King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino

King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino
by Paul A. Woods

Quentin Tarantino, director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and writer of True Romance, Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn, is undeniably the cult director of the decade. Here, Paul Woods traces the life, films and influences of the self-confessed 'movie geek' who has become the film stylist of the nineties, and one of Hollywood's hottest properties. Fully updated to include Tarantino's latest hit movie, Jackie Brown.

Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files

Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files
by Paul A. Woods

For the first time since Hitchcock, moviegoers have embraced a film director whose name is synonymous with his own genre — a culmination of the crime, gangster, and film noir genres that both celebrates and comments ironically upon itself. Part of the Ultrascreen series, Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files charts the controversial success of Tarantino's self-directed films and screenplays. From Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction to Natural Born Killers, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill, Tarantino has created a unique aesthetic drawing on pop-culture icons and ideals gleaned from movies, TV shows, comic strips, and old Top Ten records. This definitive, illustrated book provides the most essential interviews, essays, and reviews of Tarantino's career — from geekish video-store clerk to a cult figure of rock-star status. Aimed at a young, literate, moviegoing audience, Quentin Tarantino is a colorful guide to the brash, media-saturated world that spawned the premier filmmaker of his generation. Includes 70 black-and-white illustrations.

Quentin Tarantino: Interviews

Quentin Tarantino: Interviews
(Conversations With Filmmakers Series)
by Gerald Peary

Not since Martin Scorsese in the mid-1970s has a young American filmmaker made such an instant impact on international cinema as Quentin Tarantino, whose PULP FICTION won the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix Award. A manic talker, Tarantino obsesses about American pop culture and his favorite movies and movie makers.

Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies

Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies
by Jami Bernard

A premature biography, shallow and uninspired. Quentin Tarantino might be a talented filmmaker. He has written a few well-received scripts and directed two clever though overhyped films - Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction - but he has nothing approaching an oeuvre to his name. His career is still inchoate, even fetal, and the history of Hollywood is heavy with talents that quickly crashed and burned, sometimes justly, sometimes not. Bernard may be a movie critic for New York's Daily News, but she writes like an amateur gossip columnist. Despite a palsy-walsy "Quentin" tone, she wallows in trivial scandal, chronicling Tarantino's every spat and unkindness as he climbed the greasy pole of success from video-store clerk to film director. In Bernard's portrait he emerges as an ego-driven ingrate, breaking promises, betraying friends, all of which, of course, have almost nothing to do with his talent. More usefully, Bernard illuminates Tarantino's substantial "borrowings." In a manner that transcends mere postmodern art-about-art, Tarantino's work is fundamentally rooted in and derived from other films. Sometimes it is just a gesture here, a line there. And then there is Reservoir Dogs, for example, a great deal of which is "inspired" by a Hong Kong action movie, City on Fire. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, "Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal." Where Tarantino fits in this formulation is far from certain yet. Patience is its own reward. Perhaps Tarantino will one day merit a biography; it certainly won't be this one.