The opening credits sequence; young Madsen; the ironic juxtaposition of music and violence; the who's-the-mole device; Steven Wright as the radio host; the L.A. setting
The opening credit sequence is fun to watch after Swingers blatantly ripped it off four years later with the slow-motion strut out of a diner, while joking that everyone was ripping off Tarantino; the Swingers characters are exactly the guys whose lives were never the same after Reservoir Dogs.
The shot remains influential: The Farewell, an immigrant story out this year, has a slow-motion group walk that reads as meaningful; the hosts joke about filming themselves walking the Sunset Gower lot, which one once did with Jalen, walking away from an exploding car.
Young Madsen is another: a top-five lottery pick who became a whatever-happened-to like Tom Gugliotta, with a bit of Newman and Dean Martin, tall, black-haired and calm; he has had a complicated life, and a college friend loved even bad Michael Madsen movies.
Madsen is likened to Kenny Anderson and may have market-corrected himself; it is telling he is not in Pulp Fiction, though the long-term plan was a Vega Brothers movie with Travolta, and he returned in Kill Bill and The Hateful Eight.
Species is one of the great cable movies with no Oscars; Madsen then went down the road of Man with a Gun and Donnie Brasco and became the Skinamax lord, and his once olive-oil voice now sounds like gargled concrete, hard to understand in The Hateful Eight.
The juxtaposition of music against what it scores, easy-listening soft rock during the ear cutting, was mind-blowing and has been copied so often it is now undetectable; who's-the-mole plots remain a favorite device, as in The Loudest Voice.
Steven Wright as the radio host sets the scene; it is a good L.A. movie, with the warehouse in Eagle Rock, Tarantino living in Glendale, and his first three films being L.A. movies set in different parts of the city, like the True Romance hotel on Sunset.
The closing personal pick is the opening credits sequence.
Stanley Kubrick's The Killing; The Big Combo and Django for the torture scene; Jean-Pierre Melville's films; The Taking of Pelham One Two Three for the color names; Ringo Lam's City on Fire; John Woo's The Killer for the three-way standoff
Nerd Corner is a new category built for one host's reactions: Tarantino is quoted calling the film his take on Kubrick's The Killing rather than a rip-off of it.
Given thirty seconds on The Killing, he calls it one of the great Sterling Hayden performances with a top-three final shot in movie history, the film that let Kubrick leap from crafty photographer making B pictures to the most significant film artist of his time, and says its traces run throughout Reservoir Dogs. — Sean Fennessey
Joseph H. Lewis's The Big Combo and Sergio Corbucci's 1966 Django inspired the cop torture; The Big Combo is fine, Django is a better rewatch after Django Unchained, Tarantino has a relationship with Franco Nero rather than the rights, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has Django-esque flourishes.
Jean-Pierre Melville's tough-guy French films, Le Cirque La Rouge (as transcribed) and Army of Shadows, are recommended to anyone who loves Reservoir Dogs.
The color names come from The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3, a great homage with Walter Matthau, and the Denzel remake is not bad; the 1987 film City on Fire is so close that watching it raises whether Tarantino is good or just stole it, the one complicated thing about him, with critics saying he ripped off seven movies rather than paying homage.
He calls Tarantino a metatextual artist and himself a postmodernist. — Chris Ryan
Tarantino is not interested in human beings so much as weaving pre-existing stories together; City on Fire is a cool movie, Reservoir Dogs is a masterpiece; the three-way standoff is traced to John Woo films such as The Killer.
The opening diner scene is the first candidate: the Madonna 'Like a Virgin' theory leads into the tipping argument, and the clip of Mr. Pink refusing to tip because society says he has to is played.
A lot of guys came out of the movie with a new vision of the service industry; one host, who had worked as a busboy and waiter for two summers, was offended by Buscemi's character and says anyone who has worked food service knows you tip.
