The film "Jackie Brown" did every bit to blaxploitation what "Pulp Fiction" did to pulp comics. The dialogue for one was indicative of the movement that shocked white America, and intrigued many of the good-natured white children within these fenced communities. The writers would have the protagonists and others talk to a villain the way most of their audience would have loved to talk to white America -- oh look at you taking pictures of yourself with the big black dude who's your assistant, you're god damn right I got a house and not an apartment, starting over again in life is worse then a hitman's threats, a smart person will never let you know HE knows you're full of crap, etc.

As with Pulp Fiction, which rejuvenated Travolta's career by showing him dancing like in Saturday Night Fever, this time it was Coffy and Foxy Brown herself -- Pam Greer. Tarantino thought it would a good idea to make sure that the headliners of his blaxploitation film happened to be yesterday and today's...headliners of Blaxploitation. In this, Samuel L. Jackson's Odell Robey is essentially Richard Roundtree's Shaft. He is not prone to yell MOTHA-EFFER any more then Shaft does. Robert Forrester is the ultimate lonely middle-aged white man caught up in a blaxploitation wonderworld. He's Fritz the freaking Cat. Back when these movies would be made, alot of dumb white filmmakers would make movies where the point was "hell yeah, the ghetto's awesome, as a white boy I never get to see such excitement!" lionize the ghetto, show it how great it was through a white person's eyes like it was "Birth of a Nation". He's fascinated by every little thing about the other black characters. Even when he acts appalled as in the case of Ordell, he wants to learn more. The simple Delfonics song that's played at Jackie's house...begins to sink in his mind so much as the rest of the film goes on...that we find ourselves having to take a break so we can head with Forrester to the record store for a few moments so he can get his tape.

There is a flushing of his toilet -- a deliberate showing of an actor coming out of the bathroom. This almost never happens in a film. Independent filmmakers often let little bits of unprofessionalism slip like this, but Tarantino steps in and shows you how this can be a really neat trick to illustrate depth -- sometimes you don't need any snappy dialogue or action...just a brief reminder that some of these characters are such three-dimensional objects that they even use the bathroom like us. Another derivative of this trick is to show somebody sneezing in the middle of dialogue and having it lead to nothing in particular. Just because real people sneeze sometimes.

Jackie Brown featured middle-aged heroes and heroines, which was another dying aspect of modern Hollywood cinema Tarantino wanted to point out. You never see two people that old kiss on screen, nor is Jackie Brown a project that would have worked in the least with young actors and actresses.

Jackie Brown has a sex scene right in the middle of the film, and the scene is structured in a way that we're really hoping DeNiro and Fonda get it on. Samuel L. Jackson leaves them alone, which you know immediately has the entire audience wondering if they're gonna do it. And for no good reason relative to the plot but instead to give the audience what they want, it happens.

For the next six years, Tarantino was a producer. It turned out to be the move he was always meant for, even if you're one of his biggest critics who says he steals, because clearly...even they have to agree he knows how to pick some good films.

Yet during this time he would work on a new film, and ended up in a brief battle with Miramax over the funding necessary to complete it. This is the reason that Kill Bill...was split into two movies. To make the producers as happy as Tarantino about the money this baby cost.

Yet it would also make yours truly happy as well.

During the filming of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino realized that Uma Thurman had eyes that were so big they were reminiscent of how American blond women are drawn in Japanimation films, which, mostly underbelly inspired...like to poke fun at Americans the way blaxploitation poked fun at whites in America. Tarantino was riveted by the idea of making a live action Akira. Who wouldn't be?

Back in the late 60s, the Japanese director Akira Korusawa had realized he liked the American western as much as American western directors realized they like Kurosawa. Italian filmmakers liked American westerns as well. This was how the Magnificent Seven became Seven Samurai, for instance. It's the reason for the film Yojimbo, and the Good the Bad and the Ugly, Fistful of Dollars, Heartbreak Ridge. Samurai films, kung-fu films, and spaghetti westerns had all merged and intertwined during the 70s...yet there had never been one single film that encompassed all these genres at once, even though they all told the SAME STORY!!!

