Thanks, at least, for disagreeing in a civilized manner. My point is that gratuitous gore, imo, often is a lazy mechanism when a director lacks the ability or interest in coming up with a creative way to express an idea.
Yeah, I tend to agree that the bolded is often the case, but I don't agree that Tarantino uses gore out of laziness. Tarantino finds creative ways to use various types of B-movie forms -- kung fu movies, blaxploitation, guys-on-a-mission movies, car movies, slasher movies, westerns, etc. For example, in Death Proof and the Kill Bill movies, he takes male-dominated forms and puts women at their center as heroes. In Inglorious Basterds he deals with the Holocaust by making a revenge fantasy of it. In Django Unchained he borrows from spaghetti westerns to tell a story about slavery. In 2007 (long before Django came out) he told the Daily Telegraph:
I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.
Quentin Tarantino: I'm proud of my flop - Telegraph
That piece is a great window into Tarantino's work in general. Another quote I love:
"Look at my movies and there's usually at least three genres operating on all cylinders, bumping into each other," he says. "It's like I don't know if I'm going to make a tremendous amount of movies, so I keep trying to knock off three movies with each one I do."
He uses gore because the genres he's playing with use gore. It's in his source material. And using source material as scaffolding for your work is hardly laziness. Nobody called Joyce lazy when he wrote Ulysses, or Shakespeare when he wrote all of his great tragedies. Not that Tarantino's work is anywhere near as rich as those authors'; just saying that playing with genre is not laziness. Tarantino finds new ways of expressing ideas by repurposing old ways or old forms, I guess you could say. And I think that can be really powerful. Or at least interesting.
There is a lot of great stuff getting trashed in this thread! Me reading through this thread is like Otter in this scene:
"Not great?"
Not that I disagree on all of the movies that have been mentioned. A couple people have mentioned Scarface, and I think that's a really good example of an overrated movie. It's ok, but nothing to justify the tremendous cultural impact it's made, judging by the number of cultural references it has inspired. IMHO.
