On The QT

Quentin Tarantino came to my town for the first time in 1992. Of the many attractions Nottingham offers, the Broadway Cinema stands proud. Tucked away in Hockley it proffers what I believe are called Art House films: the preferred nomenclature delineating the idiosyncratic and mostly thought provoking brand of entertainment, from the mindless drivel, punted down at the multiplex.

In the summer of 1992, for only the second time, the Broadway held its Shots in the Dark Festival: a feast of crime cinema, my particular bagful, and featuring a wide eyed, ever gesticulating, American gentleman showing his much anticipated debut, Reservoir Dogs. I paid £2.50 student rate and the Artist threw in a Q and us session post- viewing: a remarkable event, a fantastic film and an engaging man.

Tarantino patronised subsequent festivals and brought his equally entertaining Pulp Fiction to Nottingham as the festival's secret feature in 1994. The gaff was, by that time, well and truly blown and even a sniff of a ticket impossible. Tarantinoesque quickly became a by- word for a new cinema and the man himself the personification of knowledge, style, provocative and insightful screen writing, notably Natural Born Killers. Tarantino’s work mined the obscure, the sub-genre, alongside the classical and canonised as he reinvented the oddball cinephile as film artist, convincing us all that we too could traverse the arc from video store to the Weinstein Empire.

Of course Quentin liked the attention, the unique fame bestowed by a stellar rise, the genius discovered, the notoriety of an enfant terrible: fame, I’m told, lets him loose, hard to swallow and QT’s subsequent moves were represented by the familiar parabola describing rise in notoriety, celebrity and commercial success against a plunge in quality, substance, innovation and eventual collapse into cliché and self parody.

The taught and urgent drama, the Mamet-like dialogue, the economy of expression, the violent shocks, the black humour, the stylised yet engaging pathos of his characters, discarded for ponderous indulgence. Witness his flaccid, plodding, tribute to Pam Grier, Jackie Brown, failing to engage with the substance of crime fiction or the style of Blacksploitation. Or the un-epic Shaw Bothers cum Sergio Leone saga of Kill Bill and the RTA that is Deathproof: I found the Dukes of Hazard more substantive and engaging. His work has become an ever more elaborate litany of pastiche and plagiarism, glued together by vague notions and symbols of his own half-baked sub-genre. He is lauded by audiences for whom an easily obtained reference marks an end in itself, the cultural equivalent of a PoMo patchwork comfort blanket.

And then there came the associated industry: forests of fawning prose; popular culture bookshelves stuffed with sub-academic analysis and rejected dissertation material; the cult of personality; the procession of involved discussions led by the man himself, as dull and navel gazing as a BFI Kubrick convention and featuring another bug eyed, ADHD performance, each sentence punctuated with a million okays, double, triple positives reinforcing the complex content of his project to capture the great car chase or the interminably fine details of Beat Takeshi’s oeuvre.

The media outlets are in full chorus anticipating his latest as QT takes on the World War 2 Movie and no doubt we can expect cartoonish, stylised, ultra-violence and faintly ambiguous morality nailing its colours firmly to Pekinpah’s iron cross.... Fame: bully for you, chilly for me.