Who is The Movie Critic?

Quentin Tarantino recently announced that his next movie “The Movie Critic” will be his last. I’m less interested in the second part of that statement because unless you’re the late great (greatest) Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who retired when he retired and told anyone yearning for his rematch with Sugar Ray to stuff it, I take any pronouncement of retirement from artists and athletes with a grain of salt. No, I’m more fascinated by Tarantino’s subject; namely, who is The Movie Critic? We don’t know. We don’t know much, in fact, as Screen Rant made clear in posting Everything We Know about Q.T.’s project and then essentially admitting they didn’t know anything. That didn’t stop them from posting, though, and it’s not going to stop Cinema Romantico either.  

Who is The Movie Critic?

Pauline Kael. This seems to be the working theory as reports are “The Movie Critic” will be set in 1970s Los Angeles. After all, Kael was lured to Los Angeles from her critical perch at The New Yorker by one Warren Beatty to get involved in the making of movies rather than critiquing them, an ultimately unsuccessful odyssey. It has been speculated that Beatty did this as a covert means to draw Kael away from killing movies with her pen. Whether or not this is true, it sets up a splendid opportunity for Tarantino to indulge his inner-fabulist and render Kael’s revenge on Beatty (Ashton Kutcher).

Kenneth Turan. But then, a couple decades later James Cameron failed to take box office success and general positive notices to heart when the LA Times’s Kenneth Turan knocked “Titanic” down a peg and initiated a war of words, (in)famously asking in a letter to the critic’s newspaper “Forget about Clinton – how do we impeach Kenneth Turan?” I’m seeing a spaghetti western, Critic vs Filmmaker.  

Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott. The esteemed Dargis worked at both the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly before moving to The New York Times where she and Scott were co-chief film critics until the latter just recently stepped away from writing movie reviews. Still, perhaps he could go out with Q.T. utilizing him and Manohla a la hapless Mayor Ebert and his dimwitted advisor Siskel in Roland Emmerich’s “Godzilla.”

Joel Siegel. Perhaps “The Movie Critic” will be to Tarantino as “The Straight Story” was to Lynch and “The Winslow Boy” was to Mamet – that is, his G-rated movie.

Harper Barnes. I know, I know, “The Movie Critic” is set in Los Angeles and Barnes, by way of the Boston Phoenix and others, wrote reviews for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, but this is “The Movie Critic” I want to see, someone hashing out reviews in the middle-west and far from the center of the industry. Then again, this sounds more like Jim Jarmusch’s “The Movie Critic,” doesn’t it?

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

If Quentin Tarantino’s eighth feature film, “The Hateful Eight”, was a western, so too is his ninth feature film, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”, consumed, as it is, by myth, not so much of the Old West as Old Hollywood, which makes the film’s 1969 setting pertinent, on the cusp of New Hollywood, when stars like Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), of a fictional TV western “Bounty Law”, were fading. But if “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is a western, it is also a fairytale, evoked in the title and the title’s ellipsis. Tarantino has no interest in challenging myths, as westerns often do, let alone tearing them down, but reveling in them, building them back up, at least for one night.

This fairytale turns on Rick’s friendship with his loyal stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), such a spot-on double that when they sit down side-by-side at a bar for cocktails they imbibe them with a similar slurp. Not just his stuntman, however, Cliff is also his confidante, his Sundance Kid, his driver, seen when he escorts Rick back to his bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills, next door to new neighbors Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), the former emblemizing that looming New Hollywood. Rather than immediately merging these neighbors’ stories, however, Tarantino runs them parallel for a good long while, denoting “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’s” languor. While most directors might be content with one freeway aerial shot to convey L.A. as a driving city, Q.T. lingers over the act of driving itself, through the narrow, twisty streets of the Hills and down boulevards, placing the camera at a low angle in Cliff’s car to ensure we can make out every painstakingly created billboard hovering just over the character’s shoulder. In that way, the backdrop becomes a character, in so much as Tarantino consciously draws our attention to it even as we are ostensibly watching the people, immersing us in the time and place. Sometimes he even does away with the people, like a brief sequence cutting from from neon sign to neon sign, each one lighting up come twilight.

