Re: Re:
BullsFan22 said:
Pulp Fiction, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained are my top 3 Tarantino flicks. It's not about the violence, it's about the acting, the old style, western/old european/spaghetti western/gangster style movies that sometimes flies over peoples heads,
Well again I've referred to what the real Spaghetti Westerns were. I am a huge Spaghetti Western fan, especially in the Zapata subgenre. I must have watched some 50 of those films, some are dull but still it's the best film genre in history. And the few excerpts of Django Unchained that I've seen totally miss the aesthetic of the old Italian films.
Again, in those Spagh Western, you had characters with filthy clothes, tanned skin with sweat on the forehead and a beard. You could see that they were coming from a long way. Sergio Leone brought authenticity to the genre.
With Tarantino, you feel like those characters were having a shower everyday, ... in the Old West. Compare:
Tarantino's cowboy characters have much more to do with the John Wayne type than with the Spaghetti type. Besides, the Spaghetti Westerns were rather centered around the Texas-Mexico border while the Tarantino film seems like it's set in the Rockies.
I know that he claimed those Euro type of films as an influence (like also the great Italian poliziottescho genre or the gialli, I guess) but the way I see it, he understood nothing of it. The Zapata Westerns, the Poliziotteschi and the Gialli were politically oriented films. Franco Nero described them as films that could concern anybody who believe in social justice
(and yet they were despised by the left-wing critique, which labelled them as fascist, justicialist). I don't see anything of that in Tarantino's films. Anyway, you can't find any sympathy for the poor in any of the Hollywood films. It's a cinema that is purely based on Entertainment and on dream (in order to make the Friday Night moronic woman cry!) while the European cinema is a cinema of social criticism, the characters are the incarnation of a social conscience. In this respect, the Euro cinema has a lot more to do with literature (especially the Italian cinema, starting with the neo-realist genre of the immediate post-war period and then the above mentioned genres or else the French cinema of the 1930's).
Jean-François Giré is a critic who defended those Italian films. He argued that "what the Italians have never been forgiven is to have filmed the loss of our innocence and made it a rejoicing show". I kind of agree on that.
BullsFan22 said:
If I ever get the chance, I'll ask Tarantino if he based some of the Basterds scenes on the old Yugoslavian Partisan films which focused mainly on the WWII resistance movements against the Nazis.
That would just be aggravating then.
I keep saying. When I heard Mélanie Laurent shouting: "Jewish Vengeance !!!" I knew it was not my kind of film. These people (Tarantino & Weinstein) don't have the same values as I have... By the way, I'm just baffled that Mélanie Laurent became such huge film star. She really has no talent.
Given, my knowledge of cinema is pretty limited, but I'd say there's nothing old style about Tarantino's movies.
He's actually mixing up everything that already has been done.
If I were to take his western films, it's just that he does not realize that Westerns had their place in time. He's trying to emulate the old-time great, never matching them but never inventing anything new. While when Leone created the Spaghetti Western genre with Per un Pugno di dollari (in 1964), it just like an atomic bomb. It was a western like you had never seen before, totally baroque, with concern for costume authenticity, etc. and then came the Zapata subgenre and suddenly the Italians put in the spotlight a long-time forgotten or belittled hero, the Mexican peon! This whole era must have been so wonderful.
You shouldn't be ashamed to have a limited knowledge of cinema mate because it's after all a minor art compared to literature, just read good classic books, a book is always better than a film, because of temporality.
But if I have to recommend a genre, that would be the Spaghetti-Zapata Western such as "El Chucho, quien sabe?" (1964), "La resa dei conti" (1966), "Il Mercenario" (1968), "Vamos a matar, Compañeros" (1970), "O Cangaçeiro" (1970) or "Faccia a Faccia" (1967). These are really inspiring films.
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