Quentin Tarantino
749 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
The Wrecking Crew (1968)
Directed by Phil Karlson
influenced Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
Only someone like Sharon Tate could go from picking up what was probably a very expensive first edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles — a present for her husband, who made a movie based on the book after her death — to getting into a movie theater for a screening of The Wrecking Crew (her last film) without paying the measly 75 cents to get in just because her lovely face is on the poster.
Al principio solamente la vemos a través del ojo de Dalton cuando llega a la nueva mansión junto a un consagrado Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), pero después también la acompañamos a una fiesta en la mansión Playboy y un paseo por las calles de la ciudad donde termina entrando a una proyección de The Wrecking Crew.
Sharon is making her own mark in Hollywood and spends the day watching a movie she made with Dean Martin, The Wrecking Crew.
With the “Polish prick” (as Steve McQueen calls him) usually away on business, a pregnant Tate keeps herself occupied by hanging out with friends and watching herself in such efforts as the Dean Martin spy spoof The Wrecking Crew.
Like Rick, we also get to see Sharon grapple with a sense of professional unfulfillment when she heads to the theater where her movie, The Wrecking Crew, is playing.
There many shots of walking feet, and Sharon Tate's bare feet on the seat in front of her as she delightedly watches herself on screen in a theater showing The Wrecking Crew.
Tarantino's fundamental inspiration stems from the original 1966 shoot-'em-up "Django," a precedent rendered in obvious terms from the opening credits, when the bouncy theme song from Sergio Corbucci's classic spaghetti western makes its first appearance.
As with most Tarantino movies, this one’s brimming with the director’s signature pop-cultural mixology, including a soundtrack with tracks by rapper 2Pac and James Brown, Jim Croce and John Denver, and the theme song to the original 1966 movie, “Django,” from which this one takes its inspiration as well as its title.
The title is an homage to "Django," Sergio Corbucci's over-the-top Spaghetti Western from 1966 starring Franco Nero.
Like "Inglourious Basterds," Tarantino's latest borrows its name and attitude from an old Italian flick, in this case the 1966 Spaghetti Western "Django."
You know from Tarantino’s audacious choice of intro music — the haunting theme song from Sergio Corbucci’s iconic 1966 Spaghetti Western “Django,” that the maestro-of-all-things-tasty has many surprises in store for his delighted audience.
The Inglorious Bastards (1978)
Directed by Enzo G. Castellari
influenced Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Plot
So be warned: This isn't "Schindler's List" (or even a remake of 1978's "The Inglorious Bastards," which provided little more than title inspiration).
The Italian war flick Tarantino stole the title from, Enzo Castellari's 1978 The Inglorious Bastards, gets a passing nod — Tarantino is obviously more enthralled with the Germans, especially Third Reich patriotic war films like the one that's screening at Shoshanna's theater.
(The deliberate misspellings of the title, presumably, are meant to simultaneously pay homage to, and make a crucial distinction from, the 1978 Italian war movie " The Inglorious Bastards.
Despite Pitt's sadism, this "Dirty Dozen" redux -- inspired by Enzo Castellari's 1978 exploitation film "The Inglorious Bastards" -- turns out to be the sketchiest component in an unexpectedly elaborate design dominated by Christoph Waltz's arch villain, Col. Hans Landa.
This is not, as has been reported in some places, a remake of the 1978 feature The Inglorious Bastards, although the title is an homage.
The oddly spelled "Inglourious Basterds" (it's loosely inspired by Enzo Castellari's 1978 action flick "The Inglorious Bastards") stars Brad Pitt, who is positively fantastic.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Directed by Robert Aldrich
influenced Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Hateful Eight (2015), Pulp Fiction (1994), Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
Plot
What clears him with his accusers is his unabashed admission of his influences within his films, be it Lady Snowblood and Shogun Assassin in Kill Bill , Vanishing Point in Death Proof , or The Dirty Dozen for Inglourious Basterds .
The Basterds themselves are a movie construct—by way of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Enzo Castellari’s Italian variant The Inglorious Bastards (1978)—reimagined as vengeance-seeking Jews (led by a bizarre hillbilly-ized Brad Pitt) terrorizing Nazis behind enemy lines.
