I’m back! I’m back from holiday! ...You didn’t know I was on holiday? I’ve been gone for MONTHS.
*stares you down evilly*
Yeah, it’s been a long, long time, and there’s a few reasons for that. The first is that I’m not writing much at all anymore; too busy watching films, thinking about films, etc. This course has certainly invigorated me on that front. I’m still reading, but very little (currently breezing through Salman Rushdie’s Fury, which is wonderful). My writing is essentially limited to reviews/editorials/whatever for Projectorheads and nothing else.
I’ve been so bad with this blog (but then, I’m always inconsistent with it. If you’ve [incredibly] read this far, you’ll know that by now), and the main, main, reason, is simple; I’m not depressed or unhappy at all. In fact, I think this has been one of the best years of my life, or at least the best for a while. I’m stuck in a routine that is glorious to be stuck in. And man, how the hell did I ever live without being a film fan? It seems inexplicable to me now. I realise that Liam and I used to talk projects and whatever, but whenever I picture us pre-film, I just see the two of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs for hours on end before saying “Okay, seeya later!!!!!” and leaving.
(On the blog front, after months of writing an uber-long entry, Jack Bz posted his latest blog. It’s very interesting, and very wordy for him. As he will be the first to point out, it’s basically the length of a normal blog for me, but it’s still great. Still, the fact that he posted it means that I am forced, as a friend, to immediately write a longer one just to render months of Bz’s life worthless. It’s a friendly thing to do, trust me)
On the film thing; I just want to make a fairly extended addendum to a previous blog entry. Last year – in fact, October of last year – in fact, Saturday the 4th of October, 2008 – in fa-no, stop there. Point is, I made a post that “examined” Empire’s top 500 film list, and was fairly scathing throughout. I read through this again recently and shivered with horror at how presumptuous and altogether unknowledgeable it is. I was basically making all these points about films that were on the list, when there was, like, half of the list that was totally unknown to me. I wasn’t qualified to make any judgments. It’s a stupid post, and I removed it from my blog. I don’t usually do that, because I feel – as is the case with this Journal – that if I make a stupid remark in the past, I shouldn’t erase it because I can use it as a reminder of my own folly and growing up. But this one was just too painful to leave online.
It’s still in this blog, though.
I was woefully unknowledgeable about foreign film in particular; as evidenced by this list of films I’d never heard of at the time, most of which are foreign:
Amores perros
Sideways
Brick
The Fountain
Flesh
Santa Sagre
Glengarry Glen Ross
Snatch
Ikiru
Ten
Dog Day Afternoon
A Man Escaped
Do the Right Thing
Greed
The Shop Around the Corner
Cache
Jules et Jim
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Lives of Others
Suspiria
Midnight Cowboy
The Red Balloon
La Belle el la Bete
Rocco and his Brothers
Rashomon (Oh god, I made a Pokemon joke here. Oh god)
L‘Avventura
Secrets and Lies
Ran
The Maltese Falcon
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The Leopard
Black Narcissus
Festen
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
Songs from the Second Floor
Le Samourai
Viridiana
The French Connection
Z
Double Indemnity
Breathless
A Woman Under the Influence
Los Olvidados
The Battle of Algiers
Fitzcarraldo
Touch of Evil
Yojimbo (I actually made a horrible remark here about wondering if the rest of the list was going to have more European and Eastern films. This despite the fact that I hadn’t heard of Yojimbo. I mean, what the hell? I made a Pokemon joke on Rashomon, and then did this with Yojimbo?)
The Spirit of the Beehive
The Night of the Hunter
His Girl Friday
La Dolce Vita
8 ½
On the Waterfront
The 400 Blows
Andrei Rublev
The Apartment
Oh god, that list is horrible. I didn’t know Godard, or Truffaut, or Fellini, or Tarkovsky (apart from Solaris), or Herzog, or Cassavetes, or Wilder, or Bunuel (beyond Un Chien Andalou), or Vinterberg, or Tati, or Kurosawa (beyond Seven Samurai), or Haneke, or Kiarostami, or Spike Lee, or Mike Leigh, or Argento, or Visconti, or Roy Andersson, or anyone from the Czech New Wave, or that Touch of Evil was a Welles film.
