Modern Maestros: Quentin Tarantino

Robert here, continuing my series on great contemporary directors. I figured this would be as good a time as any to take a look at one of this year's Best Director nominees.  No, he probably won't win the Oscar this year, but history may look upon him more kindly than any of his fellow nominees, especially as a real titan of his generation.  He's a rock star director, and like him or hate him, you can't deny his influence.

Maestro:Quentin Tarantino
Known For: Highly structured, stylized, talky and violent movies.
Influences: Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and anyone who ever made a Kung-Fu film.
Masterpieces: Pulp Fiction is the easy answer, but in pop-culture years that was eons ago. How about the Kill Bill movies.
Disasters: none
Better than you remember: Jackie Brown is already a "better than you remember" classic.
Awards: A couple Best Screenplay Oscars (excuse me, one Best Screenplay Oscar, don't want to jump the gun).  A couple Best Direction and Picture nominations.  And a Palme d'Or back in 1994.
Box Office: As we all know, Inglourious Basterds is his highest grossing film with over 120 mil to date.
Favorite Actor: Samuel L. Jackson whose likeness (or voice) has appeared in four Tarantino films.

What can be said about Quentin Tarantino that hasn't already been?  Not much.  But let's not start with the two elements of his films that are most discussed - his stylistic flourishes and his unique dialogue.  Instead I pose to you what may be Tarantino's greatest, yet least credited strength as a director.  He is a fantastic director of actors.  It's fitting to note now as we're expecting Christoph Waltz to earn an Oscar for giving perhaps the best performance in a Tarantino film that all of his actors' performances are uniformly excellent.  Unfortunately, too often they're overshadowed by the style and dialogue that everyone seems to obsess over.  But in Tarantino's mind, his witty, trademark dialogue is merely a means to the end of a great performance  He's said himself that if he truly considered himself a writer at heart he'd be writing novels.  But he's not.  He's a filmmaker, and his dialogue isn't nearly as important on a page as it is performed out loud.

Okay, so let's talk a little about style... it's unavoidable.  Tarantino, lover of the French New Wave, has taken a page from their play book and enjoys breaking cinematic rules for the sake of breaking cinematic rules.  And why not do so by throwing in elements from another kind of picture he loves, the B-movie. Q.T. has yet to meet a trick he doesn't like.  Voice overs, animated sequences, shifts in time, can all sneak up on us without warning, and perhaps without purpose aside from setting a mood unique to Tarantino films alone.  And then there's the violence.  Yes, the way Tarantino enjoys breaking the rules most is through his total and fervent delight in violence.  And yet he occasionally jars us through violence that's suddenly less gleeful (the death of Vincent Vega or the baseball bat bludgeoning of a sympathetically painted Nazi).  Tarantino is eternally exploring the complex relationship between delighting in and being repelled by violence.  It is perhaps for this reason why he's given us so many revenge pictures lately (a genre he's constantly redefining by making it epic or dancing on established archetypes or even revising history itself), or why he continually focuses on violence committed by the fairer sex.  These elements are meant to turn our ideas of right or wrong or natural against us.  But we're not bogged down by them because we're having so much damn fun.

We root for the violent ladies

Feeding into his revenge fantasies is his love for the plotting of a plan.  Tarnatino films often feature large meticulously structured plans.  It's no surprise then that he loves making movies.  He sits atop the modern indie film world as something of an elder statesman.  Really he just wants to have fun.  Other modern directors who delight in exploiting B-movie elements seem burdened by their inability to apply them to anything new.  But Tarantino knows how to keep giving us something new.  He keeps evolving.  That's what makes him not just relevant but revolutionary almost twenty years after he helped re-invent the American indie.  In that time he's been not only a director but a promoter of great films, helping to bring pictures like Chungking Express, Sonatine and Hero to American audiences.  What comes next for Tarantino is somewhat unknown.  That's all part of his enigmatic image.  He's suggested a desire to make a film entirely in Mandarin.  And he's hinted that there will soon be a unified Kill Bill epic and a Kill Bill vol. 3.  But it doesn't really matter what comes next.  It's already a given that it'll be exciting and interesting and the mark of a director who truly defines his time.