The Expanded Tarantino Rankings 2021 Thread

This is gonna get Whole Bloody Affair long.
So I just rewatched everything (in Previous Ranking Order) to update my Expanded QT Rankings. This game being inescapable, I figure the honest thing is to occasionally revisit & rearrange.

Hence, probably, one last deep-immersion before whatever #10 brings us.
A thread of a little notes on how things moved around & why, not to be taken as intensive thoughts on the films. This is “personal faves & preferences” not “in order of import, achievement, value, goodness.”

That is, don’t bother arguing the numbers. Do assume I believe any cineaste playing Advanced QT Studies needs to see and be conversant in the entire body of work at bare minimum.
Alright Rankers, let's get Ranking.

16. ER: “Motherhood"
15. CSI: “Grave Danger" — The two TV episodes holding steady, seemingly there because all the big ones do some TV work. Anyway the CSI is some excellent suspense, noteworthy in any consideration of QT’s horror work.

14. Sin City guest scene — So I’m back and forth on the overall merits of this grody, repetitive, smart-ass exercise/experiment in grotesque visual style. Tarantino's guest scene is a highlight of the best chapter of an exhausting picture, though.

A tense two-hander car ride sees a bugging-out Clive Owen doing a Head of Alfredo Garcia routine with Benicio del Toro’s wheezing corpse. Ya got some of the film’s sharpest dialogue, fun performers, & a strong visual idea as colored washes of rain spray over the b&w windshield.

13. Django Unchained— Maybe Tarantino’s greatest achievement in image-making, the problem is how appalling those images are. The game is Blaxploitation Spaghetti Western remixorama, & I believe in the picture’s kick-ass Black superhero icon and its pure heart of unwavering rage.

Far gnarlier, stupider exploitation movies on the subject of the antebellum South certainly exist, but the Great American Candyland is the on-purpose-ugliest place Tarantino has asked us to spend so much time. I'm a sensitive lad, whadya want.

12. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood— So. The bottom 2 flip-flop around for me. OUATIH's project is to lean in hard on Hangout/All-Vibes Movie, The Red Apple theory of fictional world construction, & the Wax Museum With a Pulse game: an epic built on nothing but pop cult reference.

The Historical Vengeance thread is both predictable and played-out after Basterds and Django, and ethically baffling to me. But my real issue is how slight the narrative feels blowing around such a densely-conceived film.

11. Four Rooms: “The Man from Hollywood”— So dig this, Ted the Bellhop’s terrible New Years Eve ends with him earning $1000 for one second of work: A rich asshole drunkenly throwing money around asks a service industry chump to mutilate a flunkie/friend on a bet,...

...all because he's too chickenshit to wield the hatchet himself.
 Now in and of itself, this is QT’s sharpest observational comedy about class & social station & power in America until The Hateful Eight itself. Also the whole movie is very funny to me, but I like Jerry Lewis.

10. From Dusk Till Dawn— For sheer beer & pizza night entertainment, sorry not one bit sorry, but FDTD goes full-tilt boogie on a lowly subgenre (Fangoria-Subscriber-Approved Gross-Out Action-Horror) in which middling pictures often get by with a couple cool effects or setpieces.

This, then, is the filmography’s purest uncuttest sweet rosemary, 100-proof liquor, beans and rice grindhouse exercise up to and including Grindhouse. Moving up through the years out of sheer honesty.

9. Inglourious Basterds— Tarantino’s historical revenge pictures often give me the feeling of Chaplin’s speech at the end of The Great Dictator: such sincerity being all the more heartbreaking given its ultimate futility in the face of real life atrocity.

Here a series of masterful dialogue-driven suspense scenes are strung in a row, pulled taught till they erupt in carnage. WWII considered as story playground, art as weapon, the enriching possibilities of international culture exchange — all just end in cinema itself exploding.

So I do admire that weird narrative structure, plot strands basically boiled down to rich but repetitious pan sauce, and savor its contradictions but… it kinda bums me out, okay?

8. Natural Born Killers— The sick parasitic twin of True Romance; minimal Tarantino content in theory but actually? The author’s most troubling aspects distilled into overproof hyperactive no-prisoner no-winner satire.

Outside of Kill Bill, Tarantino's most movie-movie evilly entertaining pieces landed in the hands of other directors, and Oliver Stone’s overheated questing Essays on America project aligns deliriously with Tarantino’s later morally-conflicted revisionist histories.

7. Jackie Brown— Here’s the thing, alright? I just think JB is purposely minor key QT— not “minor,” but a laid back attempt at all-vibes cinema. And I love all the things everyone love about this movie, but...

I do not think its being about middle-aged people discussing their middle age makes it Mature. I think Elmore Leonard is Mature. All good as gold, natch, but I prefer my QT wiggier and abrasive. And Jackie, sorry, you totally played that boy.

6. The Hateful Eight— A hatchet sharp as the Devil himself, the director’s prettiest pictures, the storyteller’s most complex and tightest weave, the culture critic’s most pitiless, riotous statement on American race relations.

Here is the dream of the crime novel on film and the wall-to-wall actor-worship showcase best realized. A nobody-to-root-for pug ugly acting contest, scorpions-in-a-bucket, spam-in-a-cabin political horror like nothing else. And that’s why this chapter's called The Hateful Eight.

5. Reservoir Dogs— Lean, mean, elliptical, and cinematic, OR: Given to extended pleasurable sidetrack, secretly sentimental, subtly rich & novelistic in its storytelling. A writer’s picture, an actor’s showcase, a director’s calling card, a shot to the gut of indie movie culture.

The great theme of the filmography was always right here, and it’s about keeping your super-cool while all this blood is scaring the shit out of you. This is the work of a first-year thief acting like a fucking professional.

4. True Romance—Moving back up because I am a total sap! Tony Scott’s pop confectionist craft carefully preserves the screenwriter’s voice and suspends the young man’s sweet, naive romantic fantasy in an overstuffed box of all-cream-centers.

Scott sculpts QT’s Perfect First Date daydream into Great American Junk Myth, fueled on the joy rush of rollercoasters, cocaine, cheap sunglasses, Sonny Chiba triple features, and public sex. Hamburger to be sure, but it’s the best fucking hamburger you ever had in your life.

3. Death Proof— Holding steady at 3, the dark horse, the fuck-up, the cult object. A intensely focused miniature built on illusions of complete meandering nonsense, a crowd-pleasing come-on warped into utter audience frustration— the only one I heard people BOO on opening night.

The scariest, the strangest— the damnedest thing, & for those reasons, most fascinating. Extended cut preferred, & God it must've hurt to axe the scene of Stuntman Mike stalking the Hollywood girls at a convenience store, masterclass of creep-out suspense + Rosario Dawson's feet.

2. Pulp Fiction— Still the time-capsule movie if you get 1 to preserve the QT Legacy for future generations. The Most Essential, Important, Defining or, if you must, Best. The center of the idea-map for the entire oeuvre, i.e. everything else is a variation on some aspect of PF.

1. Kill Bill — The Whole Bloody Motherfuckin Affair as it were, moving up one spot, —and this is a big deal for me— I think now my personal favorite. Like Pulp it’s a vision of the world / life / cinema as kaleidoscopic mixtape channel-surf of nothing but the cool parts...

But in KB that outrageous amped-up lens is perfect for the emotionally outsized journey of re-finding yourself after a breakup. A fevered cartoon of love as a battlefield & hysterical melodrama about reclaiming your all-important Cool,...

Tarantino's least-reality-grounded picture speaks to me the most about realer-than-real true romance: this is the real Sirk steak served bloody as hell. The heart explodes. The End