The angriest Quentin Tarantino has ever been at movie critics: “They weren’t doing their job”
Throughout his career, Quentin Tarantino has always maintained a healthy balance between being a professional who works in the movie business and a fan. More than almost any other director, Tarantino still watches movies religiously and has a deep respect for the art of movie criticism.
While many directors claim to ignore reviews, Tarantino believes the film critic plays an important role in society, pointing folks toward the best films to expand their cultural horizons. This is why the iconic director gets so angry when he believes critics aren’t doing their jobs – such as when their lazy comparisons cut a modern classic off at the knees.
In the early part of his career, Tarantino made his bones by showing the world his unique spin on the crime genre. Reservoir Dogs was his version of a heist movie; Pulp Fiction paid tribute to the lurid dime store crime novels from the ’40s and ’50s; and Jackie Brown was an adaptation of Rum Punch by the legendary crime novelist Elmore Leonard. After that film, though, Tarantino retreated from the limelight for several years before he emerged in 2001 with plans for a new movie that would see him take a stab at another of his favourite genres: the martial arts picture.
“I’m very fortunate in being part of the childhood generation that was growing up in the 1970s, when the first big Kung Fu explosion happened in America,” Tarantino told UPI. “You know, when David Carradine’s show Kung Fu and Bruce Lee and Five Fingers Of Death, the whole big explosion that happened in like 1972 and 1973, and then started to taper off in 1975. So, I was alive; I was conscious during all this time.”
According to Tarantino, the genre burned brightly but quickly, retreating from the mainstream as soon as 1976. However, he claimed it was “kept alive by the black community”, and he continued seeing every martial arts movie he could with these audiences in South Central Los Angeles. “Martial arts films to me are one of the sub-genres of my life,” he gushed. “To me, that is like one of the greatest staples in cinema. And for half the planet, it is, too.”
Tarantino’s fierce love of the genre prompted him to write Kill Bill, which would eventually balloon into a two-part epic released in 2003 and 2004. To his chagrin, though, it also meant he had to watch as a Chinese martial arts masterpiece was released in the US in 2000 to a critical community that barely seemed to understand its significance.
Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a worldwide phenomenon. The Chinese-language epic was the first foreign-language movie to make more than $100million in the US, and it was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning four. It brought martial arts movies to mainstream Western audiences in a way never before seen, and that should have excited someone like Tarantino. Instead, though, he just got madder and madder when he read reviews that only had one frame of reference for the film.
“The most depressed, pissed off or disappointed – whatever you want to say – I ever got of film critics is when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out,” Tarantino grumbled. “And the only analogies they could make to it was The Matrix. We’re talking about one of the most popular genres of cinema as far as the planet Earth is concerned, and the critics have so little knowledge of it that they have to bring up The Matrix.”
While Tarantino is a self-professed superfan of the Wachowskis’ seminal sci-fi martial arts extravaganza, he knew for a fact that its directors took many of their cues from the same martial arts movies he grew up watching. These were the inspirations for The Matrix and the lineage that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was built upon, but critics seemed to know none of that. Instead, they just remembered the last time they watched highly choreographed martial arts fight scenes and regurgitated that reference ad nauseam
“Critics are supposed to be film historians,” a miffed Tarantino concluded. “They’re supposed to be our film professors for average American Joes out there. So, I think they all accepted money under false pretences when they got paid money for writing those reviews. Because they weren’t doing their job at all. It just shows how ignorant they were.”
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.