The neon signs, though, are not as luminous as Tate, who is emotional ground zero for OUTIH even if, in a virtual non-speaking role, she receives less screen time than Rick and Cliff. If a more interior examination might have unlocked deeper truth about Tate, Tarantino, as elsewhere, is not so much interested in the truth. That’s why her romantic backstory is conveyed by Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis), wistfully, from afar, demonstrating not so much the mere Male Gaze as a certain image of her, one which Tarantino freezes in time; Sharon Tate as the life of a party that would never end.

Not that she gets no time to herself. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Tate guilelessly talks her way into a screening of her own movie (“The Wrecking Crew”) and sits unnoticed amongst a half-full theater, watching her performance and listening to the laughs around her. This is not sad but joyous, further illuminated in how Tarantino and his editor Fred Raskin cross-cut between this and a scene where Rick films a guest starring appearance on a TV western as the macabre, mustachioed villain. Here “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” delightfully idles in the actorly nuts and bolts as Rick, desperate and hungover, tries to nail his scene. (The moment when, at some saloon table, DiCaprio erupts with frustration at forgetting lines, Timothy Olyphant, playing opposite him as the show’s star, reminded me of William Goldman’s old anecdote about Roy Scheider coolly standing by on the set of the “Marathon Man” while Dustin Hoffman flipped out.) Eventually, though, Rick rises to the challenge and brings the house down, and his reaction to getting it right, where DiCaprio improbably manages to slowly let the poignancy push through the self-pity, rhymes with the scene of Tate at the theater; we are literally seeing how production gives way to release.

Yet in playing a heavy slated to die at episode’s end, this scene spiritually connects to the demise of Rick’s career, furthered in his pre-shoot encounter with an adolescent co-star championing the Method. “Who are you?” he asks as if confronted by the Ghost of Christmas Future. By the end, in fact, when “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” flashes forward, Rick returning home from shooting Spaghetti Westerns in Italy, he has acquired girth and sideburns, evoking the aging Elvis. The aging Elvis, in fact, was no fan of hippies and neither is Rick, accosting a car full of hippies in a late night scene, clutching a pitcher of frozen margaritas, laying bare his rage as ridiculous.

As ramped up as Rick gets, Cliff remains mellow, someone wholly at ease in his body, which Tarantino, noted foot fetishist, visually underlines in the character’s moccasins. When Cliff fixes Rick’s TV antenna, he ascends to the roof in the three quick leaps, a comic moment made so by how blazingly fast it happens even as it illustrates how Cliff moves with little wasted motion. It suggests a ferocity ready to uncoil at a moment’s notice, and Pitt’s laconic smile and speaking style, never employed better than here, harmonize with that notion, like someone sizing you up and half-a-second away from punching you if he decides he doesn’t like you. Indeed, a disturbing flashback to Cliff and his ex-wife, whom he is said to have murdered, though we don’t see the murder, arguing on a boat, ends with him just sitting there, a harpoon gun in his lap, a concise portrait of an itchy trigger finger.

His penchant for unbothered cool and sudden violence converge when he picks up a youthful hitch-hiker, unbeknownst to him a member of The Manson Family, and ferries her to their commune, Spahn Ranch. An old dilapidated western movie set, Tarantino effectively brings it back to life, not with any special effects or fantasies but the simple act of Cliff sauntering down the make believe main street, a marshal in moccasins, while Manson’s followers crowd the boardwalks beside him, jeering, like extras in a B movie, all leading to a near escape. The scene is portentous, The Manson Family gathering on OUTIH’s edges like storm clouds, building to the infamous, tragic night of August 8, 1969, cutting between the respective evenings out of Rick & Cliff and Sharon and her friends, every detail accounted for with time stamps and voiceover, like a more elegiac version of “Goodfellas” busy day sequence, brought home in perhaps the greatest of all Q.T. music cues, The Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time”, an astonishing eulogy to the very era Tate represents.

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” culminates, as Q.T. movies often do, with an expected yet still abrupt explosion of violence, mimicking the movie’s overall fantastical presentation in its grisly exaggeration. And if the great myth of Hollywood is that it’s where dreams come true, this denouement, in its way, embodies that myth through Tarantino’s preferred slight of hand, dispensing a kind of cosmic justice by living out Western-style revenge, brought home with an ingenious narrative payoff by way of a prop, improbably giving rise to the title track of Bruce Springsteen’s latest album: “Tonight the Western Stars are shining bright again.”

