Is Quentin Tarantino wrong?
Judging our cinematic era, praising Jennifer Lawrence, and ranking Rickeys
Last week on his podcast, writer-director Quentin Tarantino asserted offhandedly that our current era of cinema is tied for the worst in history. Here’s the full quote:
Even though the ‘80s was the time that I probably saw more movies in my life than ever—at least as far as going out to the movies was concerned—I do feel that ‘80s cinema is, along with the ‘50s, the worst era in Hollywood history. Matched only by now, matched only by the current era!
Whenever someone trashes our current era of cinema, my knee-jerk reaction is frustration. It’s too easy to glorify the past and miss the glories of the present. The reality is there has never been a better time to be a filmmaker of color, a woman director, or a filmmaker outside the United States than right now. We’ve certainly lost some things in the last two decades as the industry has pivoted to the safety of franchise filmmaking and intellectual property, but the gains have been just as real.
This year alone, high-profile films directed by women include The Woman King, Women Talking, Bodies Bodies Bodies, She Said, Where the Crawdads Sing, and the upcoming I Wanna Dance with Somebody, a Whitney Houston biopic. Filmmakers of color are getting more high-profile work than ever (watch out for Wakanda Forever, potential #1 grosser of the year); and international cinema is finding new audiences with the diversification of the Academy and the advent of streamers. It’s no coincidence that a non-English language film has been nominated for Best Picture in each of the last four years.
Tarantino could stand to be a bit more introspective. His longing for a return to the cinema of his youth—the 1970s, that rare moment in history when cultural and economic conditions conspired to produce some of the best cinema in history—erases the realities of non-white, non-male, non-U.S. based filmmakers.
Still, I think he’s technically correct. This probably is one of the worst eras for Hollywood movies specifically, unless you think milking every franchise dry is a worthwhile artistic endeavor. Executives fail upward in Hollywood when the follow the trends; in other words, it makes more sense to fail with a franchise film than with a risky original story. As a result, the kind of mid-budget adult dramas that made me fall in love with cinema in the first place are now relegated to a few months at the end of the year, when dozens of films jockey for a few yet-to-be-determined slots at the Oscars.
But superhero movies, franchise action flicks, and Oscar bait simply don’t represent the totality of cinema today. Not even close. You can’t just look at Aquaman or Fast and Furious 9, wave your hand, and dismiss the entire form. As much as we may be accustomed to defining cinema only as those films made by a major Hollywood studio and seen on a big screen, that’s just not how cinema works anymore. It’s so much bigger and richer and more varied than that, and critics and pundits need to get on board with this and stop lamenting the death of cinema that, in my opinion, has been greatly exaggerated.
The key is to look beyond the studios. For better or for worse, Netflix has spent the last half a decade throwing insane amounts of money at auteurs to let them make their vision, and other major streamers have done scaled-down versions of the same thing. Fears of their eventual turn away from big artistic gambits may turn out to be founded, but it hasn’t happened yet. This year alone, they gave over $100 million to Noah Baumbach to adapt a Don DeLillo novel, and who knows how much to Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu to make his version of 8 ½, a three-hour monstrosity about his inner demons as a filmmaker. That wouldn’t have happened in 1973 or in any other year in cinema history. Only this one.
Or check out the horror streamer Shudder, which put out 28 original films this year. According to my horror aficionado friends, many of them were quite good! Then consider the careers of young independent filmmakers like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who make thoughtful, low-budget genre movies with no apparent goal of being picked up by big studios. And there are others like them: filmmakers like Jim Cummings or my Twitter friend and one-time interview subject Luke Barnett, whose films don’t necessarily gets shown in theaters but find a following on streamers.
This is why I remain bullish on the future of cinema, despite the malaise I feel every summer when I look at the multiplex marquee and see very little that interests me. And I’ll bet Tarantino is optimistic, too. We maybe living through one of the worst eras in Hollywood history, but cinema has survived them before, and it’ll survive this one. In fact, it already is.
Recommendations
I’ve never been a fan of Jennifer Lawrence. Her whole “I’m just a regular girl” thing always seemed like a put-on to me, or at least a defense mechanism against the injuries and insults of Hollywood machine. Fair enough, I guess, but her work in the newly released Causeway is a revelation. She seems to have aged into herself now, and her naturalism feels more earned. In the film by acclaimed theater director Lila Neugebauer, Lawrence plays a military veteran who returns from Afghanistan to her hometown of New Orleans. As she works to recover from traumatic brain injury (mostly so she can return to duty), she deals with the demons in her past and forges a friendship with a local mechanic (Bryan Tyree Henry), recovering from his own personal traumas.
Their past pain flares up occasionally, but mostly this is a quietly heartwarming story of two lost souls who find each other at exact the right moment. It’s not a romance. Their friendship is the thing. File it next to Lost in Translation or Columbus, films about strangers who form meaningful relationships in unfamiliar cities. The difference in Causeway is that New Orleans is both characters’ hometown. It’s only their ruptured lives that make them feel like aliens.
The performances by Lawrence and Henry both deserve recognition, and so does the film. I’m not optimistic. Due to the preponderance of films released in the last few months of the year, all of them vying for Oscars, there is always at least one worthwhile film that gets lost in the shuffle. If it doesn’t get nominated, no one remembers it at all. With its quiet debut on AppleTV+ early this month, I fear Causeway will be this year’s entry in this dubious canon. Seek it out now or lose it forever.
Best Rickeys
Since this is supposed to be a Substack about baseball and movies, and since there hasn’t been much baseball news for me to opine on, it’s time to get creative. I have long planned to make this a space for silly lists, which happen to be a great way to blend my areas of interest. Today seems like as good a day as any to try it out. I have no idea why this topic jumped to the front of my mind, but it did, so let’s just go with it. Here are my Top 10 Rickeys (or Rickys) of all time.
1. Rickey Henderson, all-time leading base-stealer in MLB, also known as the “modern-day Yogi Berra” for his unintentional humor
2. Ricky Nelson, singer of “Garden Party” and actor/singer in Rio Bravo, one of the finest Westerns
3. Branch Rickey, one-time owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who facilitated Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color line either to make money or make the world a better place, it’s still TBD
4. Ricky Roma, a character in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, played most famously in the film by Al Pacino
5. Ricky Jay, magician, actor, card shark, friend to director Paul Thomas Anderson. What else need be said?
6. Ricky Slade, a character in Jon Favreau’s Made played by Vince Vaughn with all of the self-confidence as his character in Swingers and none of the actual charm (clip is very NSFW)
7. Ricky Baker, the football player who (33-year spoiler alert) dies tragically in Boyz N the Hood
8. Carrie Rickey, longtime film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. I grew up reading her, and now we’re mutual follows on Twitter. Ain’t that neat? Read her excellent obituary of Sidney Poitier
9. Gin Rickey, a very serviceable drink. Not my favorite but serviceable
10. Ricky Ricardo, Lucy’s husband. His presence was a landmark for Hispanic representation and interracial marriage, but to be honest, he wasn’t very nice to Lucy a lot of the time
Honorable Mentions: Ricky Gervais, Ricky Bobby
Last Place: Ricky Schroder