The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

Tarantino, Coens to release new films Friday

This coincidence seems oddly appropriate in some respects, given the various similarities between the Coens and Tarantino. The directors often draw material from Golden-era film genres, write their own scripts, routinely use the same actors and all three (contrary to their solo producer/direct credits, both Coens do each) played crucial roles in launching the American

independent film movement — the Coens helped lay the foundation in the mid-’80s with their debut, “Blood Simple,” and Tarantino brought it to the forefront in the early ’90s.

Alas, the parallels end there. Their artistic proclivities and films’ influences are strikingly different, as Marquette film professor Patrick

McGilligan notes. While the Coens’ style is “more deliberately erudite and sophisticated,” McGilligan said, Tarantino’s artistic ethos “synthesizes many elements of our youth-oriented culture — great music, visual flare, explicit sex, violence, drugs, street dialogue, hip stories and actors.”

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These explosive, innovative techniques and lurid subject matter (not to mention his fierce rapport with the press) propelled Tarantino’s first two features — “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) and “Pulp Fiction” (1994) — into the global cultural zeitgeist.

Nearly a decade after its release, it’s almost superfluous to cite “Pulp Fiction’s” pervasive influence; its non-linear chronology, pop culture riffing, oldie-laden soundtrack and resurrection of John Travolta’s then-lagging career are fairly ingrained into modern film mythology.

Tarantino’s encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood’s past and present — gleaned, as legend has it, from the five years he spent as a video store clerk in Los Angeles — was integral in creating a singular voice in an industry known for rote blockbusters and vacuous imitations of the tried and true. (Ironically, the latter applies to the “Tarantinoesque” films of other

directors who copied but never equaled his work.)

Critics and fans alike bestowed countless accolades and a rock star-like adoration upon the wunderkind writer/director, a prominence atypical to a filmmaker of any age or era. As publicly outspoken, brash and candid as any of his characters, the director reveled in the controversy his work ignited.

By the time he won an Oscar (with co-writer Roger Avary) for “Pulp Fiction’s” screenplay in 1995, Tarantino reigned as Hollywood’s most talented enfant terrible, a position comparable only to Orson Welles’ rise to fame 50 years earlier.

Incidentally, Welles’ own troubled career is somewhat analogous to Tarantino’s when looking at the years following the Academy Award win. In 1997, Tarantino wrote and directed the criminally undervalued “Jackie Brown,” a mature and restrained — for him, at least — adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch.” Although his third feature was generally well-regarded by critics and fared decently at the box office, it failed to capitalize on his celebrity and disappointed fans expecting the usual cathartic blend of

violence, dark humor and TV-show references.

Tarantino backed out of the limelight at that point. Six years of utter silence and inactivity ensued, prompting a backlash and several theories on his condition and/or whereabouts, most of which were belittling and overly speculative. Some assumed Tarantino buckled under the tremendous pressure (and purported failure) of Jackie Brown; others bizarrely posited that the boy genius had settled into a drug-induced exile in Amsterdam.

In actuality, the celebrated filmmaker was writing and devising “Kill Bill,” his most film-savvy, genre-conscious and ambitious project yet.

An epic-length revenge tale-part-kung-fu extravaganza, the film charts the vengeful quest of “The Bride” (Uma Thurman), a former member of DiVAS (Deadly Viper Assassination Squad)—an all-girl group of professional killers led by the eponymous Bill (David Carradine), her former fianceé. After Bill and her ex-partners stage a bloody massacre on her wedding day, “The Bride”

awakes from a five-year coma (a sly personal reference by Tarantino?) and embarks on a globe-spanning spree of violence in order to — you heard it here first — kill Bill.

If Tarantino is harking back to his old tricks, he’s also been successful at stirring up a public uproar. “Kill Bill’s” production was perhaps the most tumultuous of any studio film since Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”

The film went millions of dollars over budget, was months behind schedule and is now slated to be released in two installments. (The second volume is set for release on Feb. 20 next year.)

Tarantino and Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein are seemingly hedging their artistic and financial bets on fans’ favorable reactions and repeat box office. But will their release strategy pay off in the dividends (and Oscar nods, of course) Weinstein hopes for? More importantly, will Tarantino be able to satisfy his core audience along with the general public?

“Intolerable Cruelty’s” release is far less precarious than “Kill Bill’s.” The Coen brothers have never set out to fulfill or subvert their audience’s expectations, nor have they been as unprolific as Tarantino. Case in point: the brothers have completed three features in the six years since Miramax released “Jackie Brown.”

“They are very fast and productive, like Woody Allen, turning out nearly a film every year,” McGilligan said. “Their body of work is already remarkable.”

McGilligan believes the Coens intentionally lend a brainy and reflexive quality to their films.

“They wear their pastiches and influences on their sleeves,” he said. “They seem to rejoice in versatility, in trying odd and dissimilar things. They’re less mainstream and more consciously artistic” than Tarantino.

“Intolerable Cruelty” re-teams the Coens with George Clooney — one of Hollywood’s most artistically inclined leading men — after their widely successful collaboration in 2000, the Depression-era comedy and independent film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

A screwball lark co-starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Billy Bob Thornton, the new film is the Coens’ first studio picture in nine years. Their last foray into Hollywood was “The Hudsucker Proxy,” a mega-budgeted fantasia set in a version of 1950s New York City as imagined by Frank Capra or Preston Sturges. The film barely made back a 10th of its budget, and received a tepid critical response.

That’s not to suggest the Coens have ever sought critical or commercial success in their work: they function with relative autonomy in and out of the Hollywood system, always adhering to the strange, off-kilter humor and motifs that permeate their narratives.

The Coens have utilized and deconstructed a multitude of genres: a pair of twisted, modern-day tales of murder and deception, both set in two meteorologically disparate locales (“Blood Simple” and “Fargo”); a densely

plotted gangster piece (“Miller’s Crossing”); broad, slapstick comedies with socialist underpinnings (“Raising Arizona,” “Barton Fink” and “O Brother”); a shaggy-dog detective yarn (“The Big Lebowski”); and a mannered, existential black-and-white film noir (“The Man Who Wasn’t There”) that most closely recreated the texture of their cinematic sources.

While their films — like Tarantino’s — are doggedly earmarked by references and allusions, the brothers never smother the audience with their literacy or intelligence.

And no matter what “Kill Bill” or “Intolerable Cruelty” respectively earn at the box office,Tarantino and the Coens will continue to flourish artistically in the years to come.

“Although Tarantino and the Coen brothers are different kinds of filmmakers they all strive for a personal vision and compromise only as little as they have to,” McGilligan said.

While the directors may never match the mainstream successes of “Pulp Fiction” and “Fargo,” they’ll never surrender the instinct, tastes and talent which made those career apexes possible in the first place.