It is the best film of the year so far, but I'm seriously conflicted about it.
"For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed...A double minded man is unstable in all his ways."
As usual, David Bordwell's commentary is among the best. The following quote is perceptive and striking and makes me want to hunt down a copy of the Carroll essay right now.
Several years ago the film theorist Noël Carroll speculated that the Movie Brats of the 1970s sought to create a shared culture of media savvy that would replace the traditional culture based on religion, classical mythology, and official history. For the baby boomers, knowledge of the Christian Bible and iconography of American history would be replaced by deep familiarity with movies, pop music, and TV. This secular sacred would bind the audience in a new set of traditions. On this path, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas didn’t go as far as Tarantino has. In his films every situation or character name or line of dialogue feels like a citation, a link in a web of pop-culture associations. (Aldo Raine = Aldo Ray = Bruce Willis, whom Tarantino once compared to Aldo Ray.) The only other filmmaker I know who has achieved this supersaturated cross-referencing is Godard, another exponent of the vivid-moments model (though he uses it to create a more fragmentary whole). Tarantino is the most visible evidence of what Carroll called “The future of allusion.”
Not writing about the film now means that I may never write about it, but while I leave you hanging I can at least point to another Tarantino clip - an introduction to There Will Be Blood, one of my favorite movies of all time. Toward the end, Tarantino explains how Blood was a direct influence on Basterds.
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