And even then, I fucked up by:
Assuming The Third Man was an Orson Welles film
Stating that Napoleon was the first silent film on the list, when it manifestly wasn’t
Jesus Christ, if I saw someone do this now, I’d pounce all over them in rage. Still, I’ve learned by my lesson. Not only do I not post about films beyond Projectorheads, but I don’t make Top 5s of books, albums or games anymore. I simply don’t know enough to be able to do so, I think. Liking Rushdie and Dostoevsky is a nothing opinion.
Oh, and I also – and this was in fact the main, main reason I took it down (I should keep this “main, main” thing up, it’s catchy) – intimated that The Godfather didn’t deserve the top spot because it was too obvious a pick. What a stupid, stupid thing to say. I hate myself for saying it. I hadn’t even seen The Godfather then. Hell, I still haven’t seen it*, but I wouldn’t make a claim like that now. In fact, I’ve no idea why I said that in the first place. I honestly can’t even remember what I was thinking.
*Future note: I have seen The Godfather, now!
(...scrolling through this Journal sometimes reaps the most horrible results. Did I really say that Napoleon Dynamite had one of my favourite title sequences ever? Dear lord)
The funny thing about all this is that, as I already said, I’d basically online-bully someone now for making such stupid assumptions. I mean, okay, most people on the internet don’t bag The Godfather for no reason without having seen it (ulp), but certainly there’s a growing and prevalent mindless majority of sorts who hate anything non-obvious-classic and non-Tarantino. The kind of people that label you as a pretentious film snob purely for having seen and enjoyed a Godard film. The kind of people that assume that, if they and possibly their friends haven’t heard of a film, then said film is obscure, not liked by many people at all, and purely something passed around snobby art circles for a bout de semen. In other words, for chronic, groupie masturbation.
(“a bout de semen” actually doesn’t make any sense at all, I just really liked the phrasing of it)
It’s an astonishingly narrow-minded view, and one that assumes without having much evidence. Certainly there are film snobs out there, just as, by the same token, there are – for want of a better term – film slobs out there (the type of people who will rent something like The Fast and the Furious and think it’s cool cos, y’know, it has some cars and women in it. Goddammit, I like cars and women too, but would you really watch an hour-and-a-half [I presume] film just for that? I mean, really?). Most people who actually watch films – i.e. deliberately seek out films to watch – fall between these two extremes. Arguably film slobs shouldn’t even have the word “film” attached to their catchy-and-new-moniker (I bet someone else has already thought of it, but I’m going to pretend only I have because I will look minutely cooler), since film isn’t an issue for them in the slightest. It’s something they indulge in whenever they feel like it, often with friends, just for the fun of it. Ain’t nothing wrong with this; everyone has their just-for-fun activities that they share with other people*. In between watching film and generally attempting to educate/culture myself, I spend a lot of my free time committing random, senseless violence in Doom and Grand Theft Auto, just because, well, I can. Because it’s fun.
*Those with friends, that is. I’m thinking of ex-Ugmoer “Ice the Frosty Cat” (yes, he called himself this), who once argued with me by saying that multiplayer games are worthless based on the fact that he didn’t have anyone to play them with.
However, while a lot of people I know who don’t really care about film are happy to acknowledge that they probably don’t watch the greatest stuff ever (equally, I’m guilty of not watching the best television shows ever, particularly of the current day – my favourite show is the wildly inconsistent Doctor Who, for god’s sake – and I’m even more guilty of, despite my firmly held belief that videogames are art, playing nothing more challenging than Doom when bored), there are those that react angrily, so angrily that they seem almost violent, to being told this. Or in fact, not even told this, because it’s rare that film-lovers will seek out someone and say, “Hey you, you know that film you enjoy? Well, it’s shit.” Usually it’s in fact a perceived insult. Witness Roger Ebert’s recent bashing at the hands of crazed fanboys after he gave a bad review to Transformers 2. They accused him of not being able to enjoy films and being a pseudo-intellectual snob, they said that whilst it may not be Casablanca or Citizen Kane it’s an enjoyable film, they said that he was old and out of touch.
Let’s just look at this absolutely clearly;
1) Roger Ebert can’t enjoy films.
This is a statement you can only possibly make if the only review of Roger Ebert’s you’ve ever read is indeed his Transformers 2 review. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of the “classic” films are often incredibly enjoyable anyway (I’ll get back to this in a second), this is the guy who gave Knowing a good review, in fact four stars (which equates to “great movie”), when everyone else trashed it. This is the guy who did a DVD commentary for Dark City along with obvious candidates like Citizen Kane. Hell, this is the guy that not only gave thumbs-up to both Bill-Murray-voiced Garfield films, but actually really liked the first Transformers film.