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Quentin Tarantino, it goes without saying, though it still needs to be said for context, loves movies. His original Big Kahuna Burger, “Reservoir Dogs”, lifted its Mr. Black/Mr. White/Mr. Pink nomenclature bit from “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974). And “Pulp Fiction” was just sort of one rolling movie-themed carnival, with a part-cinema wax museum, of sorts, where you could order a Douglas Sirk steak, never mind an all-important, never-explained briefcase that might’ve been pilfered from the set of “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955). In the morning after Butch has gone rogue, even, while Fabienne brushes her teeth, she’s got a motorcyle movie playing in the background, a detail I always loved because in Q.T. land, even when you’re on the run and in danger of being killed, people still watch movies. “Inglorious Basterds”, meanwhile was set in the midst of WWII’s European Theatre but it may as well have been on a movie backlot, with the movie industry itself playing a crucial part and a glorious old Parisian movie theater earning a starring role. Heck, “Django Unchained” and “Kill Bill” just are Blaxploitation and Chop Socky, respectively, duplicated and then expanded into A Band Apart Pictures (taken from a movie!!!) bouillabaisse. And Q.T.’s latest, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, as the title implies, seems more of the same.

For all his references and outright homages to movies, however, the one thing that Tarantino does not serve up in his movies so frequently is the act of going to the movies. I mean, yes, people go to the movies in “Inglorious Basterds”, memorably, allowing for Q.T. to imagine the movie-going experience as something like the savior of the free world, which is a pretty righteous ode to the cinema, though that’s much more heightened than what I’m talking about. I’m talking more about the scene in “True Romance”, which was directed by Tony Scott but written by Tarantino and so just as much his joint, where Clarence goes to a triple kung-fu feature on his birthday and then is joined by Alabama and where, despite her being paid to be there, him and his love for the movies and the movies themselves lifts her higher. Even that, though, is pitched at a more romantic frequency than what I’m seeking in this here post about I’m about to unfold.

One of my favorite lines in Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” is bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) announcing his intention to go catch a movie leading his second-in-command, Winston (Tiny Lister), to ask what he’s going to see. “Something that starts soon,” Max replies, “and looks good.” And I love that line for two reasons. I love that line because it flashes me back to another time, one when you’d just watch wander down to the movie theater and, well, as he says, see what starts soon and looks good. You didn’t check Fandango on your phone; you just looked at a few posters and made a decision. Primitive, perhaps, but thrilling in its own low-key way, putting your fate in the hands of the movie gods. And I love that line because it evokes this man, Max Cherry, who’s his own boss and if he wants, in the middle of the day, can up and go catch a movie. Damn, ain’t that the dream.

That moment, however, comes later in the movie, and Max is saying it as something of an alibi for what he is actually about to go and do – that is, help the eponymous airline stewardess swindle $500,000. Tarantino, however, has set up Max’s ersatz solo movie date with a real solo movie date much earlier, one that we see just as it concludes, beginning with a shot just outside of the movie theater, its door still closed.

But then, the door flies open accompanied by a rush of music, presumably from the closing credits of the unseen movie, and this smiling couple, in the throes of post-movie enjoyment, which is key.

And after that couple passes by, and then another couple patrons, Max exits.

And he walks past a poster for “The American President”-

-and “Wolf”, pinpointing the time.

And...that’s it. We see him leave the movie. This is all set-up so he can run into Jackie Brown at the mall where the movie theater is located, but it’s this brief instant, this leaving the theater that nevertheless stays with me.

“Jackie Brown”, after all, is a movie about motion. It begins with Jackie aboard an airplane walkway, just standing there and letting it take her where she needs to go as the opening credits unspool. Over and over Tarantino just watches people walk, whether it’s Ordell and Beaumont walking and talking or Max following the money or Jackie in a burst of faux-commotion hurrying through the mall or Louis and Melanie haplessly wandering through the parking lot looking for his car or even a brief shot of Ray Nicolette sauntering into the office with his motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm. But none of these walks compare to Max’s. There’s that Bloodstone song dug up for the soundtrack by Tarantino, “Natural High,” “I’ll take to the sky on a natural high”, and what is the post-movie walk but that exactly that.