Guess we should also condemn “The Blues Brothers” for the gratuitous use of “Illinois Nazis,” and of course Indiana Jones, and “The Dirty Dozen,” and…
In an attempt to go "The Dirty Dozen" one dirtier, Tarantino piles on yet another macabre flourish, in the form of a swastika that Raine carves into the foreheads of the Germans he doesn't kill.
(The deliberately misspelled title comes from a spaghetti-Western knockoff of “The Dirty Dozen” that provided very slight inspiration for Tarantino’s movie.)
It is The Dirty Dozen on crystal meth, Defiance without conscience, presented by a cocksure filmmaker for whom no project is "only a movie."
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Directed by Sergio Leone
influenced Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), The Hateful Eight (2015), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012), Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Themes Visuals Characters Dialogue
Like the late Sergio Leone's three-hour 1969 tribute to American Westerns, "Once Upon a Time in the West," Quentin Tarantino's latest movie puts an epic spin on a favorite genre, taking it to time-tripping levels rarely tested by its forerunners.
Tarantino is channeling both the economical efficiency of the cash-strapped exploitation workmen who shaped his cinematic worldview and the more operatic ambitions of Sergio Leone in his later years, when the idea of transporting the American Western into the rocky hills of Spain morphed into such epic meditations on life and death as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
But occasionally as the movie becomes a bit garrulous, we may wish for Charles Bronson's strong, silent hero in Leoni's masterwork Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
There’s no scene in Django Unchained to put a lump in your throat like Henry Fonda’s child-slaying in Once Upon a Time in the West.
A British spy (Michael Fassbender) is a film critic with an expertise in German cinema and G.W. Pabst; Melanie Laurent plays the proprieter of a cinema in Nazi-occupied France who screens films by Henri-Georges Clouzot for the locals and "The White Hell of Pitz Palu" with Leni Riefenstahl for the occupiers; Emil Jannings (Hilmar Eichhorn) makes a cameo; a guess-the-famous-name card game includes references to Pola Negri, King Kong and Edgar Wallace (the mystery writer whose work inspired an entire genre of postwar German thrillers known as krimi); the first "chapter" of the film is an extended revamp of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"; when one of the Basterds disguises himself as an Italian, he is given the name "Antonio Margheriti" -- a reference to the director of such 1960s Italian horror movies as "Castle of Blood."
Its opening—“Once upon a time in Nazi-Occupied France”—sets the tone not just in fairy-tale terms, but in movie fairy-tale terms by invoking Sergio Leone movie titles (Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America).
The Bad Guys (2022)
Directed by Pierre Perifel
influenced by Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994)
Visuals
There's a funky 1970s vibe to this children's film, which channels Pulp Fiction , Ocean's Eleven and The Matrix , and might work as a gateway to slightly edgier fare.
Kids will love it and the parents won’t find themselves dozing off thanks to its riffs on the Quentin Tarantino filmography (the opening is clearly an homage to “Pulp Fiction” though no child in attendance will piece that together).
Aside from a few barbed quips and a delicious opening scene that riffs on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction diner sequence (with a little Reservoir Dogs vibe thrown in for good measure), The Bad Guys is most notable for the way it wastes a premise and ends up feeling like a second-rate Zootopia wannabe.
From the LA setting to the opening diner moment, it’s a clear reference to the early films of Quentin Tarantino— Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction .
Within the first two minutes of the retro-cool and warmhearted animated crime thriller spoof “The Bad Guys,” we can tell we’re in for something refreshingly original—because those two minutes (and change) consist of a single, unbroken shot in a diner that is a clear homage to the prologue of “Pulp Fiction,” and how about that.
The opening diner scene is heavily inspired by Pulp Fiction and the film is said to also be influenced by Luc Besson, Guy Ritchie, and other works from Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino.
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (2019)
Directed by Henry Dunham
influenced by Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Hateful Eight (2015)
Plot Visuals
Since the story is set largely in a single warehouse, and its cast fires off more lines of dialogue than bullets, an obvious point of comparison is Quentin Tarantino 's Reservoir Dogs .
