In Contention

Tag: Kill Bill

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Tarantino characters

    Christoph Waltz in Inglourious BasterdsIt’s been over a month since we cranked out an installment of The Lists, but with Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” set for release on Friday, it seemed a good time to cook up a new collective.

    When most people praise Tarantino’s skill as a screenwriter, they tend to focus on his well-honed ear for dialogue.  But I have always been much more enchanted by his ability to create a wide array of separately interesting characters that are nevertheless of a piece with the filmmaker’s pulp sense of the world.

    Each of Tarantino’s films are ensembles of one level or another, usually elevated off the page by the performances he gets out of actor eager to take on something fresh.  And no matter the quality of Tarantino’s work behind the camera, the material is always, if nothing else, unique.

    So a list of the greatest characters ever conceived by the man seemed to be the best course of action.  The list doesn’t merely include characters from Tarantino’s films as a director, mind you.  Those he conceived in original screenplays filmed by other directors were considered as well.  Eight films are featured on the list, two of them twice.

    The only Tarantino-affiliated films that don’t appear are “From Dusk Till Dawn” (a personal favorite that, if I was asked on another day, might show up somewhere) and the “Death Proof” segment of “Grindhouse” (which, if I were feeling particularly generous one day, might yield a mention for Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike).

    All other Tarantino extravaganzas are well-represented.  Let’s dig in here…

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  • R.I.P. David Carradine

    David CarradineBig, cold bucket of water to the face this morning.  Here’s the “just the facts” story from the AP, in part:

    Actor David Carradine, star of the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” who also had a wide-ranging career in the movies, has been found dead in the Thai capital, Bangkok. A news report said he was found hanged in his hotel room and was believed to have committed suicide.

    A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, Michael Turner, confirmed the death of the 72-year-old actor. He said the embassy was informed by Thai authorities that Carradine died either late Wednesday or early Thursday, but he could not provide further details out of consideration for his family.

    The Web site of the Thai newspaper The Nation cited unidentified police sources as saying Carradine was found Thursday hanged in his luxury hotel room.

    It said Carradine was in Bangkok to shoot a movie and had been staying at the hotel since Tuesday.

    The newspaper said Carradine could not be contacted after he failed to appear for a meal with the rest of the film crew on Wednesday, and that his body was found by a hotel maid at 10 a.m. Thursday morning. The name of the movie was not immediately available.

    It said a preliminary police investigation found that he had hanged himself with a cord used with the room’s curtains. It cited police as saying he had been dead at least 12 hours and there was no sign that he had been assaulted.

    I can’t say I grew up with “Kung Fu” but Carradine was one of those actors that had me in awe just at how damn busy he stayed.  And now he’s gone at 72.  Many of today’s generation will of course remember him as Quentin Tarantino’s diabolical Bill from the “Kill Bill” movies, but for most, he’ll always be Kwai Chang Caine:

  • Acting out

    Meryl StreepThe Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey offers an interesting piece today about screen acting, and the narrow criteria by which many of us judge it. He is writing principally in response to a recently released British film, “Helen,” a rigidly stylised meta-film in which actors play actors participating in a police reconstruction, which has attracted divisive reviews for the deliberately stilted performances of its cast.

    Complaining that many audiences place too much stock in “realism” in acting — using the deification of intensely studied, precise performers likes of Meryl Streep (“a walking manual on acting”) as an example — Gilbey argues the following:

    David Mamet writes that “We confuse ‘I like it’ with ‘It is very realistic.’ If we like it we say, ‘Yes, that’s very true.’” So truth becomes our alibi, our defence for that which pleases us.

    Given our myriad ideas of truth, it is no wonder we turn to the awards ceremonies to clarify and ratify. But while Sean Penn, Philip Seymour Hoffman or Meryl Streep win prizes, and their acting may feel true or right, it is detrimental to the craft to hold up as ideal only those performances that work as audition pieces, or as 30-second excerpts on Oscar night. The actors in Bresson’s Mouchette or Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus are but one component of those films’ defining philosophy and meaning; removed from that context, their performances have no meaning.

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  • ‘Kill Bill’ in 60 seconds

    This is silly, but I laughed:

  • Tarantino doubles up… again

    It’s difficult to get a grasp on what’s going on with Quentin Tarantino’s long-mooted WWII project, “Inglorious Bastards,” not least because QT seems somewhat hazy on the subject himself. Last month, he made this rather bold claim at Cannes: “If all goes well, I will be here … in 2009 with ‘Inglorious Bastards.’” (I’d question the hubris of his assuming that Cannes will have him, but hell, they accepted “Death Proof” into competition, so I can’t.)

    Now comes word that, in what’s becoming a familiar move for the director, the project will be released as two films, apparently because the story is too big for a single feature. Said story involves a group of war criminals fighting both Allied and Nazi forces on a journey to neutral Switzerland, which sounds do-able in one film to me, but what do I know? Meanwhile, the Vulture at New York Magazine is taking Tarantino’s assertions with a pinch of salt:

    That gives Tarantino about ten months to finish the scripts, find himself some actors — he now says previous mentions of Michael Madsen, Adam Sandler, Christopher Walken, and others were just “conversations” — and shoot and edit two movies. It’s possible, of course, but it’s also possible that this project is but a ball of yarn for Tarantino’s mischievous-kitten tendencies, and in a year, it will be a seven-part cartoon musical.

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