It’s enough to make you roll your eyes, shake your head, and wonder just how big of a complex Quentin Tarantino has sometimes when he goes on his rants about how tough it is to get noticed when ‘going to war’ with the big movie franchises. Anyone want to take a count of how many times Tarantino’s movies have been praised? Anyone at all? Is there anybody out there that really wants to think that Tarantino has suffered unduly thanks to the Marvel heroes, the Godzilla’s, the King Kong’s, or any of the other excuses he wants to make that his movies have to ‘fight’ to get seen? Seriously, any time it’s stated that a Tarantino movie is coming out his fans go nuts and are guaranteed to start talking him up in such a massive way that one might think he’s the messiah of the movie world, but that doesn’t appear to be enough as he’s been going on and on about how his movies and other independent ideas have to struggle to make themselves known. Remind me, how many Academy Award nominations did Once Upon a Time in Hollywood receive? Ten? Yeah, time to sit down and remind yourself that your persecution complex has outstripped your ego Quentin. As per Kevin Burwick of MovieWeb, this is how Tarantino explained his ‘war’ talk when it comes to how he has to compete with the big boys:
“As far as I can see, the commercial product that is owned by the conglomerates, the projects everybody knows about and has in their DNA, whether it be the Marvel Comics, the Star Wars, Godzilla, and James Bond, those films never had a better year than last year. It would have been the year that their world domination would have been complete. But it kind of wasn’t. Because of what you said, a lot of original movie content came out and demanded to be seen, and demanded to be seen at the theaters. That ended up becoming a really, really strong year. I’m really proud to be nominated with the other films that just got nominated. I think when you sum up the year, it’s cinema that doesn’t fall into that blockbuster IP proof status, made its last stand this year.”
This kind of talk would indicate that we’ve all become brain-dead, corporate-owned zombies that will ONLY ever watch something that we’re comfortable with and that is made by one of the bigger corporations that basically lure us in and make it impossible to look away. That’s one way to look at it at least, but for a man like Tarantino, who’s amassed enough awards that listing them all has become rather tiresome, to say that he’s had to continually fight to gain notice is amusing, in fact it’s downright laughable since after his movies started gaining notice people have said his name with reverence and in a way he’s become one of the best-known directors in Hollywood, AND he’s been able to release each movie to an eagerly waiting crowd that will readily gobble up every idea he sends their way, be it within a line of dialogue that sounds eerily unlike anything that two people in the real world would engage in, or buckets of blood and gore that tend to create a reddish feeling to each movie that never seems to go away.
Stating that Tarantino is a gifted filmmaker is easy since it’s obvious that he has the ear of the people, but listening to him complain or even comment about how he has to ‘fight’ to get noticed is enough to give a person a headache simply because the truth is: no he doesn’t. Want to know why his box office numbers aren’t as high and he doesn’t get quite as much notice with his movies as the big boys? It’s because they cater to more than just adolescents and adults. Quentin Tarantino movies are not family films, and they’re certainly not made for kids that would need a serious dose of therapy for years to come if they were exposed to the unrelenting language, subject matter, and gore that Tarantino is so well-known for. Spencer Kornhaber of The Atlantic has more to say on this subject. The other corporations take on the idea of catering to families in a way that allows them to increase their numbers almost exponentially since when you compare the audience in a Tarantino movie to that of an audience in a Star Wars movie, there are bound to be far more kids in the latter than the former. Some adults might not think twice about letting their young kids watch Quentin’s movies, but more often than not Disney and other corporations are catering to kids and families, and there’s no fighting those numbers, not even for someone as famous a Tarantino has become. Make no mistake about it though, his ‘fighting’ days aren’t nearly as tough as he might make them out to be.
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