I don't mind Tarentino's stuff generally, but his movies are mostly range from pretty good to tried way to hard.

Except for Pulp Fiction. I think it's one of the greatest movies ever made, far better than T's other stuff. RD is second, and a good film, but when I saw PF, I instantly found it to be the much better movie, and feel even more strongly about it today. Honestly, I think PF is what RD was aiming to be, but I'm guessing he had to make RD first to see that.

There's little chance it will be seen as anywhere near as influential as Pulp Fiction, although there's more substance here.

It's obviously better than Death Proof.

I'd put it ahead of Inglorious Basterds and Kill Bill. Not necessary in terms of entertainment value, but it's a better film.

[I've actually...never seen...Jackie Brown. Hey, it's in my Netflix queue, alright?]

Its still an awesome movie.

it's actually an elmore leonard novel (who i like very much) - he also wrote the clooney jlo movie "out of sight" - but has lots of better stuff...

i like jackie brown. it's different from the others you mentioned as tarantino wrote those scripts...but certainly worth viewing.

more to the point he and my grandfather were friends and used to grab drinks together in the '60s and '70s. I've never met him, but I've always loved him. It's one reason I'm such a big Justified fan.

that's really cool.

he's a favorite of mine - i'd love to have a beer or cup of coffee with that guy.

you oughta and report back

"Hello, Elmore? Yes. I'm one of the grandchildren of your drinking buddy who died in 1980? Let's hang out."

Seriously, though, it is pretty cool. They were a year apart in school.

that would have been one of those - "grandad, lemme know when he comes over next time so i can meet him" deals

He died in 1980; I was born in 1981.

wait, do you like Samuel L Jackson ruining movies?

The very beautiful Pam Grier and Street Life by The Jazz Crusaders, or just The Crusaders.

I thought Robert Forster did a fine job as well.

also, I'm a sucker for Bridget Fonda.

it's really too bad more couldn't be made of it. it certainly wasn't a source material problem--I love Out Of Sight, mentioned above.

I wasn't going to see it, now I will.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 is one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen, and I could watch it any day. Vol. 2, while a little less compulsively rewatchable, is also great in its own way.

I just think this has a little more unity of story and a little more going on underneath the surface. And it is very nearly as entertaining minute-to-minute.

Although I probably am the only one that loves both AND things 2 is better

but one I've seen at least 20 times and the other I've seen like, three, three and half times, and there's a reason for that.

you can see specific flashes of what Tarantino does so well in Django during Kill Bill Vol 1. i'm thinking of when Vivica and Uma are having their living room knife fight and, after some glass is broken, he cuts down for a moment to Vivica's foot sliding along the shards on the floor. there's another moment like that at the beginning of the climactic Lucy Liu tea garden samurai chic boss fight scene later.

Django recalled both those scenes for me, only better done.

i take that, perhaps foolishly, as a sign of optimism.

what if Tarantino wins out?

are an example of Tarantino's foot fetish and his ability to create unforgettable images colliding.

That goofy-looking bastard [basterd?] is threatening to quit in a few movies more. I'll be pissed. There are probably anywhere from five to twelve more great Tarantino movies out there to be made -- including a Silver Surfer movie ("Moebius!")

when he went from "kinda funny lookin'" to "comically ugly."

I was wrong.

I could say the same exact thing

the word on that is "positive portrayal of torture." Which seems like a better reason for controversy than "negative portrayal of slavery" to me.

Is it just not that positive?

no character has a long soliloquy talking about how terrible it is. To me it seems like they just portrayed it. They showed that it happened and that they got both good and bad intel out of it.

Jack Bauer would never receive bad intel from anyone. He doesn't roll that way.

But apparently because no character flipped out and denounced torture that means the film makers portrayed it in a "positive" light.

Which is why Bigelow was Oscar-snubbed. Why they snubbed Affleck is beyond me though. No film this year more owed its success to the director.

"Slavery probably wasn't that bad."

Oh, fuck yourself.

"They sure used the n word a lot."

In the antebellum South? No shit?

"It's just a lot of stylized violence and 'cool' dialogue."

In a Tarantino flick? Get the fuck out of town!

about looking around to see what color people were laughing during certain parts, and then tut-tutting about it.

I saw it in a racially mixed crowd. It seemed like everybody laughed at the funny parts and gasped at the horrific parts. Not too complicated.

And the reaction was that the black people next to me were laughing their asses off (as was I) at Samuel Jackson's racist-filled reaction when Django first arrives at Candieland.

The couple in front of me. They seemed very, very offended each time they heard a racial comment/name in the movie. Not sure what they were expecting based on the subject matter, time setting and movie previews shown on TV.

Also, every black member of our audience cheered when Candie's sister was killed. I didn't understand that. She didn't really seem like a vilian and her death was unnecessary.

"Who this n***a think he is?" I couldn't help but picture Tracy Morgan doing "Uncle Jemima's Mash Liquor" the whole time, which made it way funnier than it should've been.

I. Villainy

a) she made the decision to sell him to the mining company. she did this, further, knowing full well that
b) he was a free man.

so, i think there are at least two reasons why she is a villain beyond simple "complicity" arguments.

II. Necessity of her death

a) she would otherwise have been the only living witness to the sale to the mining company. absent his bill of freedom (which had to have been taken from him or destroyed to facilitate his sale to the miners) and given Dr. Schultz's death, there was no proof that he was a freedman. this would make the sale to the mining company legal.

b) the word of a wealthy, respected white landowner and regional figure, who just had her brother murdered and household executed by this same guy...who has no proof that he's not a slave? and has a runaway brand on his face? at the very least she could insist that he was not a freedman and return him to slavery.

so, i think there are at least two reasons why her death was necessary.

She was completely odious.

I laughed when she died too.

There were parts where the black people seemed more into it than the white people, but, Hell, that was true of Cloverfield.