Mr. White is teased as woke for dropping knowledge that waitressing is the number one job for non-college-educated women; the scene is said to foreshadow the rat, since Mr. Orange snitches on Mr. Pink when Joe demands to know who did not tip.
A low-key favorite detail is the Budweiser bottles at breakfast; Tarantino scenes often happen in the morning with people behaving as if it were night, like the wolf arriving at six in the morning.
It occurs to one host that the crew, dressed in uniform right before the heist, should not be seen together in public; it is called ludicrous and parked for nitpicks, defended as pre-surveillance state, and the waitress they stiffed would remember five guys in black suits smoking like chimneys and drinking Budweisers at nine in the morning; Joe should never be seen with them.
A nerd question asks whether the roving camera around the table, shooting backs and sides of heads, was stolen from someone; Terry Gilliam loved it at Sundance, it is Scorsese-ish, and the handheld over-the-shoulder following of Madsen going for the gas can feels like a flex.
The Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas is the comparison, called the greatest tracking shot in movie history; a Goodfellas episode could run four hours and needs a live audience.
The shooting style is read as naturalism, putting the viewer inside the conversation, and the scene characterizes everyone at once: a beef between Blonde and White, jumpy Pink, Orange lying in the cut watching, Nice Guy Eddie showing who runs what, and Eddie Bunker as pop critic preferring the early stuff.
It is one of the hosts' favorite opening scenes; an opening-scene week bracket is floated, half of Tarantino's openings would qualify including Inglourious Bastards (as transcribed), and openings and kickers are what matter most.
Keitel versus Buscemi over the bleeding Tim Roth is the second candidate: a long, escalating, well-acted scene; it is argued as the best Buscemi performance, intense, neurotic and imposing, and the two guns pointed at each other was the first John Woo reference one host caught.
Buscemi rankings: this first, The Sopranos second, Domestic Disturbance third ahead of Fargo and Miller's Crossing; Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, remembered for 'boat drinks', Amongst Friends and Very Bad Things are recalled as the Tarantino rip-off era.
The ear-cutting scene followed by the unexpected Tim Roth murder is the third candidate; Madsen gets the gleam in his eye once White and Eddie leave, talks to the severed ear, and the cutaway to the graffiti above the door at the perfect moment is why the scene does not gross one host out.
Tarantino, for someone so violent, often does not show things: Marvin's head in Pulp Fiction is quick and the trunk dummy is obvious, though Hitler's body and Jamie Foxx's forty kills in Django are counterexamples; he also had no money and never shows the suitcase, and Mr. Blonde's speech before the torture is recited.
The movie does not get many Fraternal Order of Police screenings; Mr. Orange's unexpected murder of Mr. Blonde is a great twist nobody saw coming the first time.
Tim Roth performing the commode story, from meeting his boss at the diner through the different settings, is a candidate, with the 'panic hits me like a bucket of water' passage recited.
He had never seen anything like it at the time: the color palette shifts to the graffiti background and the movie comes alive, Roth's energy changes completely as he learns to be the character, and it layers Tarantino's recurring themes of story within a story, seeing Freddy instead of Mr. Orange, and the former actor's process of memorizing lines in the apartment with the Silver Surfer poster; the jumps between settings were unlike anything he had seen. — Chris Ryan
Roth gets to flex his chops with some of the most anguished yelling in a movie, but his accent is called very bad even though a dialect coach was on set the whole shoot; is he supposed to be Dutch? A rare bad accent inside a great performance.
Roth delivering the monologue in the bathroom to cops who stand still while the German shepherd watches showed one host that writing could do that.
Buscemi arguing about the name selections is a shorter but iconic scene, with the trade request and Joe's 'city council meeting' refusal recited; the Joe Cabot bit is saved for later.
Chris Penn doubting Mr. Orange's story, and Vic Vega's return from prison with the Scagnetti talk and the wrestling with Chris Penn and Tierney, are thrown in as further candidates.
