If you’ve ever felt bad about loving "low-brow" cinema or worried that your script was too weird for the mainstream, let Quentin Tarantino be your guