Andy Warhol Was Right!

Rating: 1/10 (3 June 2014)

When Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, he was almost dead-on. Watch yourself a TED talk and see, Warhol was such a damned genius that he was only 5 minutes off. But he didn't only mean that fame would become an industry and everyday people would achieve it, if for only a little while. He meant there would be different degrees of fame, all for sale, and the lowest form would be 15 minutes of unjustified stardom. He meant that it would be arbitrary.
That's what Quentin Tarantino's fame is; totally arbitrary. He isn't proof that filmmaking geniuses can be found in video stores, he's proof that filmmaking geniuses aren't necessary, and they're too hard to find. It's easier, in these times, to take some hack from a video store and make him into a filmmaking genius, which is what the studios did with this moron. Quentin Tarantino is the boy-band of the movie industry. Kevin Smith was the same thing, but he's been accepted as a hack by now. Quentin rages on. He's a genius, they say. They give him Academy awards for movies that hardly make sense, like this stinker.
This movie, the darling of America, is a total mess. The plot holes are so big they're canyons, and the dialogue is just tired. All the way back to Reservoir Dogs, the dialogue in Tarantino movies all sounds like Quentin sitting around talking to himself and thinking, "Oh my God, that's a cool thing to say."
And that's the crux of this entire film. Quentin Tarantino wants so badly to be cool, as opposed to being the quintessential geek, that he's totally flipped out and dragged his envy of black skin into the equation. He's one step from being the reverse Michael Jackson and dyeing his skin black. He's an ugly white dude and he thinks black men look cool. He's not alone in that, he's alone in his obsession. This isn't a western, it's a bunch of fantasies of Quentin's. He's fantasizing about being a slave, which, I guess, is his way of justifying his envy and his insanity regarding black people. He's going to identify with the entire race with a movie, and forever after he will be accepted as an honorary black man, or something similarly crazy. Ultimately, though, how could Quentin Tarantino be an ugly white geek if he's black? He can't, so he must be cool. I don't know. It's hard to guess the logic of a moron.
His movies have always been a hodgepodge of scenes he thinks are cool, but in this one he didn't even connect them. Actually, I think he's incapable of connecting them. He's not capable of making a decent movie by himself. Luckily, studio people are smarter than he is, and they get him the help he needs, even when it's help writing the films he supposedly writes, and directing them too. Since Reservoir Dogs, other people have been making critical decisions for Quentin, and his movies have been serious studio investments managed by intelligent people. The reason the movies got worse and worse since Pulp Fiction is simple: Quentin has gotten more and more demanding, because he believes his own hype. The studios can't impose enough influence over his movies now to make them any good, but people seem to love them so the studios just go along.
I just can't wait until people come out from under the Tarantino spell. I know they give him awards, I know everybody expects you to like his movies. And that's just one constant in the human condition, I guess. People always shower hacks with affection and hail them as genius while they're alive. Then, generations after forget the hacks and discover some talent from the same period, some poor bastard who went completely unrecognized and died penniless, who revolutionized the very nature of his class of art. It's a shame, because I'd like to see what really talented people are doing with cameras these days, but I'm stuck watching crap like Django because the entire world around me is hypnotized by the fame and genius of a video store clerk.