The best movies from “the worst era in Hollywood history”, according to Quentin Tarantino
According to Quentin Tarantino, 2019 was “the last fucking year of movies,” which was coincidentally the year that Quentin Tarantino released his most recent movie. When will the movies return? Knowing him, probably whenever he gets around to debuting that tenth and final feature of his.
At this point, plenty of people would prefer if the two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter did everyone a favour and shut the fuck up. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and these days, everyone also has the platform to get them across to the widest possible audience.
However, singling out the likes of Paul Dano, Owen Wilson, and Matthew Lillard for being shite at their jobs reeks of unprofessionalism, especially when none of them have given a performance anywhere near as bad as Tarantino did when he let his ego run rampant again and shoehorned himself into Django Unchained.
The filmmaker has gone on the record as calling the 1970s the greatest decade in cinema history, but what about the worst? As far as he can see, it’s a toss-up. “Even though the ’80s was the time that I probably saw more movies in my life than ever, at least as far as going out to the movies was concerned, I do feel that ’80s cinema is, along with the ’50s, the worst era in Hollywood history.”
He did add that “the current era” has made it a three-way tie, but it seems odd that Tarantino would single out the breadth of the 1980s as being the bottom of the cinematic barrel, when so many of the titles that he’s quite literally called his personal favourites on a number of occasions were released at some point between January 1980 and December 1989.
As part of his tirade, he mentioned Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die, Jim McBride’s Breathless, Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh and Blood, Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, and Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon as standouts, which are by no means the only ’80s flicks that he’s celebrated at one point or another.
To that list, you can add his repeated praise of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, the obsession with John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow that saw him spend months dressed like Chow Yun-fat, Joseph Zito’s slasher flick, The Prowler, Robert Zemeckis’ debut feature, Used Cars, Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, and Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts’ two-hander, The Pope of Greenwich Village, which is only the tip of the iceberg.
There’s also Kevin Reynolds’ Fandango, which he called one of the greatest directorial debuts he’d ever seen, De Palma’s Scarface, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Oliver Stone’s Salvador, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and dozens more movies from Hollywood’s “worst era” that Tarantino actually likes.
While hyperbole should be expected whenever Tarantino opens his cavernous gob, there’s a line between being hyperbolic and talking shite. In this instance, he’s talking shite because there are upwards of 50 films from the ’80s that he’s celebrated. If that’s what constitutes the worst, then cinema is truly fucked.
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