Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
If You Like Quentin Tarantino
Collapse
X
Collapse
-
If You Like Quentin Tarantino...
Author: Katharine Rife
Released by: Limelight Editions
Released on: November 1, 2012.
Purchase From Amazon
The latest in the Limelight Editions 'If You Like…' series that expands upon music, movies and other cultural bits and pieces referenced by popular artists focuses on Quentin Tarantino. Any cult movie fan worth his or her salt knows that Tarantino likes to 'borrow' from the movies he's long been a fan of and given that his films tend to be packed with references and so called homage's to many of those pictures, something like this has the potential to be a pretty interesting read, at least to those who don't live, sleep, eat and breath this type of stuff.
If you're not familiar with City On Fire, this is the book for you. If you didn't realize that the suitcase in Pulp Fiction was a reference to Kiss Me Deadly, give this book a shot. If you were complete unaware that Pam Grier was in blaxploitation movies in the seventies and that Tarantino's admiration of these movies lead to his casting of her in Foxy Brown, you'll probably find this pretty enlightening. If you only know Sonny Chiba from his cameo in Kill Bill and had no idea that he made loads of awesome movies in his native Japan which had a big influence on not just Kill Bill but also the Tarantino scripted True Romance, check this out. You'll dig it.
And that's also the problem with the book. If you're a cult movie buff, it's hard to read something like this objectively and find it interesting. That's not to say that there aren't nuggets of information here and there to gleam, it's that a lot of this book will, to a certain segment of the readership of this site, be stating the obvious. At the same time, there are other avenues that could have been explored and which were not. Did Duke Mitchell's Massacre Mafia Style influence one of Pulp Fiction's most memorable shots? Yeah, it probably did but you'd never know it from reading this book because it doesn't go there, even if it does use that image on the cover. Did Sergio Corbucci's Django influence Django Unchained? Probably but when this book was written the film was unfinished so when it goes there it's vague. The whole chapter on Django Unchained is vague, actually, not in the western films that it recommends or reviews but in how those films relate to Tarantino's movie specifically and given that over ten percent of the book's less than two hundred pages cover Django Unchained, that's a problem.
Rife's heart seems to be in the right place and she writes with a very easy to read and down to Earth style, taking most of this stuff seriously enough to make it obvious her intentions were good. The appendix of films Tarantino released under his short lived Rolling Thunder Pictures banner through Miramax is handy and the index makes it easy to go right to whatever movie you might want to know more about but the end result is a book that really just scratches the surface. It will doubtlessly be of interest to the casual movie fans that Limelight would be wise to market it to, but seasoned fans of horror, martial arts, exploitation and foreign oddities may find that this one comes up a bit short.
Posting comments is disabled.
Categories
Collapse
article_tags
Collapse
- album review (218)
- album reviews (274)
- arrow video (272)
- blu-ray (3225)
- blu-ray review (4162)
- comic books (1392)
- comic reviews (872)
- comics (988)
- dark horse comics (484)
- dvd and blu-ray reviews a-f (1969)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews G-M (1711)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews N-S (1757)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews T-Z (878)
- dvd review (2513)
- idw publishing (216)
- image comics (207)
- kino lorber (391)
- movie news (260)
- review (318)
- scream factory (279)
- severin films (300)
- shout! factory (537)
- twilight time (269)
- twilight time releasing (231)
- vinegar syndrome (497)
Latest Articles
Collapse
-
Edited by: David C. Hayes
Published by: Bear Manor Media
Released on: September 14th, 2022
Purchase From Amazon
Recently published through Bear Manor Media are two books edited by David C. Hayes sure to appeal to the action movie fan that doesn’t need to take things too seriously – Hard To Watch: The Films Of Steven Seagal and Missing The Action: The Films Of Chuck Norris. Hayes provides an introduction to each of the two books, explaining how he...-
Channel: Books And Comics
01-20-2023, 05:04 PM -
-
Released by: Klubb Super 8
Released on: April, 2021.
Author: Rickard Gramfors
Year: 2021
Purchase From Klubb Super 8 Rickard Gramfors's 384 page full-color hardcover book, Do You Believe In Swedish Sin? Swedish Exploitation Film Posters 1951 - 1984, is a true thing of beauty. Written entirely in English, this weighty tome opens with two quick intros, the first of which spends two pages giving readers a brief history of Swedish exploitation cinema, and the sec...-
Channel: Books And Comics
07-18-2021, 11:58 AM -
-
Released by: Dynamite Entertainment
Released on: October 14th, 2020.
Written by: David Avallone
Illustrated by: Dave Acosta
Purchase From Amazon Not caught up? Then you need to pick up volume 1 (which collects the first four issues of this series from writer David Avallone and artist Dave Acosta! For those not hip to these haunted happenings, Doctor Johannes Faust has sent our favorite buxom “hostess with the mostess†travelling through tim...-
Channel: Books And Comics
10-13-2020, 07:24 PM -
-
Dracula, Motherf**ker (Image Comics) Comic Review
Released by: Image Comics
Released on: October 7th, 2020.
Written by: Alex De Campi
Illustrated by: Erica Henderson
Purchase From Amazon Sometimes a good title is all it takes. At the time of this writing, I've just finished cleaning the kitchen, cranked out four reviews that needed to be cranked out, and honestly, I could use a nice little nap right now but then, in my inbox, I see it - a chance to...-
Channel: Books And Comics
07-26-2020, 01:45 PM -
-
Released by: Titan Comics
Released on: July 29th, 2020.
Written by: Michael Green, Mike Johnson
Illustrated by: Andres Guinaldo
Purchase From Amazon The second story arc ends with this issue, but first? A quick recap. Ash was the only one to survive the Replicant attack on the off-world mining colony, through Cleo believed her to be dead and, with no other real options, joined the Replicant rebels. A new Blade Runner named Hythe, who has an arrest warrant for...-
Channel: Books And Comics
07-26-2020, 10:16 AM -
-
Judge Dredd: Control (Rebellion Publishing) Comic Review
Released by: 2000 A.D.
Released on: July 9th, 2020 (digital)/December 10th, 2020 (print)
Written by: Rob Williams
Illustrated by: Chris Weston
Purchase From Amazon Originally published in 2000 AD Progs 2035-2036, Judge Dredd: Control opens with a dramatic scene when a Judge in a small flying craft, an H-Wagon it's called, tracks down and deals with the 'We're All Heart' private heart transplant ...-
Channel: Books And Comics
06-28-2020, 04:50 PM -