Thread by @portraitinflesh

This guy is the son of Norman Reedus, who co-starred in The Boondock Saints, one of the worst films ever made, and its sequel, which is even worse. But I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, until I learned he named his son "Mingus". Mingus Reedus. For fuck's sake.

https://twitter.com/MittenDAmour/status/1959872825239756898

The Boondock Saints was one of the many, many subpar Tarantino knockoffs - that is, ultraviolence plus overcooked dialogue - of the late '90s and early '00s, distinguished only by its theme-pub-worthy fetishisation of Irish culture, of the sort you only ever see from Americans.

The title characters kill loads and loads and loads of people, but it's OK, because they're *bad* people, and they have a trademark of leaving pennies on their eyes, which is, like, totally kick-ass. Then there's Willem Dafoe as a scenery-chewing gay detective, for some reason.

The Tarantino knockoff boom was a classic cargo cult situation, because almost all these movies copied the superficial hallmarks of films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, while completely missing what made them special, i.e. quality writing, acting, plotting and direction.

As always, talent is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. Tarantino mostly gets away with overindulging in his pet tropes, even the foot fetishism, because he has a solid grasp of filmmaking fundamentals, and some genuinely original ideas. Very few of his imitators had either.

Inglourious Basterds, for instance, is at least half an hour too long, and has some moments of supreme self-indulgence that just make your eyes roll. But it also contains three or four of the best individual scenes in 21st century cinema, which are worth the price of admission.

Everyone rightly praises the opening scene in the farmhouse, but my favourite is the basement pub showdown, which rides an exquisite knife-edge of tension, then ends in a shoot-out that kills everyone but, refreshingly, lasts only a few seconds; a sort of anti-Matrix anticlimax.

Right, their returns diminish harshly. None of Tarantino's post-Jackie Brown films have been better than "brilliant but flawed", and the flaws tend to emanate from his self-indulgence and permanent adolescence. Part of him has never left the video store.

https://x.com/IrkedDinosaur/status/1959881138802995705

Going back to Inglourious Basterds, for a second: is there not something fundamentally redundant about the fantasy of turning Hitler to mince with bullets? We're all pretty much on the same page, when it comes to the Nazis, and things ended *quite* badly for them in real life.

It's hard not to suspect Tarantino just likes filming extreme violence, and if you want bad guys who can be gruesomely killed by the dozen with no moral qualms, Nazis are the way to go. The film ultimately has nothing new to *say* about the war, or the Holocaust, or even revenge.

Also - a minor quibble, but it bugs me every time - you shouldn't call a French Jewish character "Dreyfus" unless you have a very clear idea of the meaning attached to the name, and how it ties into your movie. Instead, it just feels like a sort of Easter egg for history buffs.

But compared to Kill Bill, especially Volume 1, Inglourious Basterds is a masterclass in restraint. Again, there are some amazing scenes, in both parts, but also SO much film geek wankery, apparently meant to appeal to Tarantino, his friends and virtually nobody else. Exhausting.

There's a YouTube video of Bonnie Greer reviewing Kill Bill: Volume 1 on Newsnight. They play a clip of the "silly rabbit, tricks are for kids" scene, and she says how clever it is to quote an old cereal advert. I must ask: why, exactly? Why is that clever? Rather than just naff?

She also calls it a "deeply feminist" film, apparently because it's full of women who are very good at violence. Joss Whedon feminism, in other words, which we should all really have seen through, by then. But I suppose that's why I don't get the big public intellectual bucks.

Reviewing alongside her are Ian Hislop and Mark Kermode. Kermode pans it, but in a "more in sorrow than in anger" way, because it's so self-indulgent. Hislop, though, has no time for Tarantino's bullshit whatsoever. When Greer says "deeply feminist", he literally laughs out loud.

Which was rude of him, but in the context of the windy, vacuous nonsense Greer was coming out with, undeniably satisfying. Hislop adds to the gaiety of nations because, for all the limitations of his worldview, he has an Orwell-esque allergy to pretentious, obfuscatory verbiage.

There's also a YouTube video of Kermode reviewing Volume 2, alongside *Germaine* Greer and @IMcMillan. I've no idea why Newsnight conscripted a poet to review a gory action flick, but I'm glad they did, because he's just so wholesome, and appears never to have seen a film before.

@IMcMillan Here's the Volume 1 video: youtube.com/watch?v=itwMCE… Volume 2: youtube.com/watch?v=ZAPrGn… Very entertaining, if you have a spare thirteen minutes. Though it's odd we have to rely on random punters uploading this stuff, rather than an official BBC account. Pull your finger out, Auntie.

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