Cinema Speculation
by Quentin Tarantino (Harper, $35)
Quentin Tarantino’s first book of film criticism “seems designed to arouse fruitful arguments,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. A survey of 1970s cinema that also doubles as garrulous memoir, Cinema Speculation begins with a foundational memory for its author: catching a 1972 Jim Brown action movie in a Black neighborhood at the age of 9. Already the future director was a buff, having tagged along with his mother and her friends to take in many seminal films that most kids had no chance of seeing. Here, he’s circling back to that era with a focus on the action films and horror films that captivated him, and he brings “absorbing acuity” to describing the big and small decisions that produced what viewers saw on screen. The journey proves “consistently engaging,” full of images, characters, and stories that “entice and bewitch.” The best chapters are truly fabulous, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Tarantino’s love for Escape From Alcatraz is infectious and persuasive. He could have written a whole book contrasting Hollywood’s late-1960s rebel filmmakers and the “film brats,” like Francis Ford Coppola, who arrived in their wake. Elsewhere, though, “you get little more than claustrophobic opinionating, as if you were stuck in the corner with someone manically speaking at you.” Insights and pleasures are scattered throughout Cinema Speculation, but “you dearly wish that there was an editor at hand to help craft the looser arguments.”
It’s still bracing to read film criticism by a top filmmaker, said Chuck Bowen in Slant. Playing with narrative while also dropping in frequent slang, Tarantino “knows that he’s doing things here that are verboten for a younger, unestablished writer.” But he also simply knows more, using his access to other luminaries to deliver special insight into Steve McQueen’s cool and to wring a confession from Martin Scorsese that Taxi Driver’s ending was intentionally softened. Tarantino, who has talked of retiring from directing after his next movie, clearly has a second career lined up if he wants it. “He’s as confident writing for the page as the screen. Perhaps more so.”