Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

anyway yes definitely him and tarantino deserve each other

Ellis would've loved Vine in 1985.

pretty much!

I can guiltily enjoy works from both of them, but their juxtaposition is going to reveal their similarities more than differences, and their similarities are... not good.

Worst moment of academe in the last 25 years isn't trigger warnings, it's American Psycho making it in syllabi.

I can't remember, which adaptation is Ellis most fond of? I was thinking it was Rules of Attraction, which has some loathsome moments but overall has the most human characters. And the really repulsive characters come off as repulsive on screen, even when there are hints of charisma

Worst sin of adapting BEE is allowing viewers to feel characters are more charismatic than repulsive

Ellis's best book is Glamorama anyhow.

It's the only I've felt like rereading. Never reread it, but I considered it.

rules of attraction feels the most like an actual ellis novel, american psycho the best ellis film adaptation obv. similar to how the shining or carrie are best stephen king adaptations but the mist or misery feel most like his novels.

i'm not sure ellis was ever remotely critically acclaimed - less than zero got some buzz in and sold well, then rules of attraction was slaughtered by critics who couldn't wait to dismiss this twerp, then the american psycho drama where the controversy and it changing publishers helped it get taken more seriously than it would've otherwise. i would guess mcinerney got treated more nicely by critics, nevermind donna tartt.

― balls, Tuesday, October 13, 2015 8:08 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well yeah i guess but if you were a teenager in the 1980s and 1990s there were always a bunch of assholes who thought he was the bee's knees

i happen to think tarantino is really talented but i would never suggest he was anything but full of shit

Hitchcock:Didion :: Tarantino:Ellis

yeah i mean i guess it speaks somewhat well of him as a human being (in that eventually somewhere if you dig around enough you'll be able to find a kind of violence even tarantino doesn't get a giggly hardon for) but i thought one of the many flaws is he just didn't know how to deal w/ that reality, his skillset didn't work w/ it (he'd almost have been better off doing a much more offensive exploitation pic like his beloved mandingo, at least that he could've executed better), whereas someone like spielberg (esp mature spielberg, maybe not 1985 spielberg so much) would've been able to craft something that worked as straightforward entertainment and acknowledged/honored the history.

not sure if spielberg's historical films are really a good balance to tarantino

Lunar Park my favorite Ellis book: crypto-memoir about partying with Emilio Estefan while blowing dudes in restrooms.

Rules of Attraction is a fantastic movie for this scene alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCvG1TCyikM

The director later took a lot more of the footage he shot (he spent two weeks following the actor around Europe) and turned it into a 90 minute movie I've never seen.

Has anyone seen it? I could have sworn it never became a thing

It's OK.

Tarantino is about a 60 million times better director than Ellis is a writer, but I can't dispute that QT sounds like a complete jackass every time he's interviewed.

Tarantino being "very talented" is about as relevant as Bill Clinton being "very smart." They are most notable for squandering those gifts.

He's not everyone's cup of tea. Can't all be Spielbergs.

yeah i talk shit but i'll be seeing hateful eightful this xmas i know

I can't remember, which adaptation is Ellis most fond of?

Zoolander is my fave.

xps Beg to differ. Rules of Attraction is a fantastic movie for this scene alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErNGS9JsYt8

unrecognized inspiration for Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, surely

oh great, ive turned this into a BEEllis thread.

should've emphasized the "HBO in public" angle

Of Ellis I only like Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction & American Psycho. Informers was ok, but I haven't liked anything from Glamorama on

I like pretty much all of QT's films.

Don't like Tarantino, aside from Jackie Brown. Hard-pressed to think of a movie that holds up less well than Pulp Fiction - maybe Hackers. His fetish for widescreen projection is just a very rich boy's version of audiophile dorkery; if the movie you're watching is a piece of shit, it doesn't matter if it's on an IMAX screen or an iPhone. And he's been posturing as some kind of brave iconoclast spreading the word of racial-unity-through-crassness for at least 20 years. It's never been anything but embarrassing for all involved.

comment invalidated by the timelessness of Hackers

a movie that holds up less well than Pulp Fiction

before Django my opinion has always been that this was his weakest movie. Inglorious Basterds is the masterpiece.

has always

was always

jackie brown > the movies that aren't on either side of this slot > reservoir dogs

I guess I have lost objectivity on Pulp Fiction, hard for me now to assess it's good/badness. I always get caught up remembering how great it was seeing it for the first time in the theater & get kinda stuck in the nostalgia of watching it

idk if that's a thing? call it "the star wars effect"

man I really can't stand IB, in large part thanks to Christoph Waltz's terrible mugging and how his penchant for long takes is really a facile way to gin up tension.

Waltz can't perform without projecting how adorable he is.

i love pulp fiction but one time i flipped by it during the "if you had a pot belly, i would punch you in it" scene and man oh man is that not the one to flip by the movie during

one of those films where so much of what made it fresh and novel has been normalized that the stuff people DIDN'T bother to lift is often with good reason

Waltz doesn't bother me - he's cartoonish, sure, but he's hardly alone on that count, the general hamminess on display (with the notable exception of the only two virtuous main characters in the film) is part and parcel of the film's overall fairytale approach.

i like waltz but i also like imagining john malkovich planning to kill him for eating his lunch

haha true

QT can do realism + naturalistic dialogue, but IB isn't about that - it's operating in an explicitly unrealistic milieu of archetypes and wish fulfillment

i like ib more in hindsight but i still think it's a bummer tarantino has gone from an unpredictable mix of action-heavy and dialogue-heavy scenes - you never knew which the next would be - to long dialogue scenes directly leading to (if not outright discussing) the following action-heavy scenes. i have to assume he found his time-jump hijinks getting cliche but the alternative seems relatively leaden coming from him

i totally understand if people think his revenge flick period is overrated - at this point basically all well-known auteurs are "overrated" because the middlebrow audience is given so few directors with an aggressively authorial style - but i still think they're worthwhile

Rules of Attraction is a fantastic movie for this scene alone

It's also, funnily enough, the link between QT and BEE, since the director (Roger Avary) co-wrote Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction, the first two uncredited. And the fact that they never worked together again is considered by some (including me) to be the main reason why QT has never bettered those early films.

is it that qt specifically needs roger avary or that qt needs a non-kiss-ass-if-still-obviously-beta collaborator

i'm with shakey, IB is the one.

for damn sure he bettered PF and RD and especially TR...and it happened when he based a movie on a novel.

IB is def my favorite

IB is best. Death Proof is also fairly underrated.

Christoph Waltz's terrible mugging ... Waltz can't perform without projecting how adorable he is

these qualities belong to the character. judging from other waltz performances (including django) they also belong to him, but qt's major talent area has always been casting.

i like the long takes tho. attendez la creme.

Did Waltz show any real acting range in the Tim Burton or Polanski films he did?