The final choices split three ways: the commode story; the ear-cutting scene, taken as the whole twenty-five-minute stretch from the Mr. Blonde and Mr. White showdown to learning what a psychopath he is, since the shootings are never shown; and the ending with Chris Penn figuring it out in seven minutes, which displaced the opening diner for one host after twenty years. Three-way shootouts in general are loved and are said to have influenced one host's later work.
Ebert felt the script could have been better: the film 'feels like it's going to be terrific' but the script lacks curiosity about the characters; he gave it two and a half stars out of four, said he enjoyed it as a very good film from a talented director, and wrote 'I like what I saw, but I wanted more'.
The hosts cannot believe he missed on Tarantino's first movie; he and Siskel famously turned around on Tarantino after early criticism, and the 'Raj' bit is called offensive.
Lea Seydoux is joked, Waltz is offered, and the reply is that there is nothing to overthink: it is Quentin Tarantino, who was in the dark at this point; the third wave of American revisionist Westerns starts with this movie, it revivified his ability to raise money and attract movie stars, and it does both things Tarantino movies do, discovering new talent and spotlighting great talent.
Recalling the show's Social Network conversation about the best movie of the last decade, a host puts this in the best-of-the-century conversation and cannot see how the sole author of it is not the winner; another is tending toward Tarantino because that is what leapt off the screen this time.
A counterpoint is that this is a moment where the film's reception at the time, when many people did not feel that way, is hard to ignore, even though it made money and remains his second highest grosser; Tarantino himself said Waltz gave him his movie, and it is hard to imagine the film being what it is without Waltz, the only person who could do what he did, with the joke of DiCaprio doing a Blood Diamond South African accent as Landa.
It would work as long as Tarantino writes and directs; asked whether it would have a lead character or be anthological, a host thinks it expands into the larger body of material he got rid of and played around with, more Hickox, more Basterds, Mussolini in the mix since Aldo went through Sicily, and the Italian cinema connection.
Enzo Castellari, director of the original Inglorious Bastards, appears in the movie, and Bo Svensson (as transcribed), the star of the original, appears in Nation's Pride; Svensson is Scandinavian rather than Italian.
Earlier, the middle of the movie with the tavern and Operation Kino is said to be able to stand as its own movie; asked whether it could be a 10-part Netflix series, the answer is by all means, with a 10-part Hickox or Shoshana series both wanted.
"Well, if this is it, old boy, I hope you don't mind if I go out speaking the kings"; "That's a bingo"; "The reason the Fuhrer has brought me off my Alps in Austria and placed me in French cow country today is because it does occur to me. Because I'm aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity"; "I love rumors. Facts can be so misleading where rumors, true or false, are often revealing"; "Cousin business is a booming"; "You know something, Udovich? I think this just might be my masterpiece"
Quotes are hard here for the same reason as scenes: the scenes are 20 minutes long and the quotes a paragraph long, people speaking pages of novelesque dialogue; one host grabbed few Landa lines because they are in German, while another has mostly Hans lines, having written the subtitles down in English rather than grabbing them off the internet, earning a 'Thanks, Dad'.
Aldo's 'We got a German here who wants to die for his country. Oblige him!' and the prisoner-taking speech ending 'cousin business is a booming' are performed and called incredible; 'if this is it, old boy, I hope you don't mind if I go out speaking the kings' is an all-timer, and 'that's a bingo' is delivered in a way that is so funny.
One host's favorite this time is Landa's speech to the farmer about the places it would never occur to a hawk to hide and why the Fuhrer brought him off his Alps to French cow country, because he is aware of what humans are capable of once they abandon dignity: essentially every war movie, a man who lives exactly where people are pushed past their boundaries, supremely unnerving in the delivery.
Two more Hans lines from the same conversation: 'I love rumors. Facts can be so misleading where rumors, true or false, are often revealing', followed gleefully by what rumors the farmer has heard regarding the Dreyfuses, and 'interesting as the thought may be, it makes not one bit of difference to how you feel'; in a movie where propaganda is prominent, this is its expertly executed fake news moment.