But yes, the enjoyability of older/foreign films. There’s this definite assumption that foreign films and older films are always unable to be enjoyed, only able to be analysed and looked at intellectually. This is bullshit and based on no discernable evidence that I can see. Anything by Francois Truffaut is incredibly enjoyable – Jules et Jim is hilarious, heart-warming and very-quickly-cut, and his others are too – and critic-favourite Hitchcock specialised in thrillers, in deliberately thinking of his audience the whole time (without, it must be said, assuming his audience was dumb). Citizen Kane is indeed the critics’ darling, and ignoring whether it’s the greatest film or not, it genuinely is actually really enjoyable. I mean that sincerely; I was entertained throughout. The idea that “art films” (a misnomer that is generally applied to anything foreign or non-mainstream/old; an art film is literally a film made by an artist. It’s Andy Warhol filming the Empire State Building for 24 hours, not Fellini making a film about a comedic clown girl falling in love with her well-built mentor [La Strada]) are always about “the meaning of life” and are incomprehensible because of that is one that is totally, totally incorrect. Apart from “the meaning of life” being a very, very vague term – it could refer to so many things – and apart from the fact that every human being thinks about the meaning of life from time to time – who the hell doesn’t? It’s in our nature to question these things. Otherwise we’d be animals, or worse, Christian* – I honestly can’t think of that many directors I’ve watched that have sparked my brain intellectually rather than enjoyably or emotionally. I can think of three off the top of my head; Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, and Ingmar Bergman (and even Bergman’s much more fun than he’s often painted). That’s 3 directors out of the 230-ish films I’ve watched from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so far. 3.
*Joke! It’s a joke! I swear!
2) It may not be Casablanca or Citizen Kane but it’s an enjoyable film.
This is one of those weird defences that come about whenever someone is arguing with someone knowledgeable about film. Casablanca and Citizen Kane are two of the most well-known “classic” movies, so they’re the most often mentioned. Leaving aside that both are very enjoyable – Casablanca possibly more so (in fact, a lot of its appeal purely comes from its enjoyability, rather than any dissection you could do of it [it’s not that complex a film at all, in all honesty]) – this is a comparison that makes no sense, akin to saying that The Da Vinci Code may not be War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, but it’s more enjoyable than those two. The Da Vinci Code is nothing like those two books; equally, Transformers 2 is nothing like those two films. No critic watches a film about giant robots fighting and thinks, “Man, you know what’s better than this? Casablanca!” There’s no similarity in performances, in context, in genre, in audience, in anything.
The best comparison one could make should be very obvious; Steven Spielberg’s the goddamned producer of the film, so we should be comparing Transformers 2 with his blockbusters, or George Lucas’. So let’s do that. Is Transformers 2 as good as Star Wars? Is it as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark? Has anything Michael Bay’s made been as good as even a lower-tier Spielberg?
I’m not going to answer those questions; I’m just pointing out that those are the questions that should be being asked. You make quality comparisons between products that are similar, not between products that are so wildly different that the comparisons are totally meaningless.
3) Roger Ebert is old and out of touch.
Hahahaha. Hahahahahahaha. This is inevitably the fate, in the internet age, of anyone over the age of, ooh, 35. I’ve seen posters on Something Awful being called “old” for being 38. 38! They’re being called old by the same people who would hate the youth-is-best attitude that the media is constantly shoving in our faces. The younger, the better. Since when has that ever, ever been true? Youth is not better or worse than old age.
And let’s be honest; out of touch? This is a man who watches at least one film a day, who has a back-knowledge of thousands of films, vs. some dudes who like Megan Fox and robots, for who Transformers 2 is basically the only thing they’ll watch all year. This is a man who, as I’ve already pointed out, gives favourable reviews all the time to enjoyable kiddy films. Does Ebert look down on Pixar? Not in the slightest. When Ebert prefers the catalogue of a self-proclaimed children’s animation studio to a supposedly-for-grown-ups film like Transformers 2, you know it’s not snobbery talking. It’s honesty. It suggests something very, very simple; that there’s something very, very wrong with Bay’s films.