For better or worse, and in this case worse, debut director Henry Dunham proudly dons his black and white “Reservoir Dogs” suit while bringing “The Standoff At Sparrow Creek” to life.
Drawing obvious inspiration from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, it’s a thematically ambitious debut for director Henry Dunham, whose story follows an ex-cop (James Badge Dale) who sequesters fellow right-wing militia members in a warehouse following a mass shooting at a police funeral.
I’m overselling it wildly, but The Standoff at Sparrow Creek feels like what might happen if David Fincher shot a variation on Reservoir Dogs written by Rod Serling.
Even without the strength of its character-actor cast, the warehouse-set drama would attract Reservoir Dogs comparisons; though neither as twisty nor as satisfying as that film, this debut shows pulpy promise and is a step ahead of its genre peers.
A (near) single location thriller constructed out of hard men monologuing at one another, Dunham's debut is a taut, tight work of pulp fiction that's practically predestined to draw comparisons to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.
They have a heist movie marathon and Google ‘how to plan a heist,’ and script out the perfect plan — complete with Reservoir Dogs code names, old man disguises, an Elvis montage, and a getaway van.
They take on “color” names, just as in Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.”
Wisecracking post-Tarantino ironic meta-fiction for a decade past “Reservoir Dogs” marked a decadent phase for American crime pictures, but now movies like Bart Layton’s exemplary heist canvas, “American Animals,” bloom from that wreckage.
They watched heist movies like “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Killing,” “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Snatch,” of course.
The four plan the robbery by Googling “how to plan a heist” and by watching all the relevant movies they can get their hands on (especially Reservoir Dogs, which gives them the idea to use color-coded pseudonyms).
Their speech is littered with quotes from films like Jaws and The Matrix, and their plan takes way more than it needs to from Reservoir Dogs.
Life Itself (2018)
Directed by Dan Fogelman
influenced by Pulp Fiction (1994), Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Abby, a graduate student, makes this banal observation her college thesis while she’s being romantically pursued by Will (Oscar Isaac), an erstwhile screenwriter whose Pulp Fiction-ish scribbles make for a confusingly self-referential and violent start to the film.
He proposes at a costume party where they're dressed as John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction; soon they have a baby on the way and a sweet little dog named Fuckface, just so it's clear they have an edge and are not merely swooning saps.
There’s a few early references to “Pulp Fiction” in a present context and characters in different chapters define their relationship to Bob Dylan music in a present/past way.
That might explain why college sweethearts Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde) begin their story dressed up as characters from Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction."
As such, we enjoy flashbacks of his romance with Wilde, filled with poetic declarations of love, “Pulp Fiction” costume parties and a dog named “F*** Face” (you won’t see that on NBC, folks!).
Complete with dated Pulp Fiction references, monologues about Bob Dylan’s comeback album, and more misapplied quirk than, well, an episode of This Is Us.
Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)
Directed by Drew Goddard
influenced by Pulp Fiction (1994), The Hateful Eight (2015), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997)
Themes Plot Dialogue
Tarantino set the template for this kind of self-aware homage a quarter-century ago with “Pulp Fiction” — a title that could just as easily have applied to Goddard’s all-too-familiar tribute to crime-novel archetypes and the films that immortalized them.
For his long-awaited follow-up, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” Goddard seems to have deliberately chosen to one-up himself, at least symbolically, with a film that feels at times as if it had been sitting on its own shelf for at least 22 years, right around the time when the vogue for films aping “Pulp Fiction” was at its apex and one could hardly go to a multiplex without encountering at least one twisty tale involving talkative criminals, ironic violence, unusual time structures and colorful dialogue chock-full of pop culture references galore.
First, it’s a better use of Tarantino’s signature plotting that whatever the heck last month’s Life Itself was, and secondly, at least someone has found a way to riff on newer films by that writer-director than the glut of films from the mid-90s and early 2000s that all wanted to be Pulp Fiction.
It took us 24 years, but we finally got a Pulp Fiction clone that’s worthy of standing beside the original.
You can also feel it in the dialogue scenes, which blend high stakes and mundane chatter with a sarcastic flair reminiscent of the Pulp Fiction director’s early work.
