BLACK DYNAMITE: Political Visionary

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1. indiemaker0583 06/05/2008 @ 6:40am

   Once again, I guess I can thank Quentin Tarintino for the decline of American cinema. It’s a shame, his films are entertaining, but I hate Hate HATE this all post modern bullshit they’ve inspired.

   Pulp Fiction comes out, and for 10 long years, 90% of American independent cinema were completely trite neo film noirs about jive talking hitmen in black suits with tons of references to cult classic films and gratutious John Woo inspired violence.

   Kill Bill comes out userhing a whole new era of orientalist junk that doesn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese. All of a sudden everyone is interested in the Shaw Brothers, Seijun Suzuki, Old school Kinji Fukusaku etc.

   And now with Grindhouse, every asipring director and film student out there wants to make their own exploitation homage. It’s f*cking annoying going to festivals and attending workships where almost everything being produced around me by my peers is this sh*t.

   Yeah, it’s dead on, but what’s the point? It’s far cooler when someone sets out to make an honest to goodness B-Movie. Someone who just loses all abanden and decides they want to make something fun and stupid. Maybe there’s technical errors due to lack of experience, skill, or money, but the passion makes up for all of that.

   This calcuated cult shit has as much heart as shit on bread. At least with Tarintino’s Inglorious Bastards remake, indie film makers won’t be able to afford to replicate his work.

2. zen99 06/05/2008 @ 7:32am

   Would you say that decaying cultures try to desperately recreate a felt sense of past thru manipulation of surface style?

3. indiemaker0583 06/05/2008 @ 8:17am

   Possibly. I do like the ring of that, but I’m really not sure. How does a culture decay? History would show that all cultures have been decaying, or changing from the very beginning. To quote Gogol Bordello, ” There never were any good old days, they are today, they are tomorrow.”

   While I wish I had been alive during the 60’s and 70’s purely for the cinema, I’m not sure if we were a more culturally sound nation. The majority of these films are being made by people my age, mid 20’s to mid 30’s. So these certainly are not being made out of a sense of nostalgia since we were’t alive or old enough to remember this by gone era.

   It’s simply, hipster, elitist pop art where the only point is to take obscure, or long forgotten art & entertainment properties that are clearly out of style and then put them on a pedestial marekting it all as the new cool. This is about the director proving his has “hip” credentials.

   That, and most film buffs these days are sheep who conform to the word of the almighty Taintino and Wes Anderson. But maybe it was no different 40 years ago when Godard was spreading his own fundamentalist cinematic creed giving birth to the french new wave.

   Indie lovers cry about Hollywood remaking everything and yet our scene is currently oversaturated with this stuff. Is it any different? What makes this cooler than a Hollywood remake of Death Wish or Death Race 2000?

4. zen99 06/05/2008 @ 10:30am

   I lived in Georgia in ‘72 and would go to blaxploitation picures at the local cinema in Athens (not the art house.)  Movies were packed.  The audience shared a common cultural experience watching these films and the sometimes threadbare production value contributed to the shared ‘outsider’ experience.  To have a film too slick would have devalued the experience.  In fact, more upscale films like ‘Shaft’ were considered inauthentic ( as was the Shaft character.)  Blaxsplo was ultimately co-opted by the studios and the genre underwent a slow death thru homoginization (and cloudy thematic.)  Superfly outfits turned up eventually in K-Mart where middle class retirees bought (and still wear) these oufits on the golf course.

5. ChevalierAguila 06/05/2008 @ 12:04pm

   Quentin sucks, he’s a hack and so on. All his copycats suck too, but this thing actually looks fun instead of boring and dull like Kill Bill and Deathproof.

   And american cinema has died thanks to the big studio system pumping crap film after crap film.

6. Swarez 06/05/2008 @ 6:09pm

   How is more interest in bygone era and Asian cinema a bad thing? Tarantino almost singlehandedly brought HK cinema to the mainstream in the west and woke up an interest in Asian films with Joe Six Pack. I ask again; How is that a bad thing?

