Image: Levonbiss.com

Movies are my religion and God is my patron… When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it

Tarantino’s words describe his vigorous zeal for cinema. It is well known that Tarantino – a high school drop-out with an IQ of 160 – found the bases of his motion picture prestige at Video Archives, a Californian video store that curated rare, off-beat movies. He was 22 at the time, and claims he found inspiration in cinema from watching videos during his shift at the shop. However, his introduction to film began at a much younger age when the sixteen-year-old Tarantino would accompany a porn magazine magnate to whizz through the streets of California collecting coins from magazine racks. The young Tarantino also worked as an usher in an adult film theatre called the Pussycat Theatre in Torrance, California. Speaking on his time there, the director said,

I couldn’t care less about the [porn] movies and was totally bored by them

Four Rooms, image: collider.com

It’s rare to find an adolescent male who is bored by porn, but Tarantino has always been defined by his ability to surprise. He first shocked audiences in 1992 when Reservoir Dogs – a film that saw Tarantino producing a screenplay in three and half weeks and filming the entire movie in 35 days – electrified the Sundance Film Festival. The moment marked Tarantino as a brilliant writer and a superbly enigmatic director, which is shown in his characterisation of his movies:

My movies are painfully personal, but I’m never trying to let you know how personal they are

Pulp Fiction, Image: movpins.com

Although Reservoir Dogs failed to win any awards, Tarantino’s future works would birth a new era of Hollywood film. Few directors create movies that are still whispered almost 20 years after their release, but to this day Pulp Fiction resonates as a cult pièces de résistance and it garnered Tarantino his first Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The movie started a roll of film that would develop into one of the most innovative, avant garde, controversial film reels to spool audiences and critics alike. Four Rooms, From Dusk Til Dawn, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, Inglorius Basterds… Each movie represents an artistic change in cinema. From spawning blood-splattered screenplays that draw laughter (see Marvin’s death in Pulp Fiction) to fearlessly inviting the wrath of Jews and historians by rewriting history in Inglorius Basterds (see Hitler’s fictional death), Tarantino has made the impossible and the inconceivable a very real experience. Longevity is a force which is becoming increasingly difficult to master, but Tarantino has embossed his name in cinema history books to the extent where he is written in the pages of the Collins English Dictionary:

Tarantinoesque (adj) – referring to or reminiscent of the work of the American film-maker and actor Quentin Tarantino (born 1963), known for the violence and wit of his films.

His latest release, Django Unchained, has been less publicly acclaimed than his previous works, but still managed to gift Tarantino the Best Original Screenplay golden statue at the 2013 Oscars. It also caught the attention of music fans who praised the film’s soundtrack. Diversely talented with an eye for the good stuff, Tarantino always finds a way to please his followers. Not many things are certain in Hollywood, and even less things last, but there’s one thing Tarantino can guarantee:

now, at the end of two decades in the business… I am here to stay

images: movpins.com, collider.com, Levonbiss.com
 

Words: Ra’eesa Pather

Almost Famous – ‘Tiny Dancer’ – Elton John

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William Miller: I have to go home.
Penny Lane: You are home.

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Reservoir Dogs – ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ – Stealers Wheel

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Mr. Blonde: Listen kid, I’m not gonna bullshit you, all right? I don’t give a good fuck what you know, or don’t know, but I’m gonna torture you anyway, regardless. Not to get information. It’s amusing, to me, to torture a cop. You can say anything you want cause I’ve heard it all before. All you can do is pray for a quick death, which you ain’t gonna get.
[He removes his razor]
Mr. Blonde: You ever listen to K-Billy’s ‘Super Sounds of the Seventies’ weekend? It’s my personal favorite.

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Romeo + Juliet – ‘Kissing You’ – Des’ree

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Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this. My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this. For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?
Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo: Well, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Romeo: [They kiss] Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.
Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took?
Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.
Juliet: [they kiss again] You kiss by the book.
 
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The Graduate – ‘Mrs.Robinson’ – Simon and Garfunkel

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Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?
Benjamin: Well, I would say that I’m just drifting. Here in the pool.
Mr. Braddock: Why?
Benjamin: Well, it’s very comfortable just to drift here.
Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school?
Benjamin: No.
Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?
Benjamin: You got me.
 
