QT8: The First Eight
The first midnight movie I ever saw was when my older brother snuck me into Pulp Fiction, a movie he considered so different and so groundbreaking that I just HAD to see it. Even if I was only 14. It was a formative experience and I still remember when the sound of “Misirlou” by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, nailed me to the back of my chair as the credits came up and the film keeping me nailed there for the rest of the running time.
If you, like me, were a teen movie freak in the 90s then Tarantino was part of your upbringing. Posters for his films adorned your walls, his eclectic collage of B-Movie references, homages and outright steals, lead you down the path of digging out some of the original films and adding them to your collection and every time you walked by a brick wall, you heard Little Green Bag in your head.
I have seen every Tarantino film in the cinema since that fateful night in 1994. I don’t know why because since Kill Bill 2 I have found all of them to be massively overrated but still I go. 50% because I hope beyond all hope that one day he puts his massive and unearned ego to one side and makes a movie with heart, humour, soul and fun again that isn’t all about how great HE is and 50% because if I didn’t go and see them, I couldn’t accurately participate in the endless conversation online about his films that both precede them opening and continue long after they close.
You have my generation to blame for modern day Tarantino. For the emperor’s new clothes Tarantino, for the Tarantino can do no wrong crowd, for the not-really-a-controversy that accompanies the release of every single one of his recent movies and for this utterly unnecessary, shallow, circle jerk of a “documentary”. All I can say as a representative of my generation, albeit one that didn’t drink the Kool-Aid after a certain point, is sorry. I am sorry for QT8: The First Eight.
What is with the QT8 thing by the way? The semi-colon, secondary title is The First Eight and QT8 reads as Quait, which means nothing… so… whatever.
I mean this whole - I’m Tarantino and I’m only making 10 films is all bollocks anyway - Counting My Best Friend’s Birthday he has already directed 10 full feature films (prior to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood). You would have to discount that (and the documentary certainly does as it doesn’t even mention it) and you’d have to count Kill Bill as one film (Jesus what a long tedious exercise that would be) and only then would it be 8 films. Which still wouldn’t cover his section of Four Rooms, his work on Sin City, or his screenplays for From Dusk Till Dawn, True Romance and Natural Born Killers. Again… whatever… Urgh
As for the documentary, it’s not unlike sitting around watching incredibly famous people perform lavish and grotesque oral sex on Tarantino. It has all the depth of a E! Network puff piece. There is nothing here you don’t know already, it skirts over anything even remotely negative, is as reprehensible in dealing with the Weinstein situation as Tarantino himself was and the lip service paid towards the time he, tangentially, caused Uma Thurman permanent neck and knee damage by forcing her to do a stunt that went wrong on the set of Kill Bill, is brief, slightly jarring and then you’re right back into the thick of the “I can’t rub him off hard or fast enough” interviews.
Before any Tarantinoite reading this screams “you can’t blame him for Weinstein, stop bringing it up! He has nothing to do with that!” well, you’re right, except for the fact Weinstein produced all 8 films this “documentary” is talking about and that QT dated Mira Sorvino, worked with Rose McGowen and worked twice with Uma Thurman, all of whom have claimed Weinstein harassment. Tarantino alum Michael Madsen admits in this doc, as QT has done previously, that him and Tarantino knew what was going on and said nothing, then Madsen tells some bizarre story about Weinstein and a doll and says a few words over some slow mo montage and all sins are meant to be forgiven.
The one silver lining to the Weinstein cloud is that he isn’t profiting at all from this documentary. The director Tara Wood went through a pretty lengthy process to reclaim the rights to the film back from Weinstein following the allegations against him. This is excellent news and means that, at least, QT lovers can watch this film guilt free.
Weinstein represented as a large, sweaty, bumbling cartoon of a man rather than the vicious, predatory, ogre, rapist, bully that he is.
Considering I have read people complain about this documentary because it even dares to mention Weinstein - and they’ve even said it shows a blatant and angry #metoo agenda which has no place near the great man’s work - I’m here to say that there is nowhere near enough. I could’ve popped to the kitchen to make a tea and missed all of it. The sum total of slightly difficult content or conflict with the subject matter displayed in this doc is about 3 minutes in a 2 hour running time.
The doc completely ignores getting into any relationships Tarantino might have had, professional or otherwise and even as an overview of his work, it is a chronological stroll through films that have been covered a bazillion times, with no new content and supported by the constant, nauseating reiteration that Tarantino is a flawless genius, film-making machine who we are all honoured to have even looked at for a second. I don’t know what he’s giving or paying people to say this nonsense but they all line up to say it. Actors I have loved, respected and enjoyed, not one of them with the ball hair to say anything but repetitive, positive and overly congratulatory shit about the weirdly faced, arrogant, blow-hard who makes overly-verbose, self-important genre films and then talks about them like they’re fucking re-inventing the very nature of human storytelling.
Well, enough.
Lovers will love, haters will hate and I’ll be over here wishing I could get the time back.