Think about this for a second more. Why is Pixar so popular amongst audiences and critics? Why is Transformers 2 only popular amongst (relatively selective) audiences? The answer is simple. Michael Bay is a grown man making an M-rated film with humping jokes, and is supposedly appealing to the child inside him. Pixar are grown men and women making G and PG-rated films that, by contrast, most likely appeal to the adult within children. Certainly Up’s opening is a saddening, depressing opening for a child, and all the better for it. But that’s not really the dichotomy between the two; the truth is that Bay isn’t making films for the child within us, because no child would give a shit about Megan Fox or Shia LeBeouf. No child gives a shit about the plot in general; I cared about emotion and exciting, imaginative images as a child, not plot. I liked Jurassic Park because it had dinosaurs in it, and I was a dinosaur nerd. I didn’t care if Laura Dern was attractive or not. No, Bay isn’t a child in a man’s body; he’s resolutely stuck in his teenage years. He’s stuck in his nostalgic teenage years, for that matter; the kind of guy who reminisces over their favourite things as a child and seeks them out again just to relive the fun. The kind of guy who knows it’s probably very shitty, but hey, big screen dolls, tits and explosions*! The kind of guy who would watch Transformers 2; who would pay money to watch it ironically. I’d say half of its audience is probably those who genuinely really love the film, and half is those who watch it because it’s hilarious to watch bad films.
Seriously, if you’re going to watch a bad film that’s hilarious, for god’s sake, watch The Room. David Cross loves it, and he’s awesome.
*I’m way too much of a Bowie fan these days.
The weirdest thing, though, is that this backlash happened at all. Think about it; Roger Ebert was doing his job by saying that he thought it wasn’t a good film. He’s supposed to give his honest opinion on things. How on earth did so many people think he was insulting their intelligence by doing this? He didn’t even say anything about the obvious dumbness of the film, just that the editing made the action difficult to follow and that there was nothing interesting in it. This is hardly a nasty criticism. It doesn’t even imply anything about the audience, apart from perhaps that they enjoy not knowing what the hell’s going on with such rapid-fire editing.
So why do people react so badly to criticism of such films? It reminds me of an IMDB user who said that critics suck because they like bad movies and hate the movies he likes. He listed Gremlins 2 as an example of a film that they disliked. I mean, what does he expect? It’s ludicruous.
Imagine for a moment that, like me, your diet tends to consist of McDonalds for lunch (hey, the people reading this are probably my age. This probably does apply to them. Stereotyping ahoy!). Imagine that you enjoy McDonalds, but know that it’s not really very good.
Now imagine something different; imagine that you enjoyed McDonalds so much that you genuinely thought it was one of the best sources of food in the world. Now imagine meeting a food critic, or a chef – someone, at least, who genuinely gives a shit about food – and arguing with them when they make a statement about McDonalds being fast-food, near-nothing foodstuff. Would you argue back? Would you claim that they were pretentious food lovers who snobbishly denied McDonalds, and only pretended that they like all these “obscure” foods because they want to look cool to other critics?
Ridiculous. For a start, if all critics genuinely didn’t like these “obscure” foods, they wouldn’t bother trying to look cool in front of other critics. Because if none of them like it, then why would they collectively say they do?
More than that, though, it’s just a stupid attitude to have. Everyone’s so self-absorbed these days, so much so that they assume the things they enjoy are the epitome of whatever those things are in their selective fields. To assume that McDonalds makes the best food ever is ridiculous, akin to thinking only Hollywood makes good films*. If you don’t enjoy the more “complex”/“obscure” stuff, then fine, keep on don’t-ing. However, accusing others of effectively lying about their tastes because it doesn’t fit with yours is just utterly stupid.
*McDonalds really is the most apt analogy for Hollywood; greedy money-loving capitalist pieces of shit that have the decency to have a certain amount of quality control, but only because they don’t want to alienate their consumers in the slightest. This also means that “indie cinema” is the equivalent of McDonalds’ “health-food range”, but I’ll leave you to work out what I’m implying here. Anyway, enough about this; I’m not here to rage against capitalism.
In conclusion, Mr. Reader; if there’s one thing I genuinely don’t like in people, it’s narrow-mindedness. It’s the only thing I’m, ahem, narrow-minded about.
End-note: C#.
