![]() But for all its pleasures, I think it’s too easy, too dead-center in Tarantino’s comfort zone. This is Tarantino’s most financially successful movie, and a lot of people love its rituals of retribution. And however much I like violent movies, that’s not a good thing. Carnage rarely comes so morally uncomplicated. But the helpless rage we feel in those scenes is in the service of Tarantino’s larger goal: to make the vengeance on the film’s racists all the more gleeful. The only violence that’s not a kick is done unto slaves, who are whipped, torn to pieces by dogs, and, in a particularly ugly moment, driven to slaughter one another for sport. Every bullet generates a whoopee cushion’s worth of red sauce. What Nazis were in Inglourious Basterds, slaveholders are here: people who are a gas to exterminate. Up until the release of this Western starring Jamie Foxx as a gunslinging ex-slave and (a wonderfully puckish) Christoph Waltz as his bounty-hunting German escort, I had loved, in one way or another, all the films that Tarantino had directed. ![]() It’s not laziness the feelings that come to you in the first flush of pleasure after seeing a Tarantino movie are difficult to recollect in tranquility. Note: I’ve mined some of my past reviews (the ones I still agree with, anyway) for descriptions. For better, and occasionally for worse, Tarantino really digs Tarantino. ![]() Few directors give you the sense that they’re getting off so much on their own work. ĭense with allusions to other work but more fun than a barrel of monkeys (studded with nails and rolled down a hill, à la Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 2000 Maniacs), Quentin Tarantino’s movies cry out to be viewed both singly and in relation to one another - as the journey of a boy who once lived through grindhouse movies and is now permitted to dramatize (and cinematize) his fantasies on an epic scale. We’ve updated it to include the auteur’s latest, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This article originally published in 2015 as part of Vulture’s Tarantino Week. Photo: Maya Robinson and Kelly Chiello and Photo by Miramax
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