Here’s another Quentin Tarantino story — this one we’ll be updating with more titles in the coming day or two.
Inspired by The Big Picture podcast’s 25 best films of the century list, Tarantino has decided to guest on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast and make his own list. The filmmaker “grabbed a pen,” and “started writing titles.” He’s come up with his own 20 best films of the 21st century; Only one film allowed per director.
As expected, Tarantino’s list is filled with violent, horror-leaning films. I’ll update the list tomorrow, but for now here are the announced titles with highly entertaining notes from the filmmaker. Some wild choices, some sane ones, but all around eccentric batch of titles.
No, I wouldn’t have Rob Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects” on my 21st-century list. But know what? It’s a damn fine movie that not many people talk about. I love how Tarantino described it as Peckinpah horror—which it is—and how it has influenced plenty of films since its release, which not many seem to have noticed.
I’m also a fan of ‘Passion of the Christ’, which gets unfairly maligned for being a religious-right movie. No, I did not laugh my ass off like Tarantino did while watching the film, as I saw it as a straight-up violent horror movie. That’s what the film truly is to me—something that very much falls in line with exploitative genre cinema.
Also, “Jackass: The Movie” IS absolutely hilarious. It’s low-brow humor, but quite honestly, who cares? It set out and succeeded in what it attempted to do—passing the exam with flying colors.
I’m a fan of practically every film he’s mentioned so far, including “Cabin Fever,” which I recently wrote is far and away Eli Roth’s best film. The lone title I haven’t seen is “Chocolate,” but by the looks of it, not many have seen that film. The lone film I did not like is Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” but I might be in the minority here.
Regardless, today Tarantino’s revealed #11-20 (watch out for that potshot at Scorsese in the Spielberg entry):
11. Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku)
“I do not understand how the Japanese writer didn’t sue [‘Hunger Games’ author] Susan Collins for every fcking thing she owns. They just ripped off the fcking book. Stupid book critics are not going to go watch a Japanese movie called Battle Royale, so the stupid book critics never called her on it — they talked about how it was the most original fcking thing they’d ever read. As soon as the film critics saw the film, they said, ‘what the fck, this is just Battle Royale except PG!’”
12. Big Bad Wolves (Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado)
“This has got a fantastic script and a similar storyline to Prisoners […] they handle it with guts and balls — you know the American movie wouldn’t do that […]”
13. Jackass: The Movie (Jeff Tremaine)
“This was the movie I laughed at the most in these last 20 years. I don’t remember laughing from beginning to end like this since Richard Pryor […] As I was making Kill Bill, I thought this movie was so f*cking funny I had to show it to the crew. So we found a print, watched the movie, and just died.”
14. The School of Rock (Richard Linklater)
“It was a really fun time at the theaters. It was a real fun, fun, fun screening. I do think this one had the explosion of Jack Black combined with Rick Linklater and Mike White — that made it special […] this is as close to Bad News Bears as we ever got.”
15. The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson)
“I was laughing a lot during the movie. Not because we were trying to be perverse, laughing at Jesus getting fcked up — extreme violence is just funny to me — and when you go so far beyond extremity, it just gets funnier and funnier. We were just groaning and laughing at how fcked up this was […] Mel did a tremendous directorial job. He put me in that time period. I talked to Mel Gibson about this and he looked at me like I was a f*cking nut.”
16. The Devil’s Rejects (Rob Zombie)
“This rough Peckinpah–cowboy–Manson thing [from Zombie] — that voice didn’t really exist before [in House of 1000 Corpses], and he refined that voice with this movie […] Peckinpah wasn’t part of horror before this. He melded it with sick hillbillies, and it’s become a thing now. You can recognize it across the street, but that didn’t exist before.”
17. Chocolate (Prachya Pinkaew)
“Here’s a movie you probably never heard of […] People getting f*cked up in the most spectacular of ways […] they trained this 12-year-old girl for four years to star in this movie […] this is some of the greatest kung-fu fights I’ve ever seen in a movie.”
18. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
“Brad Pitt’s performance was one of my favorite star performances of the last 20 years — where a movie star came in and reminded you why he was a movie star and just carried the movie on his shoulders.”
19. Cabin Fever (Eli Roth)
“There’s something so charming. Eli’s sense of humor, sense of gore — it just really, really works. People kind of forget how tense it is in the first half because it gets so genuinely funny in the last 20 minutes […] Hostel might be his best movie, but this is my favorite.”
20. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg)
“This is the one where Steven shows he still has it. I don’t think Scorsese has made a film this exciting [this century]. It revitalized him […] I couldn’t believe I liked the lead [Ansel Elgort] as I didn’t like him in anything else”
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.