   We look at Warhol as some genius because he painted copies of pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Roy Lichtenstein copied panels from shitty romance comic books and is put on a pedestal. How is this any different? This is moving pop art. There is no difference other than the canvas.

   Seems to me that people are bitching because they are losing the exclusivity of knowing something that Joe Q Public didn’t know of before.

7. ChevalierAguila 06/05/2008 @ 7:52pm

   Sigh, not that argument again.

   Asian cinema has more distribution these days over here that it had some years ago, no dobut about it. But i have my doubts about how much QT has helped in that. How many movies has he released under his “QT presents…” barely a few, and many go thinking that he had something to do with the film, or that it’s going to be like KB.

   And many “average joe” still barely know anything beyond Jackie Chan’s last films and some Jet Li flicks. Maybe even a couple of Shaw Bros flicks, but no more.

8. Swarez 06/06/2008 @ 3:56am

   QT doesn’t have to release the movies himself. He pointed out that there are tons of good stuff out there that people don’t know about, he was famous so people took notice. I learned about John Woo and Sonny Chiba through True Romance. Ringo Lam through Reservoir Dogs. Who else was trumping these films other than Tarantino? It became a fad because of his popularity and video companies around the world started to distribute films because people wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

   But I don’t want to talk about Tarantino, we’ve gone through this discussion before. I want to ask how it is a bad thing that these filmmakers are seeking inspiration from foreign cinema and older genres?

9. zen99 06/06/2008 @ 7:38am

   Pre “Reservoir Dogs”, my old film company bought The Killer (at tri Star) and brought Woo to America.  No one responded to him initially.  People said he was too violent and too melodramatic (precisely.)  When Tarrantino’s RDogs became trendy at sundance and he started getting high(er) level meetings, he was always speaking to the studio system about HK films etc and his B-movie influences.  While my ranting about same earlier did no good, his success lead to easier acceptance of asian films, b-films and b-movie aesthetic.  Kudos to him for making people see what was there (and ready to appreciate.)  People had been talking about and seeing HK action in Hollyweird for sometime.  But appreciation of these flms and shooters was limited to foreign sales folks for quite a while.  Difficult to get the establishment to appreciate that which is not identified as ‘normal’ or ‘commercial.’

10. ChevalierAguila 06/07/2008 @ 1:36am

    Here’s the thing, is not a bad thing at all, and i’m certainly not complaining, that some people will find out about great films from the past, be from QT’s mouth, the geeky and obese humanity of Harry Knowles or whoever it is. Not only i don’t have a “oh my precious cult films that only i know” attitude, quite the opposite, if more people can find out the greatness of some good italian giallo or yakuza eiga of the 70’s thats fantastic.

    But:

    Asian flicks are still very far from being shown as much as they could, both in cinema and yes, even stilll on DVD. Plus, i seriously have my doubts about how much credit QT deserves for this. If my memory serves me right, he never mentioned City on Fire when Reservoir Dogs came out until reporters started to ask him about that.

    “But chevalier, you idiot, people are watching the movies anyway!” Are they? Not really, is still quite a reduced number of people who actually want to go and find out about cinema’s past history. Most are flat-out happy with the things they know right now. And hey, that’s perfectly fine, let’s just put things in their right order and place. At the end, how much good, besides the expansion of the asian DVD market in the states, has all this “asian exposition” have truly made? Remake after remake? Stereotype-crap vehicles like Bulletproof Monk, Forbidden Kingdom? I guess you have to take the good with the bad, i just wish there was more “good” and less “bad”.

    And i guess everyone here is already tired of me bashing Kill Bill and/or Deathproof, so i won’t go there again D:

11. ChevalierAguila 06/07/2008 @ 1:39am

    How much credit he deserves for “promoting” asian and european flicks.

    “(it’s 3 am here)

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