He desperately wants us to be in awe of him,to know that he’s not just a cool guy now;he was born that way. He tells us that,when he was 15 but tall enough to get into R-rated movies on his own,for example,he sawTaxi Driver for the first time “with an (except for me) all-black audience”. “What was our response?” he asks. “I dug it,they dug it,and as an audience,we dug it.” There’s an unsettling kind of desperation in this need to dig.
Despite this,there is much to like aboutCinema Speculation. As Tarantino scrutinises some of the key American films and filmmakers of the late 1960s and the ’70s,he might come off as a bit of a blabbermouth,but he is movie-savvy.
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Casting an insightful eye acrossBullitt (1968),Dirty Harry (1971) and director Don Siegel,Deliverance andThe Getaway (both 1972),The Outfit (1973),Rolling Thunder (1977) and their director,John Flynn,and Hardcore (1979) and its director,Paul Schrader,he speculates shrewdly on the compromised heroes and charismatic bad guys who populate the action films of the era.
His commentary is seasoned with tasty behind-the-scenes titbits as well as an unbridled passion for his subject. He has clearly read widely about film and there’s even an entire chapter on how much he digsLos Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas. Alert to the cultural shifts that accompany the changing times,he’s perceptive about the shift in Hollywood from the “post-’60s anti-establishment auteurs” (Altman,Rafelson,Penn,Ashby,Friedkin&co.) to “the movie brat generation” (whose number includes Coppola,Scorsese,de Palma,Spielberg and Lucas).
“When the anti-establishment auteurs did genre films,” he writes,“they engaged in genre deconstruction. The movie brats embraced genre films for their own ends. They didn’t want (for the most part) to make art film meditations on genre films;they wanted to make the best genre films ever made.”
The problem withCinema Speculation,finally,is Tarantino’s scattershot approach. He’s desperately in need of an editor,although I wouldn’t want the assignment:I could be wrong,but I suspect he thinks he knows it all. But persistent digressions,interesting as some of them are,threaten to erase points he’s trying to make. His grammar is ramshackle,even allowing for the fact that he’s using the American version,and his viewpoints are generally throwaway rather than coherently argued.
In short,the book perfectly illustrates the notion that,even if you can take the boy out of the video store,you can’t take the video store out of the boy. You dig?
Cinema Speculation byQuentin Tarantino is published byWeidenfeld&Nicolson,$34.99.
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