Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Excerpt:

Quentin Tarantino's something of a strange case--he's an enthusiast without much discrimination, a director who cares more about framing his dialogue than his images, an auteur wannabe more interested in cramming allusions and homages into his works than actually fusing them into a unique voice. He's got so many references in his movies the frame operate more like hypertext (click on this hat and it's the same type hat used in so-and-so kung fu flick; click on that pack of cigarettes and it's the same brand used in one of the director's previous works)--that much he's up-to-date. To be fair, he does have a fondness for the classic and antiquated that may, after all is said and done, be his finest trait (though his uncritical passion for junk takes a bit of the gloss off that love).

In effect, he's not the greatest thing since apple pie, but he's not cow flop, either. In 1992 he took the plot of Ringo Lam's great Lung fu fong wan (City on Fire, 1987), shuffled the time scheme for variety, dumbed down the understated desperation, and presented it as Reservoir Dogs; two years later he took Godard's declaration that "every film has a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order," made Pulp Fiction, and won a Palme d'Ir in Cannes (funny Godard never got credit for the idea, nor brought home his own Palme d'Or). The 1996 From Dusk Till Dawn might be my favorite Tarantino, if only because the man wrote a clever, genre-bending script for his more visually talented friend, Robert Rodriguez (Rodriguez's problem is in constructing a narrative that moves in reasonably smooth motion, and comes to a satisfying resolution; the two should do more projects together, preferably with Tarantino at the keyboard, Rodriguez behind the camera).