Quentin Tarantino
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Watch: The Tarantino Death Toll
Ever wonder how many people have died in Quentin Tarantino films? Or what’s behind the director’s seeming obsession with killing? Kevin B. Lee, Chief Video Essayist at Fandor, has tackled the bloody topic with a video essay on the body count in Tarantino’s films. Note the video’s warning: “the following video contains disturbing imagery of extreme violence and death.” In the text essay that accompanies the video (which you can watch above), Lee explains that he created this video after the release of Tarantino’s last film, Django Unchained, but this is the first time it’s being published (read the essay to understand […]
by Paula Bernstein on Dec 16, 2015 -
20 Years of Collaborating with Tarantino with Zero ADR: Production Sound Mixer Mark Ulano on The Hateful Eight
Few directors this side of Joseph Mankiewicz are as attentive to the clear, crisp presentation of dialogue as Quentin Tarantino, giving the always important role of production sound mixer even more weight on his sets. Since Jackie Brown in 1997, Tarantino has relied on Academy Award winner (for Titanic) Mark Ulano to capture his production sound. Tarantino’s latest, The Hateful Eight, represents some of Ulano’s finest work to date – which is saying something considering that he has over a hundred credits to his name, including The Master, Iron Man and Inglourious Basterds (for which he was nominated for another Oscar). […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 15, 2015 -
“Two Girls Coming into your House and Unleashing Havoc”: Eli Roth on Knock Knock
Eli Roth’s Knock Knock is to Fatal Attraction what that film was to Play Misty For Me: an homage that expands upon its source and intersects with the zeitgeist in immensely entertaining, provocative ways. Like both Attraction and Misty, Knock Knock is a cautionary tale and a male fantasy turned nightmare: Keanu Reeves plays a husband and father who, when left alone on Father’s Day, answers the door to find two gorgeous young women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) stranded in the rain and looking for help. He invites them in and eventually succumbs to their erotic overtures, quickly […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 8, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight
After a much ballyhooed pre-production script leak, The Hateful Eight is set to hit theaters Christmas Day from The Weinstein Company. Here is the first official trailer for Quentin Taratino’s eighth feature film, starring regulars Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth, alongside Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern and Demian Bichir as a motley crew of snowbound bounty hunters in post-War Wyoming.
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 12, 2015 -
Julia Marchese on The New State of The New Beverly and 35mm
Cinephiles on both coasts were rattled by Julia Marchese’s blog post last Friday entitled “I Will Not Be Censored,” concerning her departure from Los Angeles’ beloved New Beverly Cinema. Anyone who’s been to the New Bev within the last dozen years will recognize Marchese, for many the welcoming public face of the recently beleaguered rep house. But following a steady trickle of involvement from Quentin Tarantino — first paying the theater’s bills out of love, then becoming its owner, and finally, in September, announcing he’ll be directing a majority of the programming — Marchese was isolated within the staff, and […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Oct 27, 2014 -
Stray Links 9/1-9/5: Tarantino’s 35mm Prints, Dead Russians and Teddy Bear Detectives
The future of 35mm rep cinema, a personal history of cinephilia as mediated by changing archival access, how the garbage heap of “hot takes” colonizes the internet and more in this week’s round-up of assorted reading: • Quentin Tarantino has owned Los Angeles’ beloved New Beverly Cinema since 2007; now he plans to take over programming himself, drawing extensively upon his private collection of prints. Talking with the LA Weekly‘s Chuck Wilson, Tarantino repeatedly goes off on the crappiness of DCP, including this gem: I have all three Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood movies in I.B. Technicolor. Magnificent looking. I just […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2014 -
When Independent Film Anticipates An Audience
The arrival of summer blockbuster season and another Transformers installment means it’s time for critics to take to their think pieces and argue why Hollywood’s lowbrow, cash cow economy harms the more artful realm of independent film. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, meanwhile, had the good, iconoclastic sense to pen an article entitled “The Real Threat To Independent Film,” whereby he concludes that the field’s dismantler does not lie within Hollywood, but in independent film itself. “The most audacious low-budget American independent filmmaking,” writes Brody, “is threatened much more significantly by misplaced critical praise for art-house mediocrities than by Hollywood.” […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 8, 2014 -
“Don’t Go Through The System”: John Singleton Talks in Toronto
John Singleton was raised on silent movies. The 45-year-old director of Boyz in the Hood and the Shaft remake grew up next to the Century Drive-In in Inglewood, California. As a boy, he’d literally peek out his window and watch his heroes Bruce Lee and Billy Jack‘s Tom Laughlin battle on-screen without sound. “The first breast I saw was Pam Grier’s,” Singleton confessed to a rapt audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Tuesday night, hosted by director Clement Virgo as part of the city’s Black History Month celebrations. “Every time I see Pam Grier I tell her, ‘You made me want […]
by Allan Tong on Feb 14, 2013 -
Django Unchained Review
We expect a lot from Quentin Tarantino. A generation ago, we lined up in the cold and fought for tickets to behold the next Kubrick opus or the latest Star Wars episode. Today we do it for QT. This time, he unleashes Django Unchained. It’s an historical shoot-em-up drama set in the antebellum era of the American South. Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave-turned-bounty hunter who sets out to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from a sadistic plantation owner (Leonard DiCaprio). At his side is his mentor, a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz who brilliantly played […]
by Allan Tong on Dec 21, 2012 -
RZA on The Man with the Iron Fists
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Nov 7, 2012