No but really; I wonder if simply the fact that I’ve written this will instantly result in a “PRETENTIOUS!!!” back-slapping from anyone who doesn’t agree with me (and from Sandford, who will be three-quarters-joking). No-one at TAFE seems to think Liam and I are film snobs, which is good. I think it’s because despite us watching all this stuff they may not know, we also watch lots of other, more mainstream stuff (like most film fans). I mean, goddamn, my project for TAFE was a zombie film. I’ve argued on this blog previously about the awesomeness of Dawn of the Dead and The Exorcist, and I still absolutely stand by those arguments, and probably forever will. But I wonder if those reading who don’t know me very well (that’ll be a grand total of zero, then, but I’m talking hypothetically here! Give me a break!!) will assume I am this pretentious, arty-farty type of person. The mere fact that I’ve written this on a blog probably leads to the assumption that I like voicing my opinions about these things, about “obscure” films.
Hardly. This blog exists as a friends-only thing (by admitting this I’ve ruined my own hypothetical. BLAST) on the internet, and as a Journal locked away on my computer that no-one reads and that I’m not even sure why I’m writing. In real life (that old thing), I rarely talk about films unless explicitly asked about them, or unless I’m with Liam. I certainly don’t enter a conversation with someone just to say, “You know what’s a really good experimental Czech New Wave feminist film from 1966? Daisies!”
(It actually is a really good experimental Czech New Wave feminist film from 1966, but there’s no way I’d say that in real life)
...so much for an end-note.
Ah, actually, here’s a topic; Quentin Tarantino.
I’ll be honest. When I first sat down to watch Pulp Fiction, I was wary of what I was going to see. In fact, even after seeing it, it took me a little while to realise that what I’d seen wasn’t what I had been expecting to see. Naturally this can be the fear of everyone who watches a highly-well-regarded film – look at me, flipping over to the opposition for a second after arguing against them earlier – but in my case, it was honestly the people who regarded it, erm, well (what a shittily constructed sentence). I was afraid that it would be “cool”. That it would be stylish, and with no substance whatsoever.
I was wrong, of course.
But where did this assumption come from? Well, unfortunately, it came from the majority of the film-watching public. From, if I can call them this, Tarantino fans. What I was surprised to note, later, was that a lot of Tarantino fans actively deny a lot of the things Tarantino supports.
Tarantino’s a great guy, he really is. Possibly a bit too talkative or argumentative, if you’re clutching at straws to insult him, but then, so am I. He’s too talkative only because he has so much to say, because he knows how much digressions can sometimes add to a single, clear argument; his films reflect this too. He’s argumentative because he comes against people with stupid opinions sometimes. Or not even opinions, which is the problem; just unfounded prejudices. One of my favourite Tarantino vids on Youtube is one where he’s interviewed by someone who is apparently a film critic on a news program (Warning bell! News programs don’t employ critics! They’re meant to be unbiased, for a start! Warning bell!), when Kill Bill was being released. Now, I haven’t seen Kill Bill, but the woman’s main argument against him was that it was incredibly violent. What the hell? It’s an R-rated film. If you can’t handle the violence, then don’t watch it. There’s stuff I certainly can’t handle watching (people being raped to death by horses, for instance). But she seemed to take it upon herself to be a moral crusader – one with a stupid gardening hat on her head, of all things, which more than anything else revealed her idiotic conservatism – and question the need for violence in Tarantino’s film. She questioned whether such a film empowered women because butt-kicking women equalling empowered women is a fallacy (certainly it’s a lazy cliche, but you couldn’t accuse Tarantino of that, for god’s sake; look at Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, or Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds). But the funniest part was when she said, “But why would you have such much violence in a movie?” and Tarantino replied, “BECAUSE IT’S SO MUCH FUN, JAN.”
Oh, and when Tarantino said that he thought 13 year olds should totally see Kill Bill, on the basis that any rational human being would hardly be inspired to commit violence after seeing it, she replied with, “So you did that? And look how you turned out.” Which is how, exactly? He became a filmmaker, not a Columbine-esque shooter.
Still, Tarantino is seen as a man of violence and nothing else by a lot of people. Just last night, Marco said that he hadn’t seen any of his films because “98% of it is violence, isn’t it?” to which myself, Liam and my mum all completely disagreed with (it was good to hear someone from an older generation defend and praise Tarantino, incidentally). But this myth of the man of violence comes not just from his unfounded critics, but bizarrely, sometimes from his fans. You’d think from the way that some of his fans talk about his work that it’s stylish fun and nothing more, and that’s exactly the trap I fell into before I saw Pulp Fiction. He’s far, far more than that. Tarantino loves butt-kicking, because, let’s face it, he’s a guy. I love butt-kicking sometimes too. But Tarantino also loves themes, and dialogue, and emotion and cinematics. I love those things too. It’s not like the guy makes Dead or Alive, for christ’s sake.
