1. Pulp Fiction
2. Django Unchained
3. Inglourious Basterds
4. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
5. Jackie Brown
6. The Hateful Eight
7. Kill Bill 1 & 2
8. Death Proof
9. Reservoir Dogs
The movies in each group are of about equal quality to me; I just added the numbers in case I was backed against a wall.
At the moment it's #3:
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Kill Bill
3. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
4. Django Unchaned
5. Inglourious Basterds
6. Jackie Brown
7. The Hateful Eight
8. Reservoir Dogs
9. Death Proof
Number 3 for me also
1. Jackie Brown
2. Pulp Fiction
3, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
4. Kill Bill
5. Reservoir Dogs
6. Inglorious Bastards
7. Death Proof
8. Django Unchained
9. The Hateful Eight
1. Jackie Brown
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Reservoir Dogs
4. The Hateful Eight
5. Once Upon a Time..In Hollywood
6. Django Unchained
7. Inglorious Basterds
8. Kill Bill
9. Death Proof
Thanks Ecarle (always appreciate your commentaries here).
shareThanks Ecarle (always appreciate your commentaries here).
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Thank you, Wuchak.
I might add that with QT, as with some other favorite directors of mine, the films near the bottom aren't "worst films" to me. I don't believe that QT had made(or written) a bad film yet. I like all of them.
The one at the bottom -- Death Proof -- suffers in its on again/off again status of "half of Grindhouse" and I don't think QT had the knack for writing interesting female characters here(less, ironically enough, the Rose McGowan part.)
But I think all of Kurt Russell's dialogue and actions(that weird "almost sneeze") are great, and the final car chase is pretty damn 1970's no-CGI incredible(as well as Zoe Bell's stunt work on the hood.)
Kill Bill has that even-more-incredible swordfight with the Crazy 88's ...but is surrounded by some fairly sick and sadistic stuff.
(My favorite scene is in Kill Bill 2...the strip club manager dressing down bouncer Michael Madsen.)
As for the titles above those, i gave this list some thought.
QT's original "LA trilogy" -- Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown -- are better than what came later. They are the top three. And I put them in the order I like them.
Unlike some(many?) I think that The Hateful Eight was a great achievement. One of the great opening shot/credits/opening music sequences in movie history. Morricone's score The beautiful colors and crystal clarity of the Ultra Panavision 70mm look of the movie. And eight-plus really good actors given really meaty roles to play. (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has some great actors reduced to brief cameos.) Plus: ugly as it is in content, The Hateful Eight has something to say.
The rest play out...for my reasons.
Anyway, that's my list. And there is no "worst" Tarantino movie. They are all good-to-great.
I think all of Kurt Russell's dialogue and actions(that weird "almost sneeze") are great
Yeah, "The Hateful Eight" is ugly, but the title itself announces this -- it's a perversion of "The Magnificent Seven" with genuinely amusing black humor and a potent moral, augmented by everything you said: Great opening, a superb Morricone score, an interesting wintry setting and a can't-beat-it cast. The movie's basically a one-room drama/mystery that lasts almost three hours and yet the dialogues are entertaining and the film keeps your interest.
"Reservoir Dogs" didn't work for me. The story can basically be summed up as: The cuss-oriented squabbles of lowlife crooks for 99 minutes (and no women). Still, it's interesting to observe Tarantino's first serious stab at filmmaking and it has its moments. It's a lesson on humble beginnings, which shows potential while not being up to snuff IMHO. But I'm glad others like it.
1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Reservoir Dogs
4. Jackie Brown
5. The Hateful Eight
6. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
7. Kill Bill
8. Django Unchained
9. Death Proof
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Django Unchained
3. Inglorious Bastards
4. Once upon a time
5. Reservoir Dogs
6. Kill Bill Volume 2
7. Jackie Brown
8. Kill Bill Vol 1
9. The Hateful Eight
10. Death Proof
I like all those movies, actually, but that's how Id rank them.
Yeah, there's something to appreciate in every one. I just didn't care for "Reservoir Dogs" because I found the thugs uninteresting as characters (the opposite of "Pulp Fiction") and the setting was too one-dimensional for my tastes (the old warehouse), but it showed Tarantino's potential and paved the way for the masterpiece "Pulp."
The main thing I didn't like about "Death Proof" was the dull chit chat of the girls, especially in the second half where it went into overdrive and, specifically, that involving Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms and Rosario Dawson. Yet the first half is very good, opening with the excellent "The Last Race" by Jack Nitzsche, which was the theme song for "Village of the Giants." And Russell's character is perversely charismatic; the movie perks up whenever he's on screen.
Anyway, I noticed that my list is very similar to yours, Jacob, with the obvious exception of "Reservoir." I didn't much like "Hateful Eight" the first time I viewed it, but the second time (not quite a year later) I 'got' it and found it quite entertaining, even ingenious. The movie's intentionally offensive (the title tells all) and you have to roll WITH the excesses to be entertained; otherwise you'll hate it. Compelling extended dialogues have always been Tarantino's strong suit; and so it with "Hateful." The melodramatics are amusing and the story keeps your interest despite the one-dimensional setting. Thematically, Tarantino is poking fun at our petty hostilities that separate us based on race, gender, sectionalism, faction-ism, envy and rivalry. Furthermore, men divided by hatred of culture and race can unite in hatred of something else, in this case misogyny.
1. Death Proof
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Kill Bill
4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
5. Jackie Brown
6. Reservoir Dogs
7. Inglorious Basterds
8. Django Unchained
9. The Hateful 8
1. Death proof
2. Once upon a time in Hollywood
3. Pulp fiction
4. Inglorious basterds
5. Django unchained
6. Reservoir dogs
7. Kill bill
8. Jackie Brown
9. The hateful eight (the only one that has 4 stars instead of five, on my view)
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Reservoir Dogs
3. Jackie Brown
4. Django Unchained
5. Inglourious Basterds
6. Kill Bill 1 & 2
7.Death Proof
8. The Hateful Eight
9. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
Even though bottom few are bottom I still think they are pretty good films.
I was underwhelmed with Jackie Brown when I saw it in the cinema on release, maybe expecting another Pulp Fiction. Now I think it's a fantastic film, aged like a fine wine.
Same with Death Proof, underwhelmed again on first watch, rewatched it and found it to be very good, ambitious in spending lots of time with the first group of characters then killing them off. Then doing the exact same thing with similar characters in the same situation but fleshing them all out well enough to separate them all and give them a living breathing character some writers couldn't do with one character in a full 2 and half hour long film. The dialogue is fantastic Tarantino snappy writing.
Hatefull 8 I really like, the lighting, cinematography in the hut, its stage play like atmosphere and again the dialogue.
But above those are Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown etc so they have to fit somewhere on the list.
1. Pulp Fiction
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. Kill Bill 1 & 2
4. Reservoir Dogs
5. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
6. Django Unchained
7. Jackie Brown
8. The Hateful Eight
9. Death Proof