Category Archives: Cinematics

Cinematics, Coattail Tarantino

Mad Dog Time

This piece marks the debut of a new series surveying the movie landscape of the 1990s, when everyone in La-La-Wood and beyond tried to make their own Cool Crime Movie modeled on Pulp Fiction—a film they all loved yet did not seem to understand even a little bit. Come with me on a journey through a cinematic universe where everyone dresses like a rockabilly, drops non sequitur pop culture references, and holds their gun sideways: the world of Coattail Tarantino.

In preparation for my survey of the cinematic world Quentin Tarantino birthed written earlier this year, I watched a boatload of movies from the 1990s that owed something to Tarantino stylistically, spiritually, or temporally, films that could have only been made after his success altered the Hollywood landscape. I am often asked by people I’ve made up in my head, “How did you determine what films to watch?” The answer is that I jotted down the names of several movies that immediately came to mind, then looked up lists of year-by-year releases to make note of any others that looked Tarantino-esque—basically, any film that featured crime and/or large groups of similarly dressed Guys Being Dudes strutting down sidewalks. After additional research, the list was winnowed down using a complicated process known as Vibes. In the end, I watched a lot of movies that had almost no relationship to Tarantino’s work, but this was only fair and correct. If I was going to make sweeping generalizations about the wave of Cool Bros Doing Crime Movies that littered multiplexes after the smash success of 1994’s Pulp Fiction, then science demanded I prove my theses with an ample amount of data.

It’s important to remember that Tarantino’s emergence as a cultural force created a Hollywood feeding frenzy similar to another phenomenon of this era: the flurry of major label band signings that followed “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Just like Nirvana sent record labels scrambling to find any act that could be described as “punk” or “indie,” regardless of their musical resemblance to the original article, film production companies were desperate to release anything they could plausibly compare to Pulp Fiction. So even if a movie didn’t reflect that film’s influence or sensibilities, it’s instructive to take note of what 1990s Hollywood thought they could get away with labeling as Tarantino-esque.

As stated in my original post, the overwhelming majority of the films, while often dated in ways that could make me cringe, were no better or worse than meh. It was rare to find a pleasant surprise among the bunch, a film that was genuinely good or at least enjoyable to watch, but it was also rare to find a truly dreadful movie. The real stinkers, though, boy did they stink. I would find myself watching these movies at at a slant or through my hands, unable and unwilling to view them in full, a la George C. Scott in Hardcore. My wife and kid would hear me groaning or exclaiming in anguish and ask if I was in pain, and I would have to admit yes I was in pain because I couldn’t take another minute of Suicide Kings.

The worst of the lot by a country mile was Boondock Saints, a reprehensible tradcath revenge fantasia that took a few years off my life in a single viewing. Were it not for Troy Duffy’s cinematic Chernobyl, however, the bottom spot would have gone to 1996’s Mad Dog Time. I had never heard of it before looking through lists of films from that year, but its cool gangster trappings were enough to land it on my shortlist, a decision I will rue until the day I die. This is one of those films from the era that has almost zero relationship to Tarantino’s films, yet could have only been made after his movies created a madness for anything where Cool Dudes Do Crime. And it is terrible. Beyond terrible. There is no singular word or phrase that can encapsulate how truly, deeply, irredeemably awful this movie is, or the feeling it will give you if forced to watch it.

I am not alone in this assessment; it was named Siskel & Ebert’s worst film of that year, while Ebert’s written review for the Chicago Sun-Times called it “the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.” Entertainment Weekly described it as “jaw-droppingly incoherent.”

You might think a film this bad would be remembered in some capacity, a fabled flop on par with Ishtar or Gigli, yet I’m certain the vast supermajority of people out in the world, even those who were alive for its debut, have never heard of it. The only evidence I have that anyone has watched it since its release is an episode of the Have You Seen This podcast with guest Matt Christman. (I was not aware of this episode until doing research for this post, but their assessment is along the lines of Ebert’s above and mine below.) This maintenance of obscurity is for the greater good of humanity, though, as it prevents more people from being exposed to its toxicity.

When I first decided to revisit this film for a longer review, I was hoping I could rely on the extensive notes I took during my first viewing. I soon discovered that my “extensive notes” were not at all helpful, full of questions the movie refused to answer (“who is that?” “why are they doing this?”) and howls in the dark over the torture I’d inflicted on myself (“OMG I DON’T FUCKING CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS”). This meant a second viewing would be required if I wanted to be write anything of consequence about it. After contemplating if I really wanted to subject myself to Mad Dog Time again, and enduring a series of traumatic flashbacks that could only be outdone by those who’ve lived through combat, I soldiered forth on a second viewing, which is at least two times more than anyone should watch this thing.

