THE WORLD IS QUENTIN TARANTINO'S OYSTER (PART THREE)

(Click here for part one and here for part two)

The year is 1995. Quentin Tarantino is the second coming of sliced bread. Pulp Fiction has won not only the Palme D'Or but an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Every annoying twat in the Western world is walking around quoting his dialogue out of context. Hollywood is blushing at him and pulling up its skirt to show a glimpse of stocking. Where do we go from here?

Quentin's initial reaction was, apparently, to try doing everything all at once. He took parts in movies like Destiny Turns On The Radio (which I've never seen, partly because of the shitty title). He took high-paying script doctor jobs like Crimson Tide (all those Silver Surfer references and James Gandolfini spouting submarine movie trivia, presumably). He directed an episode of ER (which, in another reminder that shit was different in '95, was once a groundbreaking and genuinely exciting television show; the original cast was one of the most talented yet assembled on the small screen). Capping an unprecedented year of celebrity for a movie director—with only two features under his belt, no less—Quentin hosted Saturday Night Live in November and it didn't seem weird at all.

Then, in December, a movie called Four Rooms was released. It was an anthology comprised of four stories, each by a different writer-director, that began life as a victory lap for the “Sundance Class of '92,” consisting of Quentin, Alison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, and Robert Rodriguez (whose El Mariachi actually screened at the festival the next year, but got to hang because El Mariachi was awesome). The four writer-directors were quite good friends, and by the time they commenced work on it, the intent was for Quentin—obviously the most famous of the bunch—and Robert Rodriguez, who had blown people's fucking minds with El Mariachi, to use their media profile to give Anders and Rockwell, who had gotten good critical notices for their debut features but not a whole lot of money, a boost. They came up with the idea to set the movie in a hotel, linked by a put-upon bellhop (played by Tim Roth), and each director would make a short set in a different room in the hotel.

It sounded like a great idea—and the public certainly couldn't get enough of Quentin at the time—but the result is one of those movies that's bad in a very strange, borderline inexplicable way. Anders' and Rockwell's “rooms” are the best of the bunch (though holy crap Madonna sucks in Anders' one), perhaps because unlike their more famous friends they had more at stake and couldn't just phone them in, but even they aren't all that great. Robert Rodriguez's “room” is the stuff the “eye roll + jerk-off” gesture was designed to describe. But Quentin's . . . holy shit.

The first eight minutes or so is one uninterrupted shot of a very drunk-looking Quentin talking directly into the camera about stuff like Cristal champagne and getting in some very unsubtle digs at Hollywood types. Bruce Willis and Paul Calderon—who also look fucked out of their tree on something or other—are wandering around cursing in the background. Tim Roth eventually gets them to explain why they've requested the weird assortment of items he's dutifully brought, at which point Quentin explains that they have a bet, based on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Peter Lorre and Steve McQueen, wherein Paul Calderon has to light his Zippo lighter ten times in a row. If he succeeds, he gets Quentin's car. If he loses, he loses a finger. Tim Roth has, involuntarily, drawn finger-cutting detail. Tim Roth is initially squeamish, but Quentin (in an extremely drawn-out but mildly entertaining speech) bribes the living fuck out of him. After almost a half-hour of buildup, Paul Calderon finally tries to light his lighter, fails the first time, and Tim Roth chops his finger off and hauls ass the fuck out of the penthouse suite. End of movie.

It's not the worst thing ever, and it certainly has a couple amusing moments, but it contains a number of gigantic Quentin ego red flags:

(1) All the broadsides against shallow Hollywood assholes, while not without merit, sound a little weird coming from a 32 year old who has sold every script he ever completed, and seen one of them turn into a $100 million grossing, generation-defining pop culture event. Just about the only times Quentin didn't get his way were Mike Medavoy getting nervous about people shooting heroin and casually blowing each other's heads off in Pulp Fiction (Quentin's intractability on those counts were what led the project moving from Tri-Star to Miramax, where everyone lived happily ever after), and Oliver Stone pissing on Natural Born Killers. Granted, the latter had to suck, and the former certainly couldn't have been fun, but still. Chill out.

(2) Quentin, not the greatest actor in the world by any reckoning, plays by far the biggest part and has—by rough estimate—90% of the lines. His performances in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (not to mention Sleep With Me, aka "the movie where Quentin gives the speech about Top Gun being gay"), because they were smaller, didn't expose his mediocre acting nearly as much. He has one thing that he does very well, which is “doing Quentin.” Considering that that's a very entertaining act, that's nothing to sneeze at, but his weird, drunk Four Rooms is a little out of his comfort zone (and his faux-black accent, while perhaps a side effect of his being drunk, is a headscratcher).

(3) Apropos of that last point about Quentin seeming drunk, everyone in the vignette with the possible exception of Tim Roth, seems like they're actually drunk/on drugs in real life. This could just be really good acting, but if it is, it's really really good acting.

(4) The whole goddamn thing is just a rehash of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode it's “paying homage” to. Quentin, at his best, at least throws in several different purloined plot elements and re-arranges them. Four Rooms just gives ammunition to the “Quentin steals, fuck him” brigade. And they're annoying, because their argument is reductive.