The Hateful Eight

The most important totem in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” is a letter from Abraham Lincoln himself. It’s read at a couple critical junctures, like the Bixby Letter that George C. Marshall recites to a couple army officers at a critical juncture in “Saving Private Ryan.” Steven Spielberg, however, believed in that letter with all his heart; Quentin Tarantino’s Honest Abe missive, on the other hand, isn’t quite so honest. And in that deception lays “The Hateful Eight’s” very, very (very) hateful heart. This is a movie built on lies because America was built on lies, which is a fairly heavy-handed allegory that is absolutely nothing new, and yet Tarantino has rarely been an ultra-original. Rather he’s a loving pastiche artist lifting from films of the past to tell stories now. And like “Inglourious Basterds” and “Django Unchained” before it, Tarantino comes on like a deranged history professor, though this time less interested in settling scores on behalf of its persecuted. No, “The Hateful Eight” is a steaming stew of nihilism that makes you swim in it, and long after its shock and awe ended, I felt as if I still couldn’t wash it off. I’m sure somewhere Q.T. cackled with a gleam in his eye.

Tarantino has been building to this indoor epic all along. He’s long been fond of lengthy scenes, of course, dating back to his 1992 debut “Reservoir Dogs”, but his recent uptick in production and costume design and determination to wrestle in his own way with America’s fraught history has turned those lengthy scenes into mammoth set pieces, like the underground bar shootout in “Inglourious Basterds” which might have been the to-date most impressive standalone feat in his career. So impressive, in fact, that “The Hateful Eight” essentially cribs that sequence by concocting an entire movie out of it. Much has been made of “The Hateful Eight”, what with its title and original Ennio Morricone score, as being the Tarantino Western. And while the setting is the frontier, and while Tarantino deconstructs (tears the limbs off) many of the movie myths surrounding the frontier, structurally the film is not so much a western as Q.T.’s ode to Agatha Christie. Despite being filmed on massive Ultra Panavision cameras, this movie mostly forgoes visual splendor, aside from a few impressive sequences of a frontier blizzard, to remain situated indoors, as if on a stage, underscored by Tarantino’s usual chapter headings, like the closing and opening of the curtain, its make-believe theatricality wielded with a purpose after a lengthy wind-up.

The players are the worst Q.T. can imagine: John Ruth (Kurt Russell) who is carrying vicious outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the nearby Wyoming town of Red Rock to be hanged so he can collect a $10,000 reward. On the trail, however, they encounter Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), once a prominent major in the Union Army, who turned bounty hunter post-war and is trying to haul a few of his own dead bounties to Red Rock, and they encounter Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), proclaiming himself as the next Sheriff or Red Rock.

When the blizzard strikes, they stop off at Minnie’s Haberdashery, though its titular proprietor, who Ruth and Warren know well, has apparently gone off down the mountain, leaving Mexican Bob (Demián Bichir) in charge, which seems strange, but then a lot seems strange about the trio left behind. Bruce Dern remains completely immovable in a comfy chair as a Confederate general burning with arms-laid-down resentment; Tim Roth, as frontier hangman Oswaldo Mobray, performs a combined impersonation of haughty Christoph Waltz and English Bob that nonetheless becomes entirely, delightfully original; Michael Madsen plays Joe Gage but is really playing Michael Madsen in a Quentin Tarantino Movie, but that goes without saying.

Where “The Hateful Eight” goes, how it goes there, what it does once it gets there, is best left to each viewer to discover for his or herself, but suffice it to say there are numerous reveals and switchbacks and out loud inquiries by a locked-in Samuel L. Jackson who often gets to play Inspector. For much of this movie, Jackson claims center stage, always seeming to be one step ahead of everyone else, roaring with great vengeance and furious anger, even as you wish his monologues might roar with more jet propulsion. The film is built on the back of Tarantino’s dialogue, which is usually best when it is simultaneously digressive and cutting straight to the heart of the over-arching manner, but in this screenplay there is an awful lot of sussing out, which renders many of the monologues more flat and repetitive than joyfully florid.

The dialogue also is heavy with Tarantino’s favorite naughty word, intended to demonstrate the racist bile of a place and time so often held up as a place where enmity always succumbed to justice. Yet, in spite of that word’s overuse, most of the characters here, frankly, reserve the brunt of their vitriol for Daisy. Now Tarantino has put his beloved Uma through the ringer, certainly, but never as much as he puts Leigh through it, who is introduced with a black eye and then proceeds to get repeatedly punched (always by men), have her teeth smashed up, and covered in so much blood that by the end she resembles Ally Sheedy of “The Breakfast Club” dispatched into the land of torture porn. Worse, she’s often stranded on the edge of frames, forced to be reactive throughout, vicious in her own right but helpless, left at the mercy of these foul-mouthed men. You keep expecting Daisy to go the route of Django Freeman and Lt. Aldo Raine, unleashing hell on everyone unleashing hell on her. It never happens.

