Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (2022) Nobody's ever going to include this title on a list of definitive books that deeply analyze the art of cinema.....
But then again, it's a near perfect realization of what you imagined a Tarantino book on movies would read like......
It reads like you sat down for a couple of hours with QT and split a a couple of six packs to hear him shoot the breeze......... about the movies he grew up with, the ones that influenced his own work, the ones that defined him.
It makes for a damn fun experience, and made me think back to my own childhood history with the movies......
Whenever my mom and dad couldn't find a babysitter for me, off to the neighborhood theaters I'd go with them........taking in all sorts of 1950's dramas, comedies, adventures and westerns that in no way were designed for small children......
Tarantino, born in 1963, also found himself taken to movies by his mom and assorted relatives. But where my introduction to film came from the conservative tropes of the 1950's, young Tarantino feasted on the groundbreaking upheavals of 1970's cinema, movies that blazed previously unthinkable new trails in subject matter, sex and violence.
So reading these chapters, you can easily spot the origins of Tarantino's stuff, which heavily draws upon the grindhouse genres of his young days in darkened movie houses.
It was an incredible era to discover movies........while legendary, iconic directors still actively worked,(like Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry") the rise of the "movie brats" shook Hollywood and the world like an earthquake way off the Richter scale ....( with breakthroughs by Coppola, DePalma, Scorsese, Milius, Lucas, Spielberg, Bogdonovich, Schrader, Boorman, among others...)
QT simply takes a reader through a chatty, funny, incisive conversation about movies still burned into his memories, for one reason or another. He's so sure of his insight into some these filmmakers' abilities, he boldly theorizes about what films like 'Taxi Driver' would look like they'd swapped directors. Whether you fully agree or hotly dispute his opinions, the chapters are never less then thought-provoking entertainment........
And what a strange, eclectic trip down memory lane he''ll take you on......the propulsive, now legendary iconography of John Boorman's "Deliverance", Peckinpah's "The Getaway", DePalma kicking off his lifelong homage to Hitchcock with "Sisters", John Flynn's two underappreciated, in-your-face shoot em ups, "The Outfit" and "Rolling Thunder".....and even Tobe Hooper's carnival horror, "The Funhouse" and Peter Bogdonovich's much reviled Henry James adaptation, "Daisy Miller"........
For all film buffs who'd love a tour through Quentin Tarantino's major influences, consider "Cinema Speculation" required reading, Think of it as a 5 star (*****) appetizer for a future, more comprehensive movie book that hopefully QT will eventually write. A fun read, through and through.
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