The reviews that really “pissed off” Quentin Tarantino
While the likes of horror and exploitation cinema have proven to be at the core of Quentin Tarantino‘s love for the movies, he’s also shown his endless passion for the martial arts genre too, and with Kill Bill, the iconic director was finally able to pay his respects to one of his favourite categories.
The likes of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Fist of Fury, Five Fingers of Death and Eight Diagram Pole Fighter are all found among Tarantino’s favourite kung fu movies, showing that the filmmaker has a longstanding history of watching movies possessing hard-hitting fighting fury.
With such a deep fascination in and respect for the martial arts and kung fu movie genre, especially going back to its 1970s heyday, when a new wave of movies in the category rolled around in the early 2000s, Tarantino found himself annoyed at film critics who seemed to lack an understanding of its history.
One of the most significant martial arts movies of the 2000s was undoubtedly Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starring Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Chang Chen and Zhang Ziyi. With some of the most brilliant martial arts sequences cinema has ever seen, Lee’s film was universally acclaimed, but Tarantino couldn’t help but still be annoyed at its overall reception.
In an interview with UPI, the director explained, “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 wasn’t upset at the fact that the film was well received but that the only other film critics could seem to compare it to was The Matrix, which came out just the previous year.
Tarantino continued, expressing his disdain for the critics who lacked a knowledge of the history of martial arts movies, “We’re talking about one of the most popular genres of cinema as far as the planet Earth is concerned, and [they] have so little knowledge of it, that they have to bring up The Matrix as the only example they can come up with.”
Indeed, the history of martial arts cinema goes back several decades before the release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so it’s rather lazy for them to compare a wuxia movie to a movie from so recent, especially when there had been so many more suitable analogues from the early works of Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee to the mastery of Jimmy Wang Wu.
As Tarantino notes, “Critics are supposed to be film historians. They’re supposed to be our film professors for average American Joes out there.” However, merely by considering Lee’s martial arts movie in light of The Matrix, they proved themselves to be lazy journalists. “It just shows how ignorant they were. And it’s like, I love this genre,” Tarantino added. “I think it’s one of those things like horror films or musicals where it’s almost like the damn movie camera was invented to film this!”
Of course, not everyone can possess a love and understanding of the cinematic medium quite like Quentin Tarantino, but it’s not even like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a brand new genre, but rather a refreshingly modern take on the brilliance of on-screen martial arts. So, it’s more than understandable that the martial arts movie mega fan Tarantino would be “pissed off” by the critics’ lazy writing.
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