If “The Hateful Eight” ultimately quotes a movie most flagrantly, it is perhaps John Carpenter’s “The Thing”, the 1982 film in which an extra-terrestrial assimilates humans at a remote Antarctic base, turning everyone against everyone else. That film was dismissed by many critics at the time as bloody excess, a means to stage grisly demises, and frankly, “The Hateful Eight” often seems to echo those sentiments, with Tarantino taking it as a kind of gospel as every blown off head, every punch to the face, every eruption of blood stands for nothing much more than Tarantino’s inalienable right to take things too far. And with each successive plot maneuver, the more I suspected this film was no more real than that Honest Abe letter, that the ultimate Agatha Christie-ish reveal would prove Tarantino himself to be The Thing, assimilating all these fine actors doing uniformly tremendous work, rendering them as pawns rather than people, and that all these ribald fantasies were merely an explication of his own hate, and an excuse to unleash the macabre folly coursing through his demented imagination.

5 More Genres For Quentin Tarantino

Filmmaking wunderkind Quentin Tarantino recently announced that his next film would be a Western, and this was spectacularly right. It was spectacularly right because Tarantino is not the sort who announces his new projects based on actors or premises or budgets. No, he is the sort who announces his new projects based on genre. And we all think: "Ah, now he's making his _______ movie."

He made a Kung Fu movie which was followed by a Grindhouse movie which was followed by a WWII movie which was followed by a Blaxploitation movie which will be followed by a Western. And so it goes. And this, as it must, got me to thinking. What other genres could Q.T. tackle?

5 More Genres For Quentin Tarantino

Disaster Movie. It seems reasonable to think Q.T. might be an Irwin Allen fan, the famed producer who brought big budgets and sprawling casts to disaster-oriented productions like "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure." And in 2003, Tarantino jokingly referred to a movie he and Samuel L. Jackson called "Airport 2005." But that......that just seems a little too obvious for our boy Quentin. Might I suggest, "When Time Ran Out 2014"? Or, "Planet Hollywood." A disaster movie set at Planet Hollywood and seen through the eyes of a sprawling cast of celebrity lookalikes.

Genie In A Bottle. Starring Samuel L. Jackson as the Genie In The Bottle. And Amber Heard as the whimsical but badass woman who finds the bottle, a one-time Miss America contestant cheated out of the pageant crown by villainous Miss Tennessee (Hayden Panettiere). She wishes for a gold-encrusted M16/SP1 ("like the one Schwarzenegger had in 'Predator'") and a winsome nose ring ("those bitches at the pageant wouldn't let me have one") and hits the road in search of payback.

Sword and Sandal Epic. Seriously, who wouldn't want to see Q.T. tackle the story of Helen of Troy and The Trojan War? The casting decisions! My God, think of the casting decisions! Unless he would prefer to tell the story of Hercules and Hippolyte (Uma Thurman). Unless he just wants to invent his own Tarantino-ized Greek myth, which might be the best of all. So yeah. Let's go with that. A Quentin Tarantino-invented Greek myth.

Elvis Musical. So, what's say Q.T. remakes "Frankie & Johnny" (1966). Lindsay Lohan as Frankie? (It's time for Tarantino to resurrect her.) James Franco as Johnny? Anne Hathaway as Nellie Bly? John Stamos as Cully? And all the songs are pop songs handpicked by Tarantino and lip-synched to by the cast, a la "Romance & Cigarettes"?

Biblical Epic. With "Inglorious Basterds" Tarantino told an alternate history of WWII, so hey, why not tell an alternate history of the Bible? Are you familiar with this book? Now just imagine that taken to the nth degree but with more swearing, more Christoph Waltz and more Ronettes.

Dissecting A Scene From Jackie Brown: The "Twist"

The screen is black. A rapping on a door. Fade in. Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) opens her door. We don't see who is AT the door because the camera consciously remains in the house. Jackie says: "Want your gun back? Come on in. I'll get it for you." She turns and exits stage right. Now Max Cherry (Robert Forster), bail bondsman, steps through the door and, thus, into the frame. He closes the door behind him.

