Thursday 3 January 2008
Thursday
The third film of Quentin Tarantino is perhaps the least talked about and least appreciated. I don't remember ever seeing it at the cinema, it came out in 1998 here, but I do remember my expectations were high. This, of course, prejudices us greatly. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were so good. Jackie Brown, undoubtedly, isn't. The first thing to be said is that it's too long. Not that two and a half hours is too much, but it is too much at the pace that this movie runs. We don't get the casual violence that carries us through the earlier films, or the sharp dialogue that kept us amused. The music selection, too, isn't quite as good as it had been. Maybe we were expecting Tarantino to do something revolutionary again, when he actually went the other way and did something quite conservative. The most significant thing that I noticed, however, when I watched it last week, that I'd never noticed before, was that it was adapted from a novel. As you may know, I have suspicions about adapted movies, and I think they're confirmed here. Tarantino wasn't aggressive enough with the material. He added moments of his own dialogue and action, but I doubt he radically altered the plot. Kubrick was great at adapting novels, but on this aspect of directing it seems Tarantino has, so far, failed.
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3 comments:
I've always quite liked Jackie Brown, but yes the pacing is off, and he gives a surprising amount of control away for Tarantino to both the author (as you say) and the actors. He seems in awe of De Nero and Samuel L. Jackson in this movie and lets them get away with things that he normally wouldn't.
I think I still like it because whenever I see a new Tarantino movie I think to myself "I'd like to see him direct a 'normal' movie without all of these tricks" and then I remember that he already has and it wasn't actually as sucessful.
De Niro's performance is strange. In a way, he almost doesn't do anything, but perhaps that's deceptive, perhaps that's exactly his skill here - he plays a simple-minded idiot who eventually screws everything up, which I think is unlike anything else he's ever played. It doesn't seem right because we're used to who he is from previous movies.
I really like the relationship between him and Bridget Fonda's character - you could almost make a film about just them: the initial desire, leading to boredom, frustration and then violence.
This is what I really like about the movie... Each of the characters is interesting and different.
It's his version of the sprawling L.A. Story (a la Magnolia) perhaps it doesn't sprawl enough.
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