NEWS: CSI: Tarantino

dude, that was hilarious ! with steven wright!

yeah, i hate csi. there was an episode of law and order when jerry orbach bitch slapped some crime scene investigator for acting like a detective...i guess dick wolf was making some statement about the 1000 crime scene investigation shows on tv.

[Edited on Feb 10, 2005 by jaggy]

I wasn't aware that John Woo was also directing a CSI episode.

"Unrealistic gunplay director". Pah. Most of Tarantino's characters seem to barely know how to use their guns. Adds to the humor of his movies -- like when Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in Pulp Fiction or when Robert DeNiro's character kills Bridget Fonda's character in "Jackie Brown" simply because she wouldn't shut up. I actually can't recall any "unrealistic" gunplay in a Tarantino movie. It's usually someone unloads a clip on someone else, and that's it.

The great Western movie directors ripped off Kurosawa. Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name Trilogy" is essentially Yojimbo. "The Magnificent Seven" is literally a remake of "Seven Samurai". Most things that have come out since "Seven Samurai" have had a bit of influence derived from that, so EVERYONE rips off old Japanese movies. The difference between most everyone and Quentin is this: Quentin loves what he's stealing from. It becomes an homage, a bow to these pieces of filmmaking genetics. He doesn't make any apologies for being low-brow with his films -- it's what he watched as a kid, it's what he grew up loving. Revenge stories, crime films, Japanese movies (usually hop-socky Shaw Brothers productions), early DePalma, anime, blaxploitation, regular old exploitation like "I Spit On Your Grave", and so on.

And about the editing... when you consider that most of the time, his movies avoid the "snap-bang-cut" that runs through most films with their MTV-trained directors -- his editing is quite fabulous and reminiscent of when someone would let a scene run. Example: the hallway shot at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, when Jules and Vincent are about to bust into an apartment, and are caught up on foot massages. Jules looks at his watch, and they go off to the end of the hallway to argue over whether giving a foot massage is "intimacy" (this works into the story later, when Vincent is afraid of acting anything close to interested in his boss's wife, until he finds out that the guy he thought was thrown out a window for giving her a foot massage was thrown out of the window for other reasons, which allows him to relax and find a connection, thus saving her life because, thanks to this intimacy, she asks him in for a drink). The camera doesn't move, doesn't do a cut -- it sits there, impatient. His editing ratchets up suspense, giving tight, quick shots when the characters are getting antsy, when things are about to bubble over. His influences are purely old-school, and in a day where you end up going to the movies to see two hours of fart and dick jokes or a piss-poor "action" movie that has barely eight cohesive seconds on screen, he has basically become a God of well-thought, well-designed cinema. He pulls from his life of watching movies, culls and shapes these influences and moments that he loved, puts them in service of his story, and makes something more out of these pieces, more than the sum of their parts.

My question is whether Quentin would write the episode of CSI, too. That would make it very interesting -- would he actually do it in chronological order? Would he try to balance a perpetrator's point of view along with CSI's?

If I remember correctly, too, Quentin directed a pretty early episode of ER, I think before Clooney left (which is how he and Clooney got to be friends, which led to "From Dusk Till Dawn"). As far as I care, ER jumped the shark after Clooney left.

what exactly would "realistic" gunplay be?


does anyone else skip over 1/2 page comments because they're too long to read

Actually someone is forcing me to watch it. They have a gun and errraaayyythaaanng.

Watch that motherfuckin show, motherfucker!

See?

yeah i was thinking the same thing csi isn't campy enuff it needs more camp.