(5) It's set in the goddamn penthouse of the hotel, which is four/five times the size of the other three rooms. Blatant, blatant symbolism.

Four Rooms is one of those “critics hate it, everyone else kinda likes it” pictures. I'll grudgingly admit that if I had some good weed, a bottle of whiskey, and a bunch of friends to crack wise with, I'd probably enjoy it very much. But even if one likes the movie, and Quentin's “room,” it's hard not to see potentially problematic ego problems shining through. (It should be noted that the Four Rooms experience basically ended his friendships with Anders and Rockwell).

Not long after Four Rooms opened, another Quentin/Robert Rodriguez collaboration, From Dusk 'Til Dawn, did as well. This one, at the time, I was very much looking forward to. The idea of QT and RR doing a fuckin vampire movie was about as cool as cool got to 17 year old me.

The irony, looking back, is that the vampire part of the movie was exactly the moment where I thought it started to suck. The first half of the movie, featuring George Clooney and Quentin as brothers (!) on the run from the entire law enforcement establishment of the southwest United States, is vintage Quentin: hip, tough-guy dialogue, crazy cartoonish violence, the whole ball of wax. Robert Rodriguez's similar but goofier sensibilities only helped (as they did in his El Mariachi remake/sequel/whatthefuck Desperado, where Quentin had a funny cameo before violently dying).

Clooney, in his first starring role, was surprisingly badass at the time (not having his career since to prepare us, it was one of those “wow, he has balls? Who knew?” moments), and Quentin was reasonably effective, since he had to play a lunatic sex criminal. When they kidnap Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, and the other kid and insist on being taken to Mexico, it's a very tense few minutes of movie. Then we get to the club where Clooney's contact asks to meet them, and all hell breaks loose.

While a movie stopping on a dime and suddenly becoming a completely different movie is novel, it is a very jarring experience. Especially when the vampires are all done with such shitty special effects. Quentin and Double-R were, I understand, paying homage to the shitty low budget horror movies that gave them boners as kids, so one would think criticizing the shitty FX would leave me open to “you just don't get it” accusations (a particularly irritating conversation to get into with other Quentin fans). But here's the twist: the reason the FX suck is that they're too expensive. This was also the problem that their future collaboration Grindhouse would have: they had way too much money to pay proper homage to the $1.50 pieces of shit of yore.

Low-budget movies are awesome precisely because they're low-budget. Spending $15 million (From Dusk 'Til Dawn's budget) to pay tribute to something that cost $15 thousand simply doesn't add up. It's always going to look a little too slick, and having people like George Clooney and Salma Hayek on hand, awesome though they are, throws off the whole enterprise, not to mention Harvey Keitel (even Juliette Lewis, a seemingly perfect fit in a trashy exploitation milieu, is too self-aware).

From Dusk 'Til Dawn made me confront a sobering truth about my taste in horror movies, and my complete lack of ability to discuss them without gigantic faggotry disclaimers: I prefer Anne Rice vampires. Sorry, I'll take all necessary ridicule for that statement (and don't worry, Twilight can eat a dick, my taste isn't that bad), but a) no one's perfect, and b) ghouls bore me. The From Dusk 'Til Dawn vampires are basically ghouls, and they thus leave me snoring. The thing I liked about the Anne Rice variation—all her bullshit narcissism and Catholic baggage aside—is that they're sexy. They have moments of monstrosity, but there's an appeal to them, and a very seductive element. Is it fair to blame Quentin for not giving me exactly what I want in a vampire movie? Of course not, but that's not why I'm on his ass about this movie.

Again, my main beef with From Dusk 'Til Dawn is the ego trip aspect. Quentin and RR both made their bones with debut features that turned their limited resources into assets. But, once they both hit it big, it was like, “ooh, more toys, gimme gimme.” It would be fucking stupid to tell someone that just because they made one good low-budget movie they have to keep making low-budget movies forever after. Instead, I advocate the principle of holistically combining resources and the creative process. If you have no money, make the kind of movie you make when you have no money (dialogue scenes and in-camera effects over car chases and CGI, for an extreme example), and when you have money, make the kind of movie that you need money to make. Conversely, if, like From Dusk 'Til Dawn, you have an idea that you really shouldn't spend more than a million bucks on, don't spend more than a million bucks. Use the other $14 mil for P&A, I don't give a shit, but the authenticity of it being a genuinely inexpensive picture will help the movie in the long run.

Anyway, in spite of it being a fairly successful year and change for him, Quentin still was facing pressure to make another feature, concurrent with the beginning of the “Quentin can't create original work” grumbling. It was announced, eventually, that Quentin's next picture would be an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch, but retitled Jackie Brown and rewritten as an homage to the “blaxploitation” pictures of the 70s. It would be released . . . eventually.

Would Jackie Brown be the epoch-defining, walking-on-water masterpiece that the critics and general public demanded? How much weed would our erstwhile protagonist smoke while trying to cope with the astronomical expectations? Tune in for Part Four to find out!