I Read Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Cinema Speculation’.

I’ve spent 43 years on this earth combing through all of the media that makes its way in front of me, and then diving a little deeper, then diving just a little deeper, and then reaching just that next bit deeper still. Honestly, I could probably spend my next 43 years gushing about all of the stuff I’ve already consumed, just to celebrate how great so much of it has been. But I still stress myself out that I’m missing out on something else, something just beyond the periphery, just beyond my scope, something that slipped in sideways. Something that’s more underground than I can keep up with. Being obsessed with media makes me almost even more obsessed with other people who are obsessed with media, because that means conversations with them are going to be a bounty of new mentions, new stuff to check out, new things to watch, read, listen to, see that I myself have missed. Tarantino is definitely one of those people, someone who has such a bounty of films he’s seen (and further media experiences) which he talks about at length in this book that he’s put together, outlining a bunch of movies that he saw when he was younger that changed the way he understood the industry, changed the way he watched film, and changed the way he enjoyed film. In this book he goes over movies over a relatively short period of time, starting from 1968 and heading through 1981.

My favorite part about this book is that Quentin does with movies what I typically do when I write about music. He meanders, he makes trees of thought, he mentions other things of note. We get so far inside his notes, his footnotes, his side paragraphs, his side thoughts, that we find ourselves uncertain which movie we were reading about in the first place. And I love that. The films that dictate the chapters are often just the table setting, and we take journeys through the directors’ inspirations, the producers’ contacts and affiliations, the actors and actresses who got passed over out of political and financial favors, the movies that these films were inspired by. We get stories about how directors started to gain their vision, how they started to dive into these specific genres. This book does a ‘Good’ job of making you want to check out these movies, but does an even better job of making you understand how the industry works, how the creation of these films work. It makes you respect so much more about the kernel from which the story grew, how it took so many people so much effort to create what we see on the screen, and to know that there’s even so much more that these films could have been.

Each chapter rattles off what feels like hundreds of other films to check out (but it’s likely closer to a dozen). While you’re getting a bigger picture look at something like Deliverance, Tarantino brings in a whole bouquet of other movies that it reminds him of. He drags in a handful of films that an actor utilized to inspire a different role, or in ways that they transformed themselves from their main mode of acting. He compares the film’s mood to the book’s mood. There’s so much to dig through, an entire era of film that has fallen by the wayside that one could dedicate an entire month to. And while the movies that headline each chapter are mostly the focus, we spend a great deal of time on some of these subtext films to the point where you could really dedicate a whole book just to those alone.

In this book, Tarantino’s voice is legible, passionate and eager, like he almost can’t get all of the words out on the page fast enough. They don’t come across as feverish though, instead feeling like sitting down at a bar or cafe and catching up on all of the stuff that you’ve been watching together. It’s very conversational, very smooth. I didn’t detect any of his famous dialog skills being injected into the text or any broad strokes of slang. This all felt like sitting comfortably on a couch and taking it all in out of familial memory. This is exactly the way that you would want films to be recommended to you, and exactly the way you’d want to reflect back on them once you’d finished them.

I highly recommend this book!I loved it and wish it were a series, as there are so many more eras of film I’d love for him to dive into, along with hearing more stories about the production, casting and conceptualizing of his entire oeuvre. Awesome read. You don’t even have to be a fan of Tarantino to enjoy it. Just a lover of film.