Many of the great lines are exchanges, like the whole encounter between Landa and Aldo, a series of heaters between the two smartest people in the movie, though Shoshana may be the smartest: 'what's that English saying about shoes and feet' answered with 'looks like the shoe's on the other foot', and the sauerkraut sandwich and 'sniper's delight' speech, delivered with Pitt's elocutionary choices for a one-quarter Apache Tennessee mountain man, descendant of Jim Berger (as transcribed).
Hitler's hysterical 'who and what is a private butt' is offered, with a tease about being pro-Hitler denied; 'I'm French. We respect directors in our country' is a perfect meta line; Hickox's special rung in hell for people who waste good scotch is very true.
Bridget's reply that she does not like mountains but likes smoking, drinking and ordering in restaurants is a host's own life; the Landa and Udovich (as transcribed) exchange about nicknames, the 'little man' and 'not circus midget little' is great humor laced into the ending.
Landa's 'we simply aren't operating on the level of mutual respect I assumed' to Aldo, delivered as if sincerely hurt, and the final 'You know something, Udovich? I think this just might be my masterpiece' before the cut to black, one of Tarantino's famed bang endings.
Some negative reviews keyed on the masterpiece line as Tarantino judging his own work, but a host thinks he was right; respect for Manohla Dargis notwithstanding, calling the movie boring is confounding, and nothing in 2009 was better, with Avatar and Up in the Air the comparisons.
A line of criticism nominated for best quote: Christopher Hitchens compared the film to sitting in the dark having a great pot of warm piss emptied slowly over your head, per Wikipedia; the hosts joke about reviving that style for Captain Marvel, with one reserving melodramatic rants for Jets, Metz and Nicks content (as transcribed).
Operation Kino is not a subtle code name; Nazi security at the premiere is lax with a mountain of nitrate film and visible dynamite; Hickox calls Pabst German when he is Austrian; Wilhelm's table cannot hear the switch to English; Bridget leaves her shoe and a signed napkin behind; the developer is threatened on top of flammable film; the 'Hans out of a million' line; Hitler fetching his own gum; Shoshana's filmed message is in English
One host has no nits; another opens with a big one: Kino is the German word for movie theater, so Operation Kino is not a subtle code name for a mission anyone overhearing could figure out; OPSEC for the Nazis is not high order, with everybody important put in a theater the size of the Bowery Ballroom guarded by little more than Wanda, where any Italian filmmaker can walk in off the street.
Rewatching, a host was briefly confused about why Landa let the two Italians into the theater, having forgotten that he purposefully allows them to bring the dynamite in to take care of the Nazi command; the nit is that his decision is already made, though his following through on killing Bridget in the interrogation delays the realization until his exchange with Aldo.
What about everybody else in the security unit: there is a mountain-sized pile of flammable film and literal dynamite around people's legs, visible to the naked eye on the stairs, which prompts a John Hamm (as transcribed) joke and a reprimand for having dick on the brain.
Two explanations offered: it is the end of the war and the Nazis have checked out, their famous rigor fallen away, or the movie is bad; the hosts take the first, since you cannot get 90 minutes into a rewatch and decide the movie is bad because the Germans lacked security.
Hickox is said to have been writing a book on G.W. Pabst, whom he calls German, but Pabst is Austrian, just like Hitler, and he still got the cosign from Fennec (as transcribed) and Churchill despite the error; when fact checkers at the Ringer make mistakes, the response is 'there's the door' and a photo of John Hamm (as transcribed) to go.
Wilhelm's table at the Maximilian birthday celebration cannot hear the next table and is not suspicious at the switch to English, even though the scene's tension rests on the others in the room being mortal peril; the party freely conducts a sensitive conversation and the neighbors hear none of it, and things go awry only because Hellstrom enters after they yell at Wilhelm and because of the strange accent; Wilhelm's drunkenness is perfect, like hitting peach schnapps at a high school party.
