Hoopla digital. - If You Like Quentin Tarantino...: Here Are Over 200 Films, TV Shows, and Other Oddities That You Will Love

Copyright 2012 by Katherine Rife

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2012 by Limelight Editions

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rife, Katie.

If you like Quentin Tarantino-- : here are over 200 films, tv shows, and other oddities that you will love / Katie Rife.

p. cm.

ISBNs: 9780879108182 (epub); 9780879108199 (mobi)

1. Tarantino, Quentin--Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN1998.3.T358R54 2012

791.430233092--dc23

2012026829

www.limelighteditions.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Samuel Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Ficton. (Miramax/Photofest)

I think 13-year-old girls will love Kill Bill. I want young girls to be able to see it. Theyre going to love Umas character, the Bride. They have my permission to buy a ticket for another movie and sneak into Kill Bill. Thats money Im okay not making. When I was a kid, I used to go into theaters when they didnt have the name of the movies on the ticket. Im a theater-sneaker-inner from way back.

Q UENTIN T ARANTINO , Playboy interview, 2003

In the summer of 2004, I was working in a video store in my small college town, rapidly losing interest in my journalism classes in favor of watching movies and talking about them with my coworkers all day. The store I worked at had a strict ID policy, so whenever a baby-faced kid would come up to the counter with Basic Instinct or Jason X or whatever, I would turn him away.

Except for this one time. One afternoon I was working by myself when two boys with matching bowl cuts (change comes slowly to small-town Ohio) who looked about junior high school age came up to the counter. They were dressed in oversized T-shirts and jean shorts and were nervously grinning at each other. One, slightly taller than the other, was clutching a DVD case close to his chest. He reached upthey clearly hadnt gone through their growth spurts yetand placed Kill Bill: Volume 1 on the counter.

My mom said it was okay, the bigger one said.

I looked at the case, looked down at them, looked around at the empty store. Ah, what the hell, I thought. At least they have good taste.

Just dont let her see it, I told them. And bring it back tomorrow. I took their two dollars and waved them around past the metal detector, placing the forbidden slab of plastic in their moist little palms. Thank you, the smaller one peeped, and they tore off out the door and across the parking lot.

I like to think they had the absolute coolest slumber party of their entire lives that Saturday night and, on Monday morning, excitedly acted out the climactic House of Blue Leaves battle to their friends at school. I like to think they spent the rest of their teen years seeking out all the movies that Kill Bill pays tribute to, going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of obsessive fandom. But I dont know for sure. I dont even know if they brought it back the next day like I told them toit was my day off.

When I was in junior high school, Pulp Fiction had just come out, and my friends and I were most decidedly not allowed to watch it. But thanks to a permissive video-store clerk or someones older brother (I dont remember which, but bless them, whoever it was) we got our hands on a VHS copy, which we watched with the sound turned down low, huddled around a TV on the carpeted floor of someones rec room. My friends were horrifiedespecially when the Gimp was brought outbut I was enthralled. This was a new world, an adult world, and this type of cool just didnt exist in my blue-collar neighborhood.

And that was it, man.

Quentin Tarantino movies lend themselves exceptionally well to reference and recommendation, because each one is itself a dense collage of references and recommendations. A former video-store clerk himself, Tarantino grew up sneaking into grindhouses and came of age in the video era, when suddenly even the most obscure movies could be viewed (and re-viewed) on demand. He takes everything hes ever seen and spins it all together into stories that may be based on other movies, sure, but at the same time are deeply personal, because he really loves those movies, and in the myopic world of movie nerds, what you love is who you are.