That’s not actually what I was going to talk about, though. What gets to me – and it’s this same subset of people who shit upon Ebert for daring to not like Transformers 2, who equate non-Hollywood cinema with “not fun” – is that these fans hold opinions that totally contradict what Tarantino believes and preaches. I often wonder what Tarantino thinks of these fans. He’s probably too busy having fun to care. God, I hope I get to do the same thing one day.
Notions these people have that disagree entirely with Tarantino;
1) Critically acclaimed films suck.
Ignoring the fact that Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds alone were praised to the high heavens – Pulp Fiction won the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, for god’s sake! – there’s just something bizarre about this. Tarantino loves fun as much as the next man, but he’ll be the first to tell you that the broad expanses of cinema reap numerous benefits. This mean lives and breathes films; I remember reading that he watches at least one a day, that he explores as many different areas of cinema as possible. His enthusiasm for films is endless. He was a video geek, remember; working in a video store for years, he indulged in as many things as possible.
And yet a lot of his fans aren’t willing to step outside their tiny circle of what they watch. It’s bizarre.
2) Foreign films suck.
Leading on from the last point is this one. It’s particularly weird, this one, because I know that a lot of these people enjoy lots of Asian horror, which somehow doesn’t qualify as “foreign” to them. Whatever the hell that means.
Why do these people not enjoy foreign films? Do they just not like reading subtitles? If so, how the hell did they get through Inglourious Basterds, which is in German for a lot of its length? Indeed, Tarantino openly criticised the Hollywoodian stereotype of having foreign characters speak English purely for the benefit of the audience. Certainly characters may have to revert to English to understand each other, but no German soldier is going to speak mostly in English just in case someone non-German doesn’t understand him.
I also don’t understand why many lament Pulp Fiction not winning the best picture Oscar in 1994. Look, I don’t think Tarantino cares that it didn’t win. Similarly, I don’t think the guy who played Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds will care if he doesn’t win best supporting actor at the Oscars this year. Both are more interested in Cannes, who, let’s remember, awarded Pulp Fiction the Palm d’Or (in other words, best picture of the year) in 1994, and this year gave the Best Supporting Actor award to said guy who played Landa. Indeed, Tarantino explicitly made Inglorious Basterds over a period of time that corresponded with Cannes; in other words, so that it would be ready for the 2009 festival. He never considered anything else. So when his fans care only about the Oscars, I totally fail to understand. The Oscars often miss out a lot of things. It’s rare that Cannes does. Off the top of my head I can only think of Amelie not being in the official selection in 2001. That’s one example. As compared to the numerous mistakes the Oscars have made over the years.
3) To mention films that aren’t totally mainstream is to be elitist.
This is the most bizarre one of all. Cubert from Projectorheads (okay, his name’s actually James Humphreys, but I’m used to calling him by his 3dmm forum name) said that Tarantino is obsessed with “elitist film references”, which I don’t understand in the slightest. So Tarantino talks about Eric Rohmer in an interview with a reporter – so? Why the hell shouldn’t he? He’s a film fan! Knowing so much about cinema is what made him such a great director. It’s even less understandable that the film trivia in Inglourious Basterds similarly rubbed Cubert up the wrong way. These film references at their most explicit are: 1) a five-second scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage, which is used as a joke explaining how film canisters are flammable; 2) a discussion between an English sergeant and an English scholar about German cinema. They talk about The Blue Angel, they talk about Leni Riefenstahl, they talk about Murnau and Lang. Now, considering this film is set in World War II, considering that the whole film is about propaganda films and how film can influence history (as evidenced by the fact that the last scene is in a cinema, as evidenced by Goebbels and the film he commissions, as evidenced by the fact that history is changed when Hitler is [hilariously] shot in the fact), I can’t see at all how that’s inappropriate. It’s like complaining that a couple of soldiers in a WWII film talk about their makes of weapons and which ones they like the most.
Every other reference in the film tends to be more subtle and only noticed by those that get the references (I mean, it’s more subtle than The Simpsons, so why does Tarantino get the slap on the hand for this?); the Battleship Potemkin moment, the Western feel, etc. They’re not obtrusive in the slightest.
Tarantino wears his influences on his sleeves, because he enjoys sharing his love of them with other people. Don’t you love talking to friends about things you both enjoy? Isn’t that what we all do?










