The Quentin Tarantino movie Roger Ebert hated the most: “Inexhaustible”
If you were tasked with pointing to the biggest loudmouth in the film industry right now, my best bet is that you’d raise a finger and direct it towards Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino has made plenty of enemies over his time with cruel, often unsolicited opinions on the quality of performances, the perceived success of an idea, or the coherence of a vision in the cinematic universe. Most recently, he unknowingly created an entire battalion of stars that rushed to Paul Dano’s defence after Tarantino, out of nowhere, deemed him “the weakest actor in SAG”, and compared him to a limp penis. Ouch.
Some might say that it’s about time Tarantino got a taste of this medicine. In the aftermath of Tarantino’s Dano comments, the internet went a little trigger-happy on videos that compared Dano’s most spectacular monologues to Tarantino’s weaker moments, which was a nice touch. Still, the criticism hits harder when it comes from inside the house.
One man who was brave enough to do this way back when was Roger Ebert, the renowned American film critic and the first to win a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism in 1975, and almost two decades after his win, in 1996, Ebert deemed a film Tarantino starred in a project which, overall, didn’t “add up to very much.”
According to the critic, in the 1994 film, Somebody to Love, Tarantino isn’t in the director’s seat but instead features as, in Ebert’s harsh words, “Another stop in his inexhaustible world tour of other directors’ movies, playing a bartender with a theory about comedy.”
OK, sure, Ebert eventually did give the overall film four stars, gesturing towards something about “style” in the grand words of a luxury lover. Also, he did admit that there was a decent sprinkling of humour throughout, writing that Tarantino pulled off a pretty good line: “Spotting the Keitel character, he has a great line: ‘Dude! `High Chaparral!’ 1969!'”
In the film, a Brooklyn taxi driver, played by Rosie Perez, and her middle-aged lover, played by Harvey Keitel, try to make it as actors in the city of Los Angeles, and if the plot sounds familiar to you, that’s because it was inspired by Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, though it’s overall slightly less classy than the 1957 Italian comedy-drama.
The same year that Somebody to Love came out, Tarantino’s critically acclaimed Pulp Fiction also hit cinemas, and in Tarantino’s defence, might we really expect a performer and a director to pull off not one, but two genre-defining home runs in the same run of 365 days?
This criticism must have got under his skin, because eventually the two had it out at a film festival party. Not quite the most professional thing to do, but those soirées do tend to have free drinks with lethal alcohol levels, so who can blame him? The two ended up ironing it out, and, in the end, a four-star review is not a bad review by any means.
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