The Films of Quentin Tarantino

Prof. Leach

COM 1101

11 September 2006

A New Era in Hollywood

"Storytelling has become a lost art. There is no storytelling, there's just situations. Very rarely are you told a story."

-Quentin Tarantino

In today's society, Hollywood has shown the public that many of their directors, producers, and screenwriters are incapable of creating of a good motion picture. Other than a few extraordinary films produced in the last few years, most of them have been movies with go-nowhere plots or terrible remakes of already bad B-rate movies from the 1980's. But, there is one man in Hollywood that is striving to change this. Quentin Tarantino is a young actor/director whose non-linear writing style and multi-layered plots entice viewers of all ages and thrill them in ways Hollywood has not been able to do in years. With his unconventional, yet classic directing and writing styles, along with his infamous plot lines that always keep audiences on the edge of their seats, Tarantino has been able to secure his legacy among the new era of Hollywood.

Tarantino first distinguished himself from other directors in the early 1990's when he showed his unorthodox directing styles, infamous plot lines, and famous one liners, with his first box office hit, Reservoir Dogs. The movie was different for its time for many different reasons. One of his famous directing traits is how he tells the complete story starting with the ending. This has been tried by many directors in the past, but none with this type of success. This style has been under criticism by many critics because it goes against the long time standard of continuous story lines. Every one of Tarantino's films seems to break this tradition, but make for a much more riveting cinematic effect. One of the other key features about this movie and many other Tarantino films are how

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violent they are. Each one of his pictures has an absurd amount of swearing along with a decent amount of blood and guts to go along with it. The interesting thing is that he is able to use this in a way that it not disgusting or absurd. As much as the films are very outlandish, different, disgusting, and outright weird, Tarantino has used these traits to make his films popular.

While Tarantino is a unique director on his own, he gives a lot of his style credit to some of the greatest directors in Hollywood history. He has been praised by many because he is able to mimic styles of classic Hollywood directors such as Hitchcock and Coppola with such detail and artistic form. Some of his deeper movies are said to be comparable to that of Hitchcock with multi-layered and multi-storied plotlines. But, he