The talkier tendencies of Quentin Tarantino are an apt point of comparison here (some of the “Pulp Fiction” auteur’s stylistic proclivities come up, too).
Less-high-flown references evoke Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo, with former heavyweight boxing champ Ken Norton as the sex slave.
Being the ostentatious character that he is, Schultz devises an elaborate plan to secure her freedom by posing as a buyer with a special interest in 'Mandingos' - slaves who are reared to fight to the death (in a reference to the 1975 film Mandingo ).
But much more forceful is the cruelty dispensed by the Southern whites, both as punishment and whim; attack dogs are unleashed on one man, Mandingo fighters (in an homage to the unforgettable 1975 Mandingo) battle to the death in a beautifully appointed drawing room for the wealthy’s amusement, a woman is locked naked in a metal “hot box,” genital mutilation is arranged for a man and much more.
But only one major-studio film of the modern era, Richard Fleischer's notorious 1975 Mandingo, dared to meet slavery on its own terms—a grind house bacchanal of sadism, incest, and miscegenation, capped by an unforgettable finale in which the eponymous bare-knuckle fighter is boiled alive by his master in a cauldron.
The ’70s also spawned some spectacularly lurid melodramas set in the Old South, including Mandingo, with ex-heavyweight champ Ken Norton as the sex slave of fluttery plantation ladies, and the mockumentary Goodbye, Uncle Tom, in which the directors of Mondo Cane submitted Haitian blacks to nearly as much degradation as their slave forebears.
But Django must swallow his pride and pretend to be that most hated of things, a "Mandingo", a fighter-trainer and the white man's tame plaything, and uncomfortably close to Stephen's domestic servitude.
Rififi (1955)
Directed by Jules Dassin
influenced Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994)
Plot Themes
Quentin Tarantino has said that this was one of the films that inspired his Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994).
The Paris-set “Rififi” still serves as inspiration for just about every modern assemble-the-team caper movie you can name, “Reservoir Dogs” and “Oceans Eleven” included.
Even though its intricate heist scenes have been recycled in countless other films -- most prominently in the '90s crime pics Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects -- Rififi still dazzles.
The Melville picture was remade twice as " Ocean's Eleven ," and echoes of the Dassin can be found from Kubrick's " The Killing " to Tarantino's " Reservoir Dogs ."
The crime is indeed perfect, the underworld equivalent of a sublime French meal, but as ''Rififi'' goes on, it becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.
Quentin Tarantino has said that this was one of the films that inspired his Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994).
The cheeky dialogue and relentless violence leans heavily on the influences of Sam Peckinpah and “Reservoir Dogs,” although in this case the comic mayhem of the protracted battle amounts to little more than a lengthy gimmick.
Suggesting a feature-length adaptation of Reservoir Dogs‘s finale, Free Fire is like so many mid-‘90s Tarantino knockoffs, all self-consciously witty dialogue meant to paper over gratuitous violence with a veneer of nonchalance and a gimmicky setup.
Indeed, this battle royale-with-cheese shares a strikingly similar tone and setting to Reservoir Dogs.
Comparisons to Reservoir Dogs are probably inevitable given the warehouse setting, copious firearms and endlessly quotable script, but this is a sleeker and more violent film (though perhaps less sadistic).
A virtuoso feat of indiscriminate gunplay from director Ben Wheatley — who is, without a doubt, the most exciting thing to hit British genre cinema since Guy Ritchie, minus the latter’s eagerness to sell out — this almost cartoonishly over-the-top action movie crosses the irreverent cheekiness of Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” with the ruthless spirit of 1970s B-movies, in which audiences hoped for a few minutes of what “Free Fire” sustains for the better part of 90 minutes.
This is low-brow Reservoir Dogs, extreme genre action meant to energize you with an insane cast of characters hell-bent on killing each other on principle.
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Directed by Mel Brooks
influenced Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015)
Themes Plot
Less-high-flown references evoke Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo, with former heavyweight boxing champ Ken Norton as the sex slave.
I’m not sure the first matters (it works in Tarantino’s fantasia concept) and the second — while likely having as much to do with Blazing Saddles (1974) as anything else — can be answered by reading Huckleberry Finn.