Without wanting to be insensitive about being shot in the leg, a host objects that Bridget, in agony and terror, leaves behind not only her high-fashion footwear but a napkin bearing her kiss and signature; the defenses are that this is just movies, she is not a trained agent who knows how to clean a scene, and Aldo needed to get out of Dodge rather than sweep the room.
The Landa-as-Sherlock-Holmes affectation of pipe, hat and uniform is loved, but is it Sherlock Holmes if her name is literally on the napkin; maybe he is not as smart as he thinks, and the modern version is sending a tweet instead of a DM, like the Ray Allen tweet he said was hacked; she should have signed BVH; Landa's clout score and self-edited wiki page are joked about.
The nitrate film is extremely flammable, yet Shoshana and Marcel throw the developer onto what is basically a bomb to convince him and threaten to put an axe in his skull; the 'Hans out of a million' line (as transcribed) does not make sense; and a host cannot shake Hitler having to get up in the middle of the movie to get his own gum when nobody will fetch it for him.
Teased by name that the Hitler gum complaint will be the social pull-quote for the episode, the host answers that this is a category of the podcast and she is taking the mission seriously. — Mallory Rubin
It is odd that Shoshana's message in the film is in English given how little of the movie is; it is a filmic flourish and an obvious homage to The Wizard of Oz, her face created in light through the smoke, and English makes the movie's most critical sentiment easiest for the intended audience, with the victory over Germany seen as the victory of the English-speaking West; whether it also says Americans are the best filmmakers is doubted, since Tarantino might favor the Italians or the Japanese, and the movie is about how we define ourselves.
Earlier, during internet research, a host saves one item for picking nits while another admits to having no nits to pick at all.
Mountains are a big thing in the movie, like Pits Paloo (as transcribed), which prompts the question of whether this is Tarantino's Apex Mountain.
Asked by name to define the category, the host first jokes about having broken his foot the day before and his new cast, then explains that Apex Mountain means a person at the peak of their powers both commercially and artistically. — Chris Ryan
One host says this cannot be Tarantino's Apex Mountain: he won the screenplay Oscar at about 29 after Pulp Fiction, was the toast of Hollywood, could have done anything and made Jackie Brown; whether this is his best movie is a different question.
Tarantino has three phases: Dogs, Fiction and Brown as Elmore Leonard underworld movies; Kill Bill and Grindhouse as martial-arts exploitation raised to an art-house level; and Basterds, Django, Hateful Eight and Hollywood as alternate history heavily influenced by Westerns. A host has a sentimental attachment to phase one, which taught him pop culture, likes phase two less, and finds it remarkable that in 2019 people still turn out for two-and-a-half-hour talky films like the roadshow Hateful Eight.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a TBD, possibly a phase four or a continuation or throwback. Asked by name for a big Tarantino conversation, the host says she loves Tarantino, that this is her favorite Tarantino movie, that she really loves Django and Pulp Fiction, and that this is the one she thinks about, craves and enjoys the most. — Mallory Rubin
It might be Apex Mountain for Pitt: shouted out as the last half century's most beautiful person, a very weird guy with extraordinary taste who works with interesting people and never gets credit, the character actor trapped in a leading man's body; the run-up is Ocean's 13, The Assassination of Jesse James, Burn After Reading, Benjamin Button and this in a row, all different performances for great directors in movies that cannot happen without him.
Not all were hits, Jesse James was famously a bomb though remembered by some as maybe the best movie of the century; afterward he does The Tree of Life, Moneyball, World War Z, Killing Them Softly, 12 Years a Slave and The Counselor and produces good work, but this period feels like the most significant of his career since his 90s breakthrough.
The hosts are split on Tarantino, one no, one arguably yes and a third no, prompting the joke that nobody understands Apex Mountain; Pitt, Waltz, Kruger and Laurent are all yes, and B.J. Novak is a no because The Office is his apex, when the residuals hit.
