The classic comedies Quentin Tarantino couldn’t stand
Most film fans know just how opinionated Quentin Tarantino is. Before he became one of cinema’s most well-known filmmakers, he worked in a video store, consuming as many movies as he could. He spent his days discussing movies with customers, telling them what to buy and what they should definitely avoid, something that he still does in interviews.
Over the years, he has expressed his opinions on movies old and new, never being afraid to call out his contemporaries for making something lacklustre or praising an unconventional favourite. Tarantino is full of surprises, and there are movies that we might assume he’d love that he has actually expressed a strong dislike for.
When it comes to comedy, Tarantino is more than familiar with the genre. All of his movies weave humour into their dialogue, with the wittiness of many of his characters leading people to crown Tarantino as one of the best screenwriters of his generation. While he loves comedies ranging from His Girl Friday and Young Frankenstein, he has shared several titles over the years that he simply can’t stand.
Despite rising to prominence in the same decade as Wes Anderson, he is not a fan of one of his earlier films, Rushmore. It starred Jason Schwartzman as Max, an eager yet underperforming student who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the parent of two of his classmates, resulting in both of them competing for the affection of a teacher. Tarantino just didn’t get on with the film, telling Brett Easton Ellis, “I never thought Rushmore was as funny as everybody else did because I didn’t like Max.”
On the theme of Bill Murray, who played Max’s unlikely friend, Tarantino has listed quite a few films starring the actor in the leading role that he doesn’t like. Stripes, Scrooged, and Groundhog Day are all comedies that Tarantino couldn’t care less about. In Cinema Speculation, Tarantino wrote, “Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable. But in the Hollywood of the eighties, likability was everything.”
He added: “If you did make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last twenty minutes. Like for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.”
Tarantino is also not keen on Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, once claiming that the scene where Terry Jones plays a fat man who can’t stop throwing up made him feel ill. For that reason, he absolutely hates the movie and he even had to physically look away while the sketch played out.
If you know about Tarantino’s likes and dislikes, you might be aware that the director hates a lot of Robert Altman movies. Brewster McCloud, a black comedy about a man suspected of murder while attempting to make himself a pair of wings, was not received positively by the filmmaker. In Cinema Speculation, he declared it “one of the worst movies to ever carry a studio logo.”
The comedies Quentin Tarantino dislikes:
- Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)
- Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, 1983)
- Brewster McCloud (Robert Altman, 1970)
- Stripes (Ivan Reitman, 1981)
- Scrooged (Richard Donner, 1988)
- Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
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