Is Tarantino Our New Kubrick?

Rating: 1/10 (26 May 2011)

It seems to be the fashion among film "intelligentsia" to give wild praise to the most incomprehensible and incoherent rubbish, sending the partly unspoken message that if you, the film-goer, do not get it, you are not smart enough to understand it. This applies to most of the oeuvre of the late Stanley Kubrick (with the exception of LOLITA, DR STRANGELOVE, and to a point A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), and it applies equally well to this odd and trashy bit of nonsense handed to us by Quentin Tarantino. To say that sitting through it was painful would be an understatement, but if that isn't bad enough, it is also incoherent and confusing (at one point the Samuel L Jackson character dies, if memory serves, only to show up alive later with no explanation given). Uma Thurman is striking to look at in that dark wig, and Travolta stretches what little acting talent he has, but I still to this day have no idea what the movie was about, and frankly, Tarantino failed to make me care very much.
Like most of Kubrick's work, this film is visually striking: the color palette in particular is stunning. But at the end of the day, how a film looks means nothing unless there is some substance underneath the surface, and if there is any here, I did not see it.
At the time this movie came out, the critics were falling all over themselves proclaiming that it represented a new direction for Hollywood films. Fortunately that seems not to have been the case.