At times more in line with "Blazing Saddles" than the grimly bawdy qualities that define many bonafide oaters, "Django Unchained" erupts with a conceptual brilliance from the outset that never fully meshes with its clumsy storyline.
At one point, another plantation owner (played with ferocious glee by Don Johnson) goes off in pursuit of Django and Schultz with the aid of other members of the local chapter of the KKK and without going into detail, let it be said that what comes next is so laugh-out-loud funny that Mel Brooks will probably be kicking himself for not having thought of the joke himself when he was putting together "Blazing Saddles" back in the day.
In the subversive pairing of a black and a white man in the Old West, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles may ring a bell, or the 1971 sagebrush comedy Skin Game, with James Garner and Louis Gossett Jr. as con-men partners.
One standout is a bit where a group of precursor KKK thugs argue about the efficacy of riding around in hoods with eyeholes cut in them, which would have felt right at home in "Blazing Saddles."
The Villainess (2017)
Directed by Jung Byung-gil
influenced by Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Visuals Themes Plot
Think Oldboy‘s hallway scene from the first-person perspective of Hardcore Henry spilling over through a non-descript doorway into a wide-open setting for a one-on-twenty bloodbath a la Kill Bill‘s House of Blue Leaves sequence.
This is a scene that could have existed in any female-centric vigilante flick such as Nikita or Kill Bill , and both films are heavy inspirations for the story of The Villainess (which is described later in this review), but that doesn’t matter so much because the strengths of the film are within the execution of these action sequences.
With its swarming squads of black-suited assassins, its overload of guns, swords and corpses, and its cold-eyed killer women, his movie blithely recalls such earlier revenge thrillers as the Kill Bills, the John Wicks (already a part of the international action pantheon), and La Femme Nikita, with maybe a faint whiff of the old Japanese "Baby Cart" pictures as well (little kids make several intrusions here).
Channeling “La femme Nikita,” “Kill Bill,” Nikkatsu’s ’70s female exploitation films and a gazillion Hong Kong martial arts heroines, “ The Villainess ” nonetheless succeeds in being one-of-a-kind for its delirious action choreography and overall narrative dementia.
While Sook-hee's eventually-revealed origin has echoes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (he basically apes the O-Ren Ishii story), the non-linear method he uses to tell it leaves us disconnected.
By this point, “The Villainess” has become such a delirious welter of action-cinema allusions that the explicit reference to “Kill Bill” registers only fleetingly.
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Directed by Sergio Leone
influenced Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Dialogue Themes Visuals
Its opening—“Once upon a time in Nazi-Occupied France”—sets the tone not just in fairy-tale terms, but in movie fairy-tale terms by invoking Sergio Leone movie titles (Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America).
Sergio Leone directed Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and then Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
Or a fairytale, as we might glean from the title – which pays homage to Sergio Leone’s visionary Once Upon a Time in America , a “memory piece” in the grandest sense.
It echoes “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both directed by Sergio Leone, whom Tarantino reveres.
Tarantino’s title tells us exactly what he was hoping to accomplish, harking back not to fairy tales but to his idol Sergio Leone’s masterpieces, Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America .
Even the title is desperate to join the club of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984).
The template was provided, though, by John Ford’s venerable Stagecoach: Tarantino borrowed and extended its Dry Fork noon station stopover and subverted it every which way.
In a way, it’s somewhat akin to the 1939 western "Stagecoach" and it actually starts in one of those vehicles as a leathery old bounty hunter (an excellent Kurt Russell) is transporting a murderer (a hilariously unladylike Jennifer Jason Leigh) to watch her hang and collect his handsome bounty.
Tarantino's latest, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, is a twisted combination of John Ford's 'Stagecoach,' Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Indians' and Jean-Paul Sartre's 'No Exit.'
…celluloid film (Ultra Panavision 70 in 100 theaters) -- is partly a spaghetti Western, partly John Ford's "Stagecoach" and partly Ira Levin's "Death Trap" gushing with bodily fluids.
In his new film, the slow-simmering Western The Hateful Eight, he sets out on a classic adventure right out of John Ford’s Stagecoach and ends up in the caffeinated chaos that closed Reservoir Dogs.
