You can but no thanks.
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…and? Not sure I care about his point. Nobody is forcing him to direct one. I’m sure he can make another edgy violent film where people shout the n-word ironically.
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while that didn’t bother me per se, I admit it was gratuitous. but there is precident for split-screen in good movies like the original Thomas Crown Affair (but yeah, also a bunch of bad ones, too.)
I just like how he portrayed Banner and Hulk.
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I appreciate the sentiment, but the 1980s were the era when the wild experimentation of the 1960s and especially the 1970s flamed out. The death of United Artists was the true hallmark that risks were no longer going to be taken, and the studios began dictating to the directors what scenes needed to be in the movie before they would release it. “Our marketing research shows that a movie like yours needs at least one shot of a topless female and and a car chase, so add those.”
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It was certainly an odd creative decision to have the main character only find out his birth name was “Bruce Banner” halfway through the movie.
Maybe Ang Lee had been watching Superman and just figured that was how superhero origin stories were supposed to work.
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Hey, I grew up thinking his name was David Banner, and was played by that guy who starred in The Magician!
I also gave Dallas a shot only because it hat the lead from Man From Atlantis in it.
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My point exactly. 
Lots of sequels, yes, but other than Batman, nary a superhero to be found.
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To be clear, I wasn’t trying to claim it was a period of grand experimental art cinema. Not in the mainstream theatres anyway. My point was that there were lots of different IPs, lots of one-offs or mini-franchises, and no goddamn superheroes. Everyone thought Tim Burton’s Batman reboot was nuts because who wants to watch a movie about a comic book?
It was the era of Ferris Bueller, Gremlins, Goonies, Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Back to The Future, and on and on. All amazing fun movies, and tons of variety. You never had to see the same IP twice if you didn’t want to.
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To be fair Superman II broke US box office records on its opening weekend in 1981 so there was definitely some precedent for commercially successful comic book superhero movies before Batman.
(ETA: Christopher Reeve even pitched the idea of putting a Superman cameo in the 1989 Batman, which would have established a shared cinematic universe almost 20 years before Marvel did.)
But as to your larger point, yes. Definitely a wider variety of genres among big-budget action & adventure movies.
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Tarantino taking orders from Harvey Weinstein? Say it isn’t so!
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I don’t usually consider Tarantino a great writer and director. I think he riffs on other films and then claims credit for originality in spinning the existing style and tropes. Pulp Fiction was fun to watch and Kill Bill parts 1 & 2 were interesting. True Romance is by far his best film IMO.
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I’d argue that much of the films of the era were influenced by the b-movies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s… Not all of them of course, but lots of them were. So, it’s just superheros you’re not fond of, I guess?
And I like all the films you listed, too, but I also do enjoy a decent superhero film, as well.
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Very mixed bag in what aged well since then.
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What has always bothered me about Tarantino is that he never seemed to be willing to go out of his comfort zone. Born in 1980 I was just the right age to grow up thinking that his early films were the greatest thing ever, but somewhere around the time of Kill Bill it felt as if it wouldn’t hurt if he evolved a little.
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His comfort zone is showing feet and screaming the N word. Double bonus if he gets a cameo where he gets to touch feet or say the N-word. Oh, and finding Harvey Weinstein victims.
He kept getting paid for being in that comfortzone and doing what his fetishes pushed him to. Why evolve when there’s tons of people who will pay for anything he publishes.
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But one of my favorite Marvel films came out that year and I thought it was visually inventive.
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Yeah sometimes it’s jarring to re-watch beloved 80s movies and realize how much of the humor revolved around racism, homophobia and sexual assault.
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When young Quentin watched the Oscars broadcast in 1971, he’d seen all five Best Picture nominees (“Patton,” “m *a *s *h ,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Airport,” and “Love Story”) and knew well that his movie exposure—and his habit of telling his classmates in detail about what he’d seen—made him stand out. He stood out as well because his mother was dating a Black man named Reggie, who took him to see Blaxploitation films in predominantly Black neighborhoods. He cites their moviegoing habits as the bedrock of his cinematic destiny: “To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972.” The book is centered almost entirely on violent films, action films, horror films, the kinds of films that delighted the child Quentin and the teen Tarantino and that, to all appearances, are still—for better or worse—at the core of his cinematic universe.
probably mere self justification, but there you have it in his own words.
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i feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Maybe on some level he’s saying marvel movies are beneath him, but it seems like he’s just stating a fact: that he only directs movies where he is the creator. He isnt the type of director who can be hired to realize someone else’s creation. Not that there’s anything bad about that. Lots of people can do really creative stuff working on someone else’s ideas, but that’s not his thing. It would be like asking stephen king to write a marvel universe book. it’s just not what he does. (he probably could do something fun with the concept if he tried but he doesn’t need to)
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