The only three movies released since 2020 that are actually worth watching, according to Quentin Tarantino
For someone who’s always prided themselves on being a champion of cinema, Quentin Tarantino has turned into a bit of a miserable git recently, hasn’t he?
Whenever the filmmaker opens his mouth these days, he’s almost certain to be spouting about how much the modern era of cinema sucks, why it’s nowhere near as good as it used to be, and how the industry has the power to change it and steadfastly refuses to do anything about it.
While his opinions are rooted in a fair amount of truth, there’s a reason why the old saying posits that if you’ve got nothing nice to say, maybe you should shut the fuck up and make that tenth and final movie of yours that we all know you’re becoming increasingly frightened of. We’re paraphrasing, of course.
Tarantino thought the 1950s were pretty shit, and he felt the same about the 1980s, both of which were overflowing with classics, but he’s adamant that we’re stuck in the biggest rut the motion picture business has ever seen. Again, that’s his opinion, but his recommendations for the only worthwhile viewing experiences of the post-pandemic era are questionable at best.
It’s no secret that he loves The Rip, the Netflix crime thriller starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Is it a masterpiece? Is it fuck. It’s one of those films that you’ll watch on a Friday night, and it delivers a meat-and-potatoes genre flick boosted by the star power of its two leads, but is it something that we’ll be talking about in ten years? Is it fuck. It’s a Netflix movie, so we won’t be talking about it at all in a year, never mind a decade.
“I did forgive the ’80s, because I loved going to the movies,” Tarantino explained. “These days, however, the entire concept of what is a movie is more inclined to inspire contempt in me than generosity. Which is fair enough, because by comparison, the movies of the last six years make the ’80s seem like the ’30s.”
The two-time Academy Award winner did note that he’s “seen movies I liked since then,” which includes The Rip, as well as Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and the first two chapters of Kevin Costner’s cursed Horizon saga, but we’re only counting the first one, since the second remains unreleased and stuck in a form of purgatory it may never be able to escape from.
Apart from that, he hasn’t seen anything “that really held me in its grip and swept me away to the magical land of enjoyment that I used to visit regularly, and was the reason I loved movies above all other art forms.” With all due respect, he’s talking utter shite, because even if he hasn’t personally enjoyed them, you can’t say cinema has been lacking, not when you’ve named Horizon as the pinnacle.
Are an (admittedly very good) remake of a musical, a Netflix thriller, and a self-absorbed western really the best that Hollywood has bestowed on its audience in the post-pandemic era? Not to put too fine a point on it, but absolutely fucking not, and it just goes to show that Tarantino remains increasingly at risk from his pomposity getting the better of him.
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