Quentin Tarantino – The Artist Unchained

A man of imagination unchained, Quentin Tarantino can take the knottiest of ideas and denature them with baleful lunacy, writes Rohit Raina

Lemme be honest, this article is drenched in my unabashed affection for Tarantino, because you can’t be just an admirer of his work’! He can’t be just a filmmaker!

With his unrestrained loopy-ness, Tarantino strokes our senses in our own lust for audaciousness. Quentin Tarantino is the most brazenly irresponsible filmmaker on planet earth and he has no qualms, nor do we. Tarantino is beyond his quirky capabilities and the redundant violence (to someone’s taste)

The Critics

His biggest detractors have a problem with how he treats the history books with disdain to suit his crazy, outrageous sensibilities. They argue he must project the facts without any distortion and that there should be a lesser limping and spluttering of human beings. Not bloody likely! Tarantino making a movie at the mercy of facts is not bloody likely. Tarantino not living to cross the line is not bloody likely. Tarantino giving a rat’s ass to critics who are irreparably traumatized over him rewriting history is not bloody likely.

The Movies

Tarantino burst into the scene with an unlikely bank robbery movie, The Reservoir Dogs, which brought two sides of his vision and wits into equal focus. And then came Pulp Fiction, a movie that changed the gravitas of cinema forever. Considered as one of the biggest Oscar snubs ever, the movie put Tarantino right up there in the league of extraordinary film-makers – those who live to cross the line. Jackie Brown, Kill Bill volumes and Death Proof followed before he decided to take the history head-on.

The story in Inglorious Basterds is Tarantinoian and he’s in full bloom. The movie was played in chapters which converge to a disturbingly ‘triumphant’ climax and it was quite fascinating to see it all unravel on the screen. For a movie based on holocaust, Inglorious Basterds burst out of its binding with exhilarating craziness – burning to ashes every member of the Third Reich alive.

Django Unchained opened a big can of worms – Tarantino style. In perhaps the greatest movie that has come out of Tarantino’s box of wonders, dialogues flow with piquant arias of malediction. Owing to a load of ‘n’ words and unbridled spluttering of blood, cynics argued that Tarantino had gone too far , without realizing that this was a movie where too far was far enough. And I don’t see Tarantino bettering Django Unchained anytime sooner, not until he makes at least 3 more (unless he is challenged by more stupid-ass writers like me)

Tarantino has always taken his characters and his stories right over the top. He has a formula-smashing audacity that perches him 10 steps ahead of his fastest peers. That is not to say that he is the best film-maker around, but he surely is a film-maker who makes you believe he makes his movies in the magic hour.

Absurd facts about Tarantino

Tarantino had a dramatic (read: hard) life as a young bloke. He first two jobs were for the porn industry. No, he wasn’t banging voluptuous babes in front of the camera, he was only selling porn magazines, which only made him a lesser soul. He has been in jail thrice for tickets. The man who also happens to be famous for his IQ of 160 couldn’t finish school, or rather I should say, ‘didn’t’ finish school. His calling was cinema, so getting satiated and bored of school and its monotonous grind was in order. And thus he swapped school for Hollywood.

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Rohit Raina

A writer by chance and leisurely on his way to become a writer by choice, Rohit is either ranting his ire out or talking about the most irrelevant stuff around.