Kate Solomon

Prepare yourself. What I’m about to say may well shock you to your very core: I’m not a Tarantino fan. I know, right? And me with my degree in film studies and everything. But it’s true. Sure, I admire his inventive experimentation and his stories are gripping, his scripts all right and his love of film can’t be debated. But his work has always felt a bit too egotistical, with a smidgen too much gratuitous violence and a ‘fuck’ too many (in both senses) for my liking.

It got to the point where I convinced myself that I literally hated his films for a while. Of course I didn’t really – who can deny the sucker punches that were Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction? During a filmmaking era that gave us The Body Guard, Forrest Gump and Speed, Tarantino came out swinging with a clever, assertive style coupled with an ear for the perfect soundtrack and almost single-handedly breathed fresh life into American filmmaking. But I was, like, eight at the time. All that passed me by. So what began as ambivalence became – as it so often does – dislike, dislike became loathing and the rest is history.

It was pretty easy to hate him, too – that face of his sneered at me in my mind’s eye, his smug Miramax carte-blanche holding squint, his self-satisfied, self-proclaimed love affair with ‘cinema’, his constant referencing and homaging just sounded like name-dropping to me. UGH. He acted just like a puffed up film studies student.

I didn’t bother with Kill Bill. It’s ok, my East Asian Cinema tutor assured me that it’s a rehash of Lady Snowblood. Which I haven’t seen either. But the fact that I know this fact makes me feel better and more qualified to berate Tarantino.

Yes yes, it’s true. I have always been an idiot.

My dislike of Tarantino continued apace up until 1300 on Sunday August 30th 2009. It was about that time that I went to see Inglourious Basterds. And it wasn’t all that bad. I even – whisper it now – enjoyed it. Yikes.

I mean, for an utterly ridiculous story it was compelling viewing. For a film that literally bludgeoned you round the head with its pastiche of cinematic references it still held it together. Although as much as Tarantino is lauded for having matured, his latest film is still pretty adolescent in a lot of senses.

Old habits die pretty hard it seems – but nobody can deny that the man can write and shoot a film (seriously, you can’t. I’ve tried). Some of the script writing was dazzlingly clever, the casting was great and the acting was top notch with some actual laugh-out-loud moments mixed in with hide-behind-your-hands violence and the heavy-weight history being addressed. The camera work and set designs were almost theatrical – it’s absolutely one for the big screen.

Gosh. I might even watch Kill Bill now. Well… not right now. Baby steps.