Yes, I realize “why I don’t care” posts are the height of self-involved lameness. Bear with me. I mentioned this the other day, but keep thinking about it.
When I went to see 300, there was a trailer for Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. While I’d been half-curious about the film since it was announced, the trailer is generally supposed to be the figurative knife in the guts – the revelation that, hey, this really is going to be awesome and that I simply must see it. It’s even opening on my birthday – what kind of perfect timing is that?
Instead, I felt nothing. Occasional sparks of interest – the biggest seeing Six Feet Under‘s Freddy Rodriguez appearing outside of a funeral home – but nothing that actually made me want to see the film.
Partly, it’s the genre. I’ve never been a fan of slasher/gross-out flicks, so the idea of watching an homage to them isn’t terribly appealing. (Also, hasn’t every other horror film released in the past five years been a slasher homage?)
But mostly, I’m getting bored by Tarantino’s schtick. Granted, he’s never been the most original director; I know that Reservoir Dogs is largely ripped off from some movie I’ve never seen. But Kill Bill just took things to a whole new, blatant level, one he seems to have stayed at for Grindhouse.
To be fair, I loved Kill Bill when I first saw it. But in offering a love letter to the films that influenced him, Tarantino showed up his own flaws: As I gradually tracked down some of the “classics”, the homage just seemed less and less impressive. Kill Bill became less of a movie in its own right than a collection of choice scenes and plot elements Lady Snowblood, The Vanishing, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Goyokin, and others with a fresh coat of paint that most of them didn’t even need in the first place. (I’m not sure if Goyokin is explicitly an influence, but it simply can’t be beat for a duel in the snow. If Tarantino wasn’t aping it, he should have been.) It’s becoming impossible to watch one if his films without picking the influences apart scene by scene, and I still haven’t seem a lot of the films in his chosen oeuvres.
I understand the appeal in doing a mash-up of your childhood icons, but that’s the sort of gratuitous hero-worship most directors get out of the way with their first couple films. Tarantino actually seems to be getting worse, and abandoning any real pretense of adding anything new to cinema. It’s still probably better than 85% of films being made, but at some point he just needs to get over it: No one’s going to be doing Quentin Tarantino homages in 30 years at this rate.
(All this goes for Robert Rodriguez, too, but cut by about half: He never showed quite the same talent as Tarantino – though I do love Desperado – so doesn’t produce the same level of disappointment at squandering it.)