Tarantino by definition

By GRAHAM REID

There was a scene in last week's Michael Palin travel-doco Himalaya which, even if you didn't see it, you'll recognise. It was of a towering mountain with clouds scuttling over at about 10 times the speed. Such an image is almost over-familiar these days - you see it in ads which indicates how cliched it has become - but the accompanying music caught my attention. It was a series of repeated and slightly varying phrases known as minimalism.

"Koyaanisqatsi," I yelled to the bewilderment of those around me. But that's what it was. Palin's team had appropriated not only the sped-up image, but added similar music to Godfrey Reggio's '83 film Koyaanisqatsi (Life out of Balance), which was a whole movie using this technique and Philip Glass' minimalist music.

I remembered it as an exceptional and innovative film, and it's just out on midprice DVD so I bought it and we sat down to watch. We didn't move, and barely spoke, for the next 90 minutes.

It's still an impressive work and if the music isn't to your taste you can turn it off, bang on Strauss or the Clash, and still remain engrossed by the visuals. However, many of them - clouds racing over landscapes, cars zipping along freeways - have become overly-familiar these past two decades, although the impact has seldom been bettered. For Palin's crew it was the easy but eye-engaging option. Just add minimalism.

Many film-makers determine how we see the world. John Ford defined the West for audiences when he shot great films like The Searchers in Monument Valley, Arizona. (In The Searchers he identified it as Texas but no one cared, it was just the uncharted but visually impressive land known as the West).

Two decades later Sergio Leone redefined the West in movies like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as an unforgiving wasteland of bleached deserts, low brush and rock. They were actually shot in Spain, but when Clint Eastwood walked through them to the sound of Ennio Morricone's haunting music it became the West. Another West!

Some directors define emotional landscapes: Martin Scorsese set the template for New York gangster movies with Mean Streets and created a violent masterpiece (with a great pop'n'rock soundtrack) in Goodfellas.

Films like Brian DePalma's Scarface and Scorsese's Casino (set in Miami and Las Vegas respectively) are just variants of the same emotional and physical environment.

The DVD release this week of Kill Bill 2 also illustrates how much Quentin Tarantino has defined his own filmic landscape by drawing from all that went before. Kill Bill (notably the second volume) adopts not only the soundtracks of its predecessors (he uses snippets from Morricone's Good, Bad and Ugly, oddball but distinctive Spanish music of the El Mariachi kind and so on) but even appropriates whole chunks of style. When the Bride (Uma Thurman) goes to learn from her kung fu master, the sequence (from grainy and bleached film to sudden zooms and mystical sayings) comes from cheap '60s Asian martial arts movies.

Also, Tarantino uses manga (comic-book art), direct-to-camera commentary, voice-overs and shifts to black and white. Like Natural Born Killers, it's a homework assignment for film students.

This is no unique observation, but Kill Bill 2 reminds you just how much Tarantino defined a style of often archly referential movie-making.

Over the two volumes Kill Bill is way too long and ultimately self-indulgent. By the final showdown, which involves absurd globs of dialogue in which Tarantino's voice is unashamedly filtered through Bill (David Carradine), you just want one of the Weinstein producers to wander on and cry, "Enough already".

But what you can admire after the buckets of blood, the limbs hacked, the balletic fights and constant shifts of colour and tone, is how Tarantino has managed to create an emotional landscape of his own, albeit a pastiche of ideas from others.

He's the archetypal postmodern film-maker, every image or style worth as much as any other. And he's an adjective. Just as you might speak of an epic western being Ford-like, or snort Koyaanisqatsi during an insurance company ad, you can also say, "That's sooo Tarantino."

Or, if you want a derogatory tone, as you might in the final 20 minutes of Kill Bill 2: "That's so Queeeeentin."