But the funding was running out. It was like watching a god damn public transit system in any major cities where all the department and state heads can point fingers at the other one as to why they're not giving a cent. The Weinsteins would come through however, as often happened in the case of the public transit systems. You see, they realized that the Quentin Tarantino name alone was big business. They could they split this four-hour monstrosity into two films and people would still go and see it due to missing Tarantino films so much. The trick, the lone obstacle then, turned out to be harder then it seemed...how to remind the world that Quentin Tarantino the filmmaker still exists. Of course you could send Tarantino on all the late night shows and on Charlie Rose and all that...but how do you get all the high school kids? They're under 18, most of them. At least the ones who would really be into Kill Bill and Tarantino films the most...at least in the most massive of numbers. At least if you consider...there's always more kids then there are adults.

The day Kill Bill opened, I don't think I ever saw so many kids get into an R-rated movie. The Weinsteins were able to advertise this film on big billboards where any kid could see it, and all you had to do was say you wanted an adult ticket. If you LOOKED 12, you could get in.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 was an "Eastern" in every bit of the same way that Kill Bill 2 was a Western. Like Tarantino did with Keitel in Reservoir Dogs, Travolta in Pulp, and Pam Greer and Robert Forrester in Jackie Brown, Tarantino brings a principal player of the original genre back, not only with David Carradine in the kung-fu western that was Vol. 2, but in Vol. 1 with numerous famous Japanese actors and actresses, including the man who played Tanaka and the girl who played Go-Go, and the guy who played Pai Mai, but the one Tarantino was clearly hoping you'd recognize as the Pam Greer of Kill Bill Vol. 1...was the great Sonny Chiba.

Sonny Chiba was the landmark samurai film star of his day. Appearing in the highly successful Street Fighter series, Chiba also played a recurring character named Hattori Honzo. Several of these films show him fighting. Now an older man, it was Tarantino's idea to portray Chiba's Honzo...like a Mr. Miyagi who made swords.

Somehow Vol. 2 was forty times as good as a movie where fortysomething dudes with swords all attacked Uma Thuman at once and lost. Kill Bill Vol. 2 had four people die. Like a western. Kill Bill has four women who, if you put their names together would be the closest thing there is to DIVAS -- Deadly VIper Assassination Squad. Each of the assassins are named after a different snake. Sidewinders are from Southwest U.S., as is Budd's moniker who lives a trailer in the Southeast California mountains...and the only person who's right in the vicinity of him is the Mountain Snake.

Kill Bill 2's my favorite Tarantino movie by FAR. One of the characters, Bill's brother Budd, tells him that he pawned the samurai sword he gave him as a gift. He's lying. It's sitting right in the trailer. Budd needs something to hurt Bill's feelings with. Make him feel as guilty as he is for the fact that they killed a pregnant woman. Unlike Vol. 1 where Vernita and O-Ren have as much sympathy for Uma Thurman's predicament as it's possible without it truly changing them...Budd is on a path of self destruction over the incident, and he wants to make Bill feel it too.

The one assassin who's not still up on their training...is the only one who gets the better of Uma Thurman. Her character Beatrix Kiddo ends up in a position that we can't believe she'll ever get out of...and then Tarantino leads us slowly and slowly and slowly...into Pai Mai breaking the wood. It's like AH!!! So THAT's how she gets out! Over the course of the training, our ignorant selves who read all the promotions and ads...are trained drill-sergeant style that WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING YET!!! SAMURAI STUFF IS NOTHING!!! VOLUME 1 IS OVER!!!! YOU CAN'T USE THE CRANE KICK THIS TIME, DANIEL! You are here for ONE reason only today, and that is to learn kung-fu.

Pai Mei doesn't agree or approve of what Bill does. It actually disgusts him. Pai Mei recognizes Bill to be what he is -- a pimp. And so as he trains each of the women, he teaches each of them a move that is designed to be used as a LAST RESORT, it's a move that one can perform on Bill if he gets too far out of line with them. If he ever is to hit them, trap them, try to beat them, Pai Mai teaches Uma Thurman and others a move that Bill DOESN'T know. A move that Bill has tried to learn over and over again from Pai Mei but he swears he teaches nobody. The move is called the "five point palm exploding heart technique". This is why, when dying, Bill asks Uma if Pai Mei taught her this move...she cries and says "of course".

Watch the "Good the Bad and the Ugly". Does that music sound familiar? Go on youtube -- it's the exact same music from the Kill Bill Vol. 2 preview.

