Film classic and hoaxer Quentin Tarantino celebrates his birthday today

Quentin Tarantino became famous at the age of 31, when in 1994 his second film "Pulp Fiction" won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. And this became a revolution not only for Tarantino himself, but also for Cannes, which at that time was already quietly dying, and for world cinema in general. It was not for nothing that Krzysztof Kieślowski's pastiche "Three Colors: Red", imitating a certain intellectual and emotional depth, was considered his favorite during all the days of the 1994 festival.

And then the Cannes jury, headed by Clint Eastwood, suddenly shook itself up and gave the main prize to Pulp Fiction (in fact, this name is more correctly translated as "pulp fiction", a cheap adventure book "for one time" in a paperback, almost trash). And a new generation of young directors suddenly realized that in order to become famous and rich, it is not necessary to imitate truly high-class cinema. Conventionally speaking, it is not necessary to become the twenty-second Woody Allen, who was nicknamed "the poor man's Bergman", since you will not become the second Ingmar Bergman anyway.

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At first, one of Tarantino's main tasks was to "explode" the sense of taste that was usual for the "intelligent moviegoer", sometimes, as paradoxical as it may sound (in fact, there is no paradox in this), he lacked the taste for this. Thus, "Inglourious Basterds" is clearly too much, as, incidentally, is - but for a completely different reason - "Kill Bill".

In fact, Quentin has two truly "Tarantino" films in the old sense of the word - "Pulp Fiction" and "Death Proof" (possibly his best film, which few have seen). Tarantino himself, who in his youth adored class B films, for example, horror films, so low-budget that, as he recalled, no one in the audience was surprised that a zipper was visible on the skin of some screen monster, the further, the more he gravitated toward mainstream cinema (remember, for example, the long landscape panoramas in "The Hateful Eight"). He reached the pinnacle in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood". Now where there is a classic film, so a classic, no matter how you look at it - although here, too, Tarantino added his "signature touch", changing the ending to a happy one in a real tragic story. And here his main creative problem (Tarantino seems to have no other) began - having mastered everything in cinema, on the one hand, he seems to want to leave it, afraid that any new film of his will be a repetition of the past, and on the other hand, he cannot leave, since cinema is his whole life.

And now Tarantino, now 62 years old, behaves like a schoolboy and a pensioner at the same time. For example, he fools everyone that he will soon shoot his last film, talks about it, hints at the future main character (at first - the heroine), then radically changes this character in his story, then becomes completely disappointed in this idea, etc. And then - who can stop him after he shoots and shows his "last" film, to say in a year that he was wrong and the words "last" should be read as "penultimate"?

If we talk about "Retired Tarantino", then here he constantly grumbles about how real cinema (meaning not the films themselves, but the system of their showing) no longer exists, that there is no point in making films for the big screen now, since a couple of weeks after the premiere you can see them on streaming channels - and he buys and reconstructs a movie theater to show how film distribution should look. And here you can't disagree with Tarantino - as, by the way, in the case when he says that he cannot watch remakes.

As for his own cinema, now Tarantino has a new excuse - he will make his "last film" when his son, who is now five years old, grows up to the age where he can understand and remember what his father does on the set. And here we will allow ourselves to fantasize that Tarantino's next excuse will be the time when his son is of such an age that he himself will be able to make films and continue his father's work.

However, maybe Tarantino will come up with something else...

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