Mixing it up and having a little fun this time around with the premium streaming guide posts. What if, instead of giving you the best of a streaming service, we break down a single filmmaker — where to watch their movies, where to begin if you’re just being introduced, and which ones to check out if you like a certain kind of other movie?
…I don’t know, it sounded like a good idea in my head. Let me know if you like it, and I’ll do more.
After all, this is the way I and many other aspiring young cinephiles first start our movie-loving journeys. I think it’s the best way to start to truly “understand” cinema (as pretentious as that sounds), because you can recognize personal style and artistic intention in a way that’s not obvious if you’re just watching a random assortment of movies throughout the year.
With that in mind, I’d like to start this series in the exact same place I started, with Quentin Tarintino.
Why Quentin Tarantino?
Permit me a quick story. The year was 2015, and I went to see The Hateful Eight in theaters with my brother. I was only a few months removed from my “awakening” to movies as an art form (to catch the newbies up, I was given the script to Birdman in 2014 during a freshman media class and told it was the best movie of the year…only to be confronted with an opening scene of a man hovering in the air in his tighty-whities…brain explosion), so this was one of the first big releases of a name brand filmmaker since I became excited about movies.
And I hated it. Or, more accurately, I didn’t understand it. At all. By the logic of a moviegoer whose gold standard to that point was Avatar and The Dark Knight, a three-hour, foul-mouthed chamber drama where all that happens is people argue and shoot each other seemed like just about the dumbest thing in the world.
But something about the movie — it’s obvious attention to detail and confidence in writing and execution — really stuck in my mind for days afterward. I felt like I may be the problem, instead of the movie.
So for the first time I sat down and started watching Tarantino’s movies, in order: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown…you get the gist. By the time I got back around to The Hateful Eight, I loved it.
To understand QT is, in my estimation, a shortcut to understanding what writing and directing can and should be. So here’s the full blueprint:
Where to stream all of Tarantino’s movies (in order)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Content For Old Men to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.