A niche pick: the assistant who drives Hellstrom to pick up Shoshana at the movie theater, who plays Egon Tiedemann in the show Dark, met with blank stares; it is observed that everybody who is a Joey Pants is also kind of famous, like Sam Levine (as transcribed), Paul Russ (as transcribed) and B.J. Novak, all recognizable.
All of the Basterds are also screenwriters, a Tarantino-esque flourish; Rod Taylor is that guy here because you cannot tell who he is; since Joey Pants is usually the guy sharing a title card with four others, Denis Menoshe (as transcribed), the dairy farmer, a French actor of note who turns up in Assassin's Creed with Fassbender, is nominated as a Joey Pants.
Hellstrom's King Kong theory is Tarantino's own from Fresh Air; the opening title card is Tarantino's handwriting; the screenplay sets Aldo's briefing in England and explains his neck scar as a survived lynching; Donny Donowitz is the father of True Romance's Lee Donowitz and Aldo is suggested as Floyd's great-grandfather; Eli Roth directed Nation's Pride; the marquee film is Clouzot's Le Corbeau; Zoller is based on Audie Murphy; Goebbels's Lilian Harvey tantrum reflects her 1939 flight from Germany; Landa's rat speech draws on The Eternal Jew; von Hammersmark is based partly on Zarah Leander; Tarantino said discovering Waltz gave him his movie; Hickox quotes Cole Porter and Villon
Hellstrom's King Kong theory is Tarantino's own from his Terry Gross interview, and the opening title card is in Tarantino's handwriting; the screenplay reveals that the 'I want my scalps' briefing takes place in England and that the ligature marks on Aldo's neck come from a survived lynching, a common punishment in the 20s and 30s, which also references Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Lee Donowitz and Donnie Donowitz are related, and Aldo is assumed or suggested to be the great-grandfather of Floyd from True Romance; Eli Roth, the horror director of Hostel, directed Nation's Pride, the film within the film.
The movie Shoshana takes down off the marquee is Henri-Georges Clouseau's (as transcribed) Le Corbeau, a famous 40s French film with hidden anti-Nazi messages; the Audie Murphy basis for Zoller is a clever subversion of the American ideal of heroism applied to a German soldier.
Goebbels throws a tantrum at Francesca's mention of Lillian Harvey because Harvey fled Nazi Germany in 1939 after helping the Jewish choreographer Jens Keith escape to Switzerland; Landa's rats speech to the farmer is influenced by The Eternal Jew, an SS propaganda film made in Poland that depicted Jews as disease-spreading rats; Hammersmark is based somewhat on Zara Leander (as transcribed), a Swedish actress said to have been a Russian spy; this is less half-assed research than World War II history.
Tarantino has said that discovering Waltz gave him his movie, since he had come to fear the role was literally unplayable, and he was resistant to Leo speaking English with a German accent for two and a half hours.
Hickox is literate and literary: 'Paris when it sizzles' is a lyric from a Cole Porter song, and 'like the snows of yesteryear' comes from a Villon poem (attributed in the episode to Jacques Villon), heady stuff for a Tarantino movie that still feels true to the character.
Earlier, during the tavern discussion, a host borrows a piece of half-assed research: the King Kong scene is Tarantino's theory from Fresh Air, and his Top Gun theory would have been anachronistic.
The award is named for Saul Rubinek's turn as the movie producer Lee Donowitz in True Romance, so Eli Roth not only overacts here but has to win, because he plays Lee Donowitz's father; the family relationships between Tarantino characters are saved for internet research, and Sylvester Groth's case is denied under the bylaws of the Rewatchables.
Every Roth line reading, like 'fuck a duck', is goofy, though the way Groth begins to weep in the theater after Hitler's praise of Nation's Pride has stuck with a host, and the two could flip-flop between the two acting awards.