In the film, like all Tarantino's efforts, bad and good are skewed. After everything he put Uma through, we feel for Budd when he dies. We feel for Pai Mai when he dies. And to a degree, we even feel a bit for Bill, who provides a challenge for Uma Thurman that...AMAZINGLY...is even more of painful one then any other challenge Uma has yet to face.

Bill, the "Snakecharmer", who very appropriately lives in Mexico where no extradition treaties would bring an American murderer to justice, owns the heart of Uma Thurman or the "Black Mamba", the deadliest creature there is. He preys on her emotions. He launches a barrage of veiled death threats across the bar as he cuts up lemons and tells the tale of a fish that her offspring managed to pull out of the tank, and then stomp on, basically because she felt bad that this suffocating, out-of-place pathetic fish was still trying to put up some kind of unwinnable fight against bigger forces one wouldn't believe could be so cruel behind the cuteness.

Bill's daughter B.B. is fully literate when it comes to the most bloody of the samurai and kung-fu genre. Shogun Assassin in its' laserdisc cut is CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZY. And the only reason Bill objects to her watching it is that by the time it's finished, it will be way past young B.B.'s bedtime (B.B. is FOUR YEARS OLD, MAN!!!). And the signs of its' effects on an impressionable infant have already surfaced -- Bill's daughter has no concept of the nastiness or permanence of a father who freaking shoots a mother in the skull. Simply telling her it was no big deal...is enough to make her change the subject.

Kill Bill 1 and 2 each made over 60 million dollars on it's opening nights in 2003 and 2004 respectively. The hiding of the "western" element in the ads worked, and everyone came back dutifully.The fact that only us enthusiasts from the 90s liked this movie...was awesome. Screw the kids.

The next film was another collaberation with Rodriguez, and it was called "Grindhouse". According to Roger Ebert, no such place existed in the 70s that showed two movies back to back that sucked for the price of one. Yet what was familiar was the crappy theatre with the low ticket prices that enabled you see a hundred movies because they never paid any ushers. But those movies were major Hollywood releases like Bebe's Kids and Hunt for Red October. These were films that marked the grossest and most exploratory of horror films.

But Tarantino's "Deathproof" is good. So good. It is a step by step illustration by Tarantino on how an amateur would handle a horror movie with chicks. What he would do is write them one of two ways -- either as drunken bitches...or as his own male friends, simply transferring "clever" dialogue you heard while you were hanging out with your boys and having it said by Zoe Bell and Mary Winstead. This is why so many people think those stuntwomen in Act 2 were lesbians. They weren't.

In Deathproof, Russell knows to call Vanessa Ferlito "chicken shit". How would he? Jungle Julia never said that phrase over the radio. She only said in the bar when telling Ferlito people would think she was a chickenshit. This is a TYPICAL, TYPICAL screenwriter's error who isn't expecting to get paid tomorrow for what he just wrote. We rarely catch tiny glaring details when we're going over our writing because we're far too familiar with it to find it fun enough to explore deeply.

Some people say there's no plot involved in Death Proof, that whatever plot does exist didn't have to take 85 minutes (100 on the DVD). That it's just a bunch of girls spewing words.

Not true, my friends.

Kurt Russell gets off scot free from a murder because those girls just get drunker and drunker and drunker. Watch Death Proof again and keep track of how many times those girls order a drink and what they order. They've had at least a gallon of alcohol each before they toke up on the porch. Now it's time to drive? Now it's time to take the status of victim in the situation where cars collide?

To imagine what it felt like to Tarantino the day he realized that real-live stuntwoman Zoe Bell was actually willing to go along with an extended sequence at the end where she rides on the car and gets slammed a dozen times while at full speed. Grindhouse is 3 hours and 11 minutes long...and this is what happens at 2 hours and 46 minutes in. It comes from Crazy Mary Dirty Larry, but like the "Man From Hollywood" story in "Four Rooms", what intent!

Unfortunately there has yet to be a Grindhouse DVD. They released both films separately in response to low box office returns. For a movie projected to make 20 million in the theatres, it would only pull in 11 million on opening weekend. You have to have the cover, the poster, any liner notes, and the mid-film trailers in order to have the whole experience.

Tarantino had been working on a new film for about ten years and always ended up putting it back in the drawer. It was called "Inglorious Bastards"...

And I don't know if you've seen it yet, but it warrants it's own hub. Tune in tomorrow.

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Beatles-Part-1-to-February-1964

 

http://hubpages.com/hub/Quentin-Tarantino-Part-4