist of events that Steiner calls “intolerant, simplistic, and often just as brutal as what it protests.” Are the women of Death Proof just as brutal as what they protest? Is Tarantino’s fantasy an imagined corrective to gender-based violence, or just another form of it? Feminist critic Ellen Willis, who died in 2006, might have favored the latter interpretation. In a 1977 Village Voice article, “Beginning to See the Light,” Willis writes about her ambivalence toward punk rocker Patti Smith: “I’m also uncomfortable with her androgynous, one-of-the-guys image; its rebelliousness is seductive, but it plays into a kind of misogyny…that consents to distinguish a woman who acts like one of the guys (and is also sexy and conspicuously ‘liberated’) from the general run of stupid girls.” Her description of Smith could certainly apply to the women of Death Proof: Stuntwomen Zoë and Kim are self-proclaimed “gearheads,” berating the other girls for preferring John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink to classic car-chase movies like Vanishing Point."

- Grindhouse (film)

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"If Death Proof is Tarantino’s fantasy of what women talk about when they get together, it’s a pretty great one. Those “long, long, long” conversations take on a loping, aimless rhythm that mirrors the pulse of the film itself. Perhaps they make Bradshaw uneasy in part because these lengthy girl-on-girl chats are not something we see too often in movies. It feels like watching an actual group of women talk about their lives: How far they’re willing to take things with the men they’re dating, their plans for the evening, how they’re going to score pot. (Not through any men: “We don’t score ourselves, we’re gonna be stuck with them all fucking night.”) With the exception of Rose McGowan and Rosario Dawson, Tarantino cast relatively underexposed actresses to play the lead women. It’s hard to place them in the context of other films, which makes their intrepid characters feel both true to life and super-human. They’re tough, quick-witted women who are simultaneously powerful, unapologetic, sexy, fun, angry, and reckless. They do whatever they feel like doing. And they look so cool doing it. The stuntwomen characters in Death Proof aren’t just stand-ins for actresses on a film shoot; they’re surrogates for the female viewer who perform feats of strength and tenacity that ordinary women can only daydream of. This is why it’s so upsetting that people mistook the film for a fetishistic, misogynist screed. That it was mostly women who protested the film is particularly disappointing. After all, art, as Steiner argues, can do things reality can’t. A decade after its release, Death Proof demonstrates that when it comes to gender violence, 2007, or even 2017, can still feel a lot like the 1970s — and in its cartoonish depiction of evil men, it gives those ordinary women license to get angry about the everlasting problem of brutality against women. Watching Death Proof, or any revenge fantasy, is a powerful act of vengeance-by-proxy — one in which everyone gets to keep their limbs."

- Grindhouse (film)

0 likesFilms directed by Quentin TarantinoFilms about technologyFilms about serial killersApocalyptic filmsFilms about zombies
"[Showing Django and Schultz a human skull] This is Ben. He's an old joe that lived around here for a long time, and I do mean a long damn time. Old Ben here took care of my daddy and my daddy's daddy. Till he up and keeled over one day, old Ben took care of me. Growin' up the son of a huge plantation owner in Mississippi puts a white man in contact with a whole lotta black faces. I spent my whole life here, right here in Candyland, surrounded by black faces. Now seein' 'em every day, day in and day out, I only had one question: why don't they kill us? Now right out there on that porch, three times a week for fifty years, old Ben here would shave my daddy with a straight razor. Now, if I was old Ben, I woulda cut my daddy's goddamn throat, an' it wouldn't-a taken me no fifty years of doin' neither. But he never did. Why not? See, the science of phrenology is crucial to understandin' the separation of our two species. [Picking up a hacksaw] And the skull of the African here? The area associated with submissiveness is larger than any human or any other sub-human species on planet Earth. [Saws a piece off the back of the skull, brushes it off, and holds it up] If you examine this piece of skull here you'll notice three distinct dimples. Here, here and here. Now, if I was holdin' the skull of an Issac Newton or a Galileo, these three dimples would be found in the area of the skull most associated with creativity. But this is the skull of old Ben. And in the skull of old Ben, unburdened by genius, these three dimples exist in the area of the skull most associated with servility. [To Django] Now bright boy, I will admit you are pretty clever. But if I took this hammer here, and I bashed in your skull with it, you would have the same three dimples in the same place as old Ben."

- Django Unchained

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"[To Django] Your black ass been all them motherfuckers at the big house could talk about for the last few hours. Seem like white folk ain't never had a bright idea in they life is comin' up with all kinds of ways to kill your ass. Now mind you, most of them ideas had to do with fuckin' with your fun parts. Now that may seem like a good idea, but truth is when you snip a nigga's nuts most of 'em bleed out in oh, about seven minutes. Most of 'em. Well, more than most. Then I says, "Shitfire, the niggers we sells to LeQuint Dickey got it worse than that!" And they still saying, "Let's whip him to death!" or "Throw him to the mandingos! Feed him to Stonesipher's dogs!" I said "What's so special about that? We do that shit all the time. Hell's bells, the niggers we sells to LeQuint Dickey got it worse than that!" Lo and behold! Out of nowhere, Miss Lara come up with the bright idea of givin' your ass to the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company. And as a slave of the LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, henceforth till the day you die, all day, every day, you will be swingin' a sledgehammer, turnin' big rocks into little rocks. Now when you get there, they gonna take away your name, gi'ya a number and a sledgehammer and say, "Get to work!" One word of sass, they cuts out your tongue. They good at it too. You won't bleed out. Oh, they does that real good! They gonna work yout, all day, every day, till your back give out. Then they gonna hitcha in the head with a hammer, and throw your ass down the nigga hole, and that will be the story of you, Django!"

- Django Unchained

0 likesFilms directed by Quentin Tarantino2010s American filmsWestern filmsDrama filmsScreenplays by Quentin Tarantino