John Ford’s answer, expressed with considerable heartbreak in his classic film Stagecoach and several of his other great Westerns, is No.
The Searchers (1956)
Directed by John Ford
influenced Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009), The Hateful Eight (2015), Django Unchained (2012)
Plot Visuals Themes
In most westerns the hero either stays put and the action comes to him (like John Wayne as the sheriff in Rio Bravo) or he sets out on a transformative journey of some kind (as Wayne does in The Searchers).
Now, when he borrows and name-drops, he often does so with a sense of mischief and fun: Watching “Inglourious Basterds,” longtime movie enthusiasts will be able to spot the visual nods to “The Searchers”; if they’ve seen any ’70s Giallo starring the Algerian-born actress Edwige Fenech, they’ll giggle when they note that the character Mike Myers plays, in a tiny role, is named Gen.
Violence explodes—fabulously, yes, but without trivializing the value of human life—and as a girl escapes into the distance, in a perfect stylistic and thematic homage to The Searchers , a revenge plot is set into stunning motion.
In a farmhouse set-designed to replicate the effect of the cabin in John Ford’s The Searchers , Tarantino stages a patient scene that is Inglourious Basterds at its best.
While those who see the film undoubtedly expect something more akin to the jaw dropping Monument Valley scenery in The Searchers, or desolate expanses of Once Upon a Time in the West, or the grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia.
I could point to other, far greater Westerns that know this – the Coen Brothers’ True Grit , Paul Newman’s Hombre , John Ford’s The Searchers – but the truth is that the best Tarantino movies acknowledge this too.
At first glance, Wolfs, the first non-Spider-Man film from director Jon Watts since 2015’s Cop Car, seems to be something of a Pulp Fiction/Quentin Tarantino riff. There’s that deliberately grammatically inaccurate title, which nods to Harvey Keitel’s character from that film, a well-dressed man who ‘solves problems’ when a dead body unhelpfully shows up. There’s a MacGuffin in a bag.
The inexplicably ugly title could be a vague reference to Mr Wolf, Harvey Keitel’s dapper ‘fixer’ from Tarantino’s 1993 zeitgeist-grabber, Pulp Fiction.
Clooney and Pitt are lone “wolf” fixers akin to the Harvey Keitel “cleaner” character in “Pulp Fiction” (known, by the way, as “The Wolf”). When a politician’s (Amy Ryan) attempted fling with a goofy young dude (Austin Abrams) goes terribly wrong, they’re separately called in to erase the incident and, despite their objections, forced to work together.
Clooney plays a fixer — one of those movie characters whom rich and powerful people use to make unseemly problems quietly go away, like Harvey Keitel's Winston Wolfe in "Pulp Fiction" — who is called upon by district attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) when a young gentleman she had brought to her Manhattan hotel room accidentally dies after impaling himself on a beverage cart.
They’re fixers, in the manner of Harvey Keitel’s Winston “The Wolf” in “Pulp Fiction.” Margaret has hired Clooney, obviously. Pam, the owner of the hotel, has hired Pitt.
Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)
Directed by Navot Papushado
influenced by Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994)
Characters Visuals Music
Their talents aren’t wasted, but the looney tune presentation, and bumbling, cartoonish henchmen borrowed from the set of “Kill Bill” leaves plenty to be desired.
Director Navot Papushado (“Big Bad Wolves”) dives into “Kill Bill” and “John Wick“ territory, for a stylized action flick that reminds us in the immortal words of James Brown, “This is a man’s world.”
Just a few scenes prior, the whistling spaghetti-western vibe of Frank Ilfman’s score emphasized how much a fight in an under-illuminated bowling alley wanted to be a Kill Bill set piece.
The film obviously takes cues from the director’s biggest films, with moments that recall both 1994’s “Pulp Fiction” and 2003’s “Kill Bill.”
So much personality goes into every action sequence, the brutality mixing with humor ala Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
Gillan’s Sam is an assassin so violently badass and invincible that she makes Uma Thurman in the “Kill Bill” films look like Eleanor Roosevelt.