Quentin Tarantino’s new nonfiction novel “Cinema Speculation” just arrived in the mail. This is Tarantino playing film critic and writing about his love for cinema. I’ll eventually share my thoughts.
Regardless, he‘a been promoting this book hard, and in an interview with Kimmel, after being pressed to share what he considers to be “perfect films,” Tarantino admitted “there’s not many of them.” However, he believes there are seven film that should be deemed as perfection, they are “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Jaws,” “The Exorcist,” “Annie Hall,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Back to The Future,” and “The Wild Bunch.”
A very mainstream list. Nothing new is really learned. Not too sure about ‘Texas Chainsaw.’ I’m also reminded of a Pauline Kael quote that I’ve always agreed with: “Great movies are rarely perfect movies.” The best movies swing for the fences and when a great filmmaker pours his soul and ambition into something it might sometimes turn out to be much more than just the sum of its parts.
I always wondered why Tarantino almost never namechecks films from the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s. I get it, he grew up with ‘70s American cinema so that would obviously be his preferred era for moviemaking, but, still, I’d like to know more about his thoughts on Welles, Hitchcock, Fellini, Renoir, Bergman, Ozu, Murnau ..