The naive among you may peep the film’s cast and wonder how it could possibly be so bad. Jeff Goldblum! Gabriel Byrne! Richard Dreyfuss! Ellen Barkin! Diane Lane! You might believe these pieces don’t quite fit together yet puzzle over how Mad Dog Time could possibly be so unwatchable. I’m here to assure you it is as unwatchable as anything ever made by humans, and that includes videos of executions.

Continue reading Mad Dog Time →
Cinematics, Pointless Nostalgia

Death Drive for QT

It began with Paul Dano, of course. Late in 2025, Quentin Tarantino made a podcast appearance in which he trashed that actor’s thespian abilities, firing shots that were as baffling and unprovoked as they were mean spirited. Like many people, my initial reaction to Tarantino’s slam was “fuck that guy,” less out of love or defense of Dano than in condemning the audio equivalent of a sucker punch. Unlike most people, my next move was to watch a completely forgotten time capsule of a film, 1995’s Destiny Turns on the Radio. This movie was a relic from the first Clinton term with a small role for Tarantino. The temptation to compare his acting chops against Dano’s was the main reason for revisiting it. Another reason was I hate myself, apparently.

I say “revisit” the film even though I had not previously seen it, because I might as well have seen it when it was first released. Destiny invoked a pop culture moment indelibly imprinted on my psyche: the immediate post-Pulp Fiction years, when Hollywood scrambled to exploit the sudden popularity of both Tarantino’s cool, ultra-violent aesthetic and Tarantino himself as a personality. Though his screen time in Destiny is not significant, the trailer overemphasized his presence and was soundtracked by a replacement level surf rock song so close to “Misirlou” (the song that famously runs over the opening credits of Pulp Fiction) it could have sued Dick Dale for paternity. Commercials for Destiny ran incessantly on late night cable during shows like 120 Minutes and Mystery Science Theater 3000 that appealed to a young hip audience of presumed Tarantino fans. 

Then Destiny flopped at the box office and was never mentioned again, except in the sort of intrusive thoughts that I experience, when an old TV show theme song or commercial will ring in my head for days on end. I’ve forgotten the names of most of my high school teachers but if you woke me in the middle of the night I could recite several Tootsie Pop jingles for you. 

Thirty years after I had taken note of Destiny, I found watching this movie a draining experience. This was not because it sucked, though it did, but because the way in which it sucked was so aggressively 1990s, so reminiscent of the air of my own youth, that it felt like having pictures from my teens shoved under my nose so I could cringe at the old fashions. 

It also served as a reminder that I once loved, if not the man himself, then certainly what Tarantino’s films represented. The “indie” film revolution of the early 1990s and its mythology around self-taught filmmakers could not have been better timed for me, an impressionable high school aged kid who found it genuinely inspiring that Tarantino had educated himself as a video store clerk rather than at a fancy film school. I don’t know how I first heard of Reservoir Dogs (my dad’s slavish devotion to The New York Times and its Arts section was the most likely culprit) but I rented it from the local video store with upsetting regularity and would talk it up to whoever would listen. Its mixture of off color humor, random pop culture references, and unfettered violence truly felt revelatory at that moment, especially before I had a chance to watch the older movies from which it had kited its scenes and vibes. When Pulp Fiction proved a monster success, it felt like a validation of my early adoption. I am not absolutely sure I saw Jackie Brown on opening day but that’s definitely what I would have wanted to do back then, so let’s just say I did. 

Then the love faded. As often happens with a faded love there was no single inciting incident but a series of small disappointments that chipped away at the affection. There is the matter of Tarantino the public figure, who loves to take embarrassing contrarian stances, such as his decades-long defense of using the N-word at wholesale volume in his movies. He also lashes out at any critic who dares to take issue with any of his films, sometimes with physical violence, in a way that became more like bullying the higher his star rose. More recently, his steadfast approval of Israel despite the genocide in Gaza was yet another reminder that Gen X’s cultural icons have a terrible moral batting average. There’s a few Real Ones still out there to be sure, but in total they’re hitting well below the Mendoza line. 

Come the 2000s, Tarantino no longer seemed necessary to me, cinematically speaking, especially when he was leaning heavily into a grindhouse revivalism that left me cold. I have watched the films he’s made this century out of a sense of completism more than any other impulse. Some I’ve enjoyed, and none are bad films if I’m being honest, but their Easter eggs and endless references (most annoyingly to his own films ) can make the end products feel less like art and more like tracing.

Despite the break I thought I’d made with Tarantino, the cringe I felt while watching Destiny nagged at me. The affected quirks of the film were all too familiar to me because they evoked the memory of many more films from that era, whose existences I recalled vividly in trailer form. After Pulp Fiction, the major studios rushed out anything that could possibly be described as Tarantino-esque, stories about cool dudes doing crimes, sharing pop culture non sequiturs, getting philosophical about their lives of danger while firing their guns sideways in slo-mo. 

