Quentin Tarantino is the most influential American filmmaker of the past quarter century. A passionate lover of so many classic genres, Tarantino has spent 30 years re-inventing and combining those genres into modern films for modern audiences all while infusing a dialogue style never heard before and oft-imitated since. His movies are violent, loud, feature colorful language, and above all else, they’re just plain cool. Technically, his directorial debut was My Best Friend’s Birthday from 1987, but only 36 minutes of that project exists. His first official film was 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, and he wrote gangster True Romance and a draft of Natural Born Killers before hitting the stratosphere with Pulp Fiction in 1994.
With the recent release of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Tarantino officially has 9 feature films he’s both written and directed on his resume (when we count Kill Bill as one movie, which they do on the poster for the Once). And since rankings and lists are always fun, I’m going to countdown Tarantino’s filmography in order from worst to best, along with a mention of each entry’s Best Moment.
Pulp Fiction, one of the most audacious, intense, electrifying, and unpredictable films ever made just celebrated its 20th Anniversary.
For sure, the film remains one of the wildest rides ever committed to celluloid, an absolute passion project and one that looks as if it was done with great ease by latter-day maverick director Quentin Tarantino (who also scripted the film with Roger Avary, both winning an Oscar for their work), and it’s a film of unconscious narrative, which has a road as slick and wet as driving in a hurricane down a slippery slope, and brimming with spontaneous abandon.
The deal of the day over at RIPT Apparel today is a mash-up of Guardians Of The Galaxy and Pulp Fiction called “Comic Fiction” by JuanFoo.
The shirt went on sale at RIPT today, Saturday, March 8, 2014, at midnight CST, and will continue for 24 hours from then, and once it’s over, it will not be sold on the site anymore.
The t-shirt is available in men’s (through 3XL), women’s, and youth sizes for $10 each. Kids sizes are $10 (Girls, Toddlers, and Onesies); Hoodies for $38 (in Men/Unisex sizes). See images on product page for shirt colors. You can also get the design on coasters for $25; prints 18″³x24″³ for $20 and 24″³x32″³ for $40; headphones for $40; laptop sleeves for $30-$40.
Happy 50th Birthday today to writer/director Quentin Tarantino, who contemporized like a color wheel elements of grittiness, intensity, machismo, tough dialogue, and violence from decades of Hollywood productions before him, and honed and fine tuned it into a style that is all his own, presenting it to today’s audiences, most of whom might not be as astute as him in film history and knowledge, and hence, regard him as the progenitor for much of said cinematic adjectives.
That’s not to say that Tarantino has not been wholly original in many of his fine productions – he has, he certainly has. He wears his influences on his directorial and writing sleeve always, and at best, he presents a crackerjack good time at the cinema, where audiences are at once delighted, jolted, shocked, surprised, amused, repelled, and ultimately blown away by each and every one of his productions. It’s not that the works of Tarantino are strictly by numbers, but he’s certainly tread down weathered roads, by intensely detailed studies of dilapilated and yellowed film roadmaps through the years.
The fifteenth episode of The Geeks Of Doom Round Up is here, and Andy takes a look at the trailer for the upcoming film called Django Unchained directed by Quentin Tarantino starring Jamie Foxx. For our music selection this week, Greg continues the Tarantino theme, bringing in the latest Pogo song taking elements from the classic Pulp Fiction into a tune called Lead Breakfast.
Later, we take a look at the upcoming documentary release focusing on songwriter Paul Williams called Still Alive. We also look at plans by filmmaker Seb Hunter to bring the concept of The Elder by KISS into a post-apocalyptic movie.
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press