Background: the previous night Max picked up Jackie at jail after Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) bailed her out. Fearing for her life, Jackie stealthily thieved Max's handgun from his glove apartment to fend off Ordell's murderous advances.

The camera angle switches and we see Max straight on. He examines the house. He crosses his arms. He looks no-nonsense. We've seen this scene, right? We've seen it a thousand times. He's a gruff guy just doing his job who just wants his gun back who doesn't have time for this B.S. That's the expectation.

Jackie enters with the gun. "Max, I am so sorry about this," she starts. "I was afraid to ask to borrow it. I was afraid you'd say no. I mean, you'd have to." She hands him the gun. He takes it. He holsters it. Jackie says everything she says in a lightly flirtatious manner, trying to slither her way off the hook. Max STILL looks no-nonsense, like he's not going to let her slither her way off the hook. So Jackie tries another approach: "Want some coffee?"

Max says: "If you're having some." Wait, wait, wait. The way he says it is so cordial. Is this, like, a brunch date or something? What's going on?

She invites him in and offers him a seat as she goes to make the coffee in her kitchen. Max wonders "Did you get a chance to use it?" But he doesn't say it suspiciously or angrily. He really wonders. "I felt a lot safer having it," she replies.

Max: "Would you care to hang on to it for awhile? It wouldn't be legal but if it makes you feel better, I guess."
Jackie: "Thanks. But I got one now."
Max: "You went out this morning and bought a gun?"
Jackie: "Well, let's say I got one now, okay?"

Jackie goes to her record player and her thick collection of LPs. She puts on The Delfonics (remember, this is a Q.T. film). She and he banter a bit about the CD revolution (remember, this is 1997) and how Jackie has resisted it. The music momentarily transports Jackie away from her problems......but only momentarily.

The first half of the discussion that follows is standard fare for a heist picture. You know, how Jackie can scam both Ordell and the A.T.F. into getting Ordell's half a million bucks up from Cabo San Lucas - which is where Jackie flies for her job as an airline attendant - and into the country and manage to keep all for herself without landing herself back in jail or winding up dead by Ordell's hand. This, however, is just verbal foreplay, building up to the real intent of the sequence.

Jackie: "Well, I ain’t going back to jail, and I ain’t doing that probation thing again." (Pause.) "Max, how do you feel about getting old?"
Max: "You’re not old. You look great."
Jackie: "No, I’m asking you how do you feel about getting old. Doesn’t it bother you?"
Max: "It's not really something I think about. I guess I got sensitive about my hair a few years ago. It started falling out, so I did something about it."
Jackie: "How’d you feel about that?" 
Max: "I feel fine with it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have done it. I did it to feel better about myself, and, you know, I do. I look in the mirror. Looks like me."               
Jackie: "Yeah, but its different for men."
Max: "You know, I can’t really feel too sorry for you in this department. I bet that, except for possibly an afro, you look exactly the way you did at twenty-nine."
Jackie: "Well, my ass ain’t the same."
Max: "Bigger?"
Max: "Yeah."
Max: "Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Something else worry you?"
Jackie: "I always feel like I’m starting over. How many bonds you said you wrote?"
Max: "Fifteen-thousand."
Jackie: "Is that a lot?"
Max: "That's plenty."
Jackie: "Well, I’ve flown over seven million miles and I’ve been waiting on people for twenty years. Then after my bust, the best job I could get was with Cabo Air. Which is the worst job you can get in this industry. You know I make sixteen-thousand a year, plus retirement benefits that ain’t worth a damn. And with this arrest hanging over my head, Max, I’m scared. And if I lose this job, I gotta start all over again. And I ain’t got nothing to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that shit is more scary than Ordell."

The first time I saw this film I was barely twenty. I saw it, plainly, as a heist picture as made by the guy fresh off "Pulp Fiction." That's how everyone saw it - strike that! That's how everyone my age, or around my age, saw it. At the time of its release I was working as a lowly movie theater grunt and I picked up an extra shift at the Westwood 6 (may she rest in peace) which was showing "Jackie Brown" and I remember another grunt around my age saying to me that he did not like the film. And he did not like it because he kept expecting "some big twist" that never arrived.

Except it did arrive. The twist is this scene. "Jackie Brown" is not a heist film. "Jackie Brown" is a film about aging that uses the heist for cover. I didn't understand then.

I do now.