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Four Rooms – ‘Vertigogo’ – Combustible Edison

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[Leo is timing Chester for the 60 seconds he has to explain to Ted about the whole situation]
Leo: Begin.
Chester: Okay, Ted, pay attention here. I’m going to make two piles on the bar. One pile which is yours. And another pile which *could* be yours. And what you have to realize is we’re gonna do this thing one way… or the other. Whether it’s *you* who holds the axe or a Mexican maid or some bum we yank off the street.
Norman: [about the money on the bar] You could buy a whole lot of soup with that pile.
Chester: Shh! I’m the closer here. All right, I’m a little me – um, I’ve lost count. How much is on the bar here?
Group: Six hundred.
Chester: Okay, Ted, do you know how long it takes the average American to count to 600?
Ted the Bellhop: [Thinks for a bit]
Angela: It’s a rhetorical question, Ted.
Ted the Bellhop: No, sir.
Chester: About one minute less than it takes to count to 700. Now Ted, a person’s life is filled with a zillion little experiences. Some which are insignificant, have no meaning, and, you know, you forget them. Others which you remember for the rest of your natural life. Now, since what we’re proposing here is so unusual, so outside the norm, this is a good bet that is going to be one of those incidents that sticks. So, since you’re gonna be stuck remembering this for the rest of your life, you have to decide what that memory will be. So, Ted, are you going to remember for the next 40 years, give or take a decade, that you *refused* a $1000 for one second’s worth of work? Or that you *made* $1000 for one second’s worth of work?
Leo: Time!
Chester: So, Ted, what’s it gonna be?
Ted the Bellhop: Okay
 
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Desperado – ‘El Mariachi’ – Los Lobos

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El Mariachi: You know, it’s easier to pull the trigger than play guitar. Easier to destroy than to create.

 
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Trainspotting – ‘Perfect Day’ – Lou Reed

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Mark ‘Rent-boy’ Renton: I don’t feel the sickness yet, but it’s in the post. That’s for sure. I’m in the junkie limbo at the moment. Too ill to sleep. Too tired to stay awake, but the sickness is on its way. Sweat, chills, nausea. Pain and craving. A need like nothing else I’ve ever known will soon take hold of me. It’s on its way.

 
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Donnie Darko – ‘Killing Moon’ – Echo & the Bunnymen

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Donnie: [matter-of-factly] First of all, Papa Smurf didn’t create Smurfette. Gargamel did. She was sent in as Gargamel’s evil spy with the intention of destroying the Smurf village. But the overwhelming goodness of the Smurf way of life transformed her. And as for the whole gang-bang scenario — It just couldn’t happen. Smurfs are asexual. They don’t even have reproductive organs under those little white pants. That’s what’s so illogical, you know, about being a Smurf. What’s the point of living… if you don’t have a dick?
 
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Mullholland Drive – ‘Llorando’ – Rebekah del Rio

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[At the club Silencio]

Bondar: No hay banda! There is no band! Il n’est pas de orquestra! This is all… a tape-recording. No hay banda! And yet we hear a band. If we want to hear a clarinette… listen.
Bondar: [the sounds responding to his every hand motion] Un trombon ‘à coulisse’. Un trombon ‘con sordina’. Sient le son du trombon in sourdine. Hear le son… and mute it… drop it. It’s all recorded. No hay banda! It’s all a tape. Il n’est pas de orquestra. It is… an illusion!

 
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Pulp Fiction – ‘Flowers on the Wall’ – The Statler Brothers

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Fabienne: Whose motorcycle is this?
Butch: It’s a chopper, baby.
Fabienne: Whose chopper is this?
Butch: Zed’s.
Fabienne: Who’s Zed?
Butch: Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
 
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Stand by Me – ‘Stand by Me’ – Ben E. King

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Gordie: Alright, alright, Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog. What’s Goofy?
Vern: If I could only have one food for the rest of my life? That’s easy-Pez. Cherry-flavored Pez. No question about it.
Teddy: Goofy’s a dog. He’s definitely a dog.
Gordie: I knew the $64,000 question was fixed. There’s no way anybody could know that much about opera!
Chris: He can’t be a dog. He drives a car and wears a hat.
Gordie: Wagon Train’s a really cool show, but did you notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training.
Vern: Oh, God. That’s weird. What the hell is Goofy?
 
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Dazed and Confused – ‘School’s Out’ – Alice Cooper

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Mrs. Kramer, Mitch’s Mother: Have you been drinking?
Mitch: No
[falls on bed and can’t even take off both boots]
Mrs. Kramer, Mitch’s Mother: Are you drunk?
Mitch: [clearly drunk] Psshh

 
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Words by Christine Hogg

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