I convinced myself there was a retroactive microgenre here, a la Yacht Rock, a form of art everyone was making at a very specific time and place without realizing they were making it. I refreshed my memory about the films that might be considered Tarantino Ripoffs and watched as many as I could find and stomach. Some were awful and some were decent, while the majority settled in the Meh pile, as most things do. Despite the initial impulse that led me to watch Destiny, my intent was not to take Tarantino down a peg through his imitators, a thoroughly unfair pursuit; Bob Dylan shouldn’t have to answer for every bad poet who picked up a guitar and harmonica. Rather, my intent was to examine the mid- to late 90s mini-moment in film that Tarantino inspired, to define these movies’ identifying quirks, to examine if they had any redeeming features, and to see how close they came to the original article. 

The longer I ran this gauntlet, however, the harder it was to separate my conclusions about these movies from those about Tarantino himself and the generation to which he belongs. In the spirit of the aesthetics of the time, I’ll show the ending now and work my way through my process afterwards. The achilles heel of Tarantino and Gen X writ large is that the ideal they hold higher than any other is the maintenance of Being Cool, and evangelizing for Cool. As it turns out, this is a very shaky foundation on which to rest your personal ethos.

Continue reading Death Drive for QT →
Cinematics

What The Woody Allen Scandal Means For Me, A Very Important Writer

Surely no one wished to be in Woody Allen’s shoes when Dylan Farrow’s new accusations came to light earlier this week. But I assure you, gentle reader, neither did you wish to be me, a Very Important Writer, at that moment. For the news sent me into the kind of turgid self-examination and moral reassessment known only to Very Important Writers, the men to whom the world looks for guidance.

As you are no doubt wondering, how does an allegation of pedophilia make me, a Very Important Writer, feel? As shocking as it may sound to you, this is not a question I could answer immediately.

Foremost on my mind when hearing of Dylan Farrow’s tale of unconscionable sexual abuse and violation of trust was, of course, how would I enjoy Woody Allen’s films again? Could I restrict my enjoyment to one viewing of Annie Hall while sitting on an uncomfortable chair as penance? Would it be more prudent of me to watch his more difficult films such as Interiors instead? It was a quandary not to be considered lightly, and a burden that only I, a Very Important Writer, should be asked to bear.

You can be sure that when I, a Very Important Writer, heard this news, it caused me to pace about my brownstone, lost in the recesses of my Very Important Thoughts. The walls of my humble $3.5 million home soon grew too confining. I phoned up a Very Important Writer friend of mine, but he was busy preparing for the Bread Loaf Conference, and of course also preoccupied pondering the same questions about Woody Allen’s work as I. Could we ever enjoy Allen’s films again, he wondered, and if so what would be a respectable time to wait to do so? We reassured each other that we, two Very Important Writers, should be able to solve these dilemmas in our own due time.

Hoping to clear my head, I took a stroll around my colorful Brooklyn neighborhood, peering in the window of the antique shops and the coffee shops and the charming bistro that used to be a laundromat. I stopped at my favorite watering hole and sipped a 12-year-old scotch while exchanging pleasantries about a local sports team with the ruddy-faced barkeep. I sought solace in a delightful ethnic snack from a food cart while trying out snatches of Catalan I learned during one torrid summer in Barcelona. I believe I made myself understood, for all the deficiencies in my accent, and the considerable drawback that the delightful ethnic snack’s vendor was not from anywhere near Catalonia.

And as I ran across these people, I tried not to burden them with my own burden. To do so would have been unfair, for it is a burden they could not possibly have understood, no matter how much my soul yearned to cry out, You do not understand the grief Dylan Farrow’s lost childhood has caused me, a Very Important Writer.

I returned to my home, which began to seem very much like a prison to me. A prison with an ample garden and vintage pressed tin ceilings, but a prison nonetheless. The latest issue of The New Yorker was waiting in my mailbox, but it gave me no succor, despite a fascinating feature on the oldest bookbinder in Northampton. Nor did I find any relief in a sojourn through an advance reader’s copy of Franzen’s latest, The Tepids of Winona.

Alas, it is only in work that a Very Important Writer can find peace. We are much like the ant in that sense, or the miner, or the humble mechanic who toils on my Audi. And so I resolved to document my inner turmoil, because I wanted you, gentle reader, to know that even I, a Very Important Writer, can not answer every question. I must press forward nonetheless, though I can think of no person who has been hurt more by what Dylan Farrow was subjected to than I, a Very Important Writer.