I think Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino should swap for a movie. It would be fun.

Alternate universe indicated in set dressing by Kevin Smith Pulp Fiction and Quentin Tarantino Mallrats posters

oldshowbiz:

The Golden Girls (1988) featuring Quentin Tarantino 

Thinking about how specifically a San Fernando Valley movie Licorice Pizza was, got to thinking how amusing it would be to periodize Quentin Tarantino with No Doubt and Sublime as “from the mixed-race and thus cross-influenced communities south of Los Angeles in the 90s”

Also while we’re on the topic of Quentin Tarantino: as long time readers know I’m fond of conceptual puns, and using Across 110th Street (from the 1972 blaxploitation movie, where it was about the far northern, poor black part of Manhattan) as the title song to Jackie Brown (in 1997, making it about the far southern, poor black part of LA County) was honestly one of my favorite of all time

Like, I knew all along that Quentin Tarantino movies were all about The Movies and moviemaking, but I just now thought to realize that his “dead nigger storage” scene in Pulp Fiction was taking the piss out of himself as a director, and directors in general

Like, Samuel L. Jackson was an experienced professional who’d been doing his thing for decades at that point, but he still had to politely let this reedy, coked up San Fernando Valley whiteboy scream abuse about how to do his job, uselessly melting down and then getting saved by a producer-fixer (“The Wolf”), and then giving the stars shit over the outcome of his own creative decisions (“They look like a couple of dorks/They’re your clothes, motherfucker”)

Watching Kill Bill, the black and white scene outside the church where Uma Thurman says she’s getting out to talk about music with her petty-rebel-fronting boyfriend and raise a strong girl

And David Carradine languidly asks whether she really wants to flee his patriarch-managing-badass-women life of flying around the world immune from law and morality on their elite projects

And she refuses so his allies correct her

Man, that scene by Quentin “all the sexy, violent movies I make with Harvey Weinstein are about sex and violence in movies or in the movie industry” Tarantino sure reads deeper now

Wait, Death Proof was totally Tarantino proving he could merge the ‘70s genres of rape-revenge and car chase movies, wasn’t it?

Like, everyone gets that the conceit of Inglourious Basterds is that the (enlisted) Basterds are all monoethnic, weakly distinguished horrific monsters driven by ethnic hatred while the Nazis are noble, individual down-home types with distinct regional accents who share tales of the homes and loved ones they’re fighting to protect?

That the Nazis are multilingual humanists with a sense of chivalric honor, a taste for art, an appreciation of the nuances of foreign cultures, and a desire to end the war with a minimum of death while the Basterds are provincial, monolingual, sadistic thugs who have a superficial understanding of German culture, kill for joy, torture their own allies, and mutilate captives they’ve promised safe passage?

That the marketing campaign for the movie involved the principals doing interviews about how awesome it was to have a movie about Us wreaking mayhem against Them, while the principal of the Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film leaves the premiere because he hates how it valorizes the act of killing?

That after the whole movie we’re expected to cheer the Basterds as they go on a nihilistic homicidal rampage, setting fire to fragile artworks to destroy a temple of high culture, because after all what matters is that they’re Us, and anyway our popular media has long constructed Them as an insect collectivity to be incinerated en masse without compunction?

Right? But, I never saw anyone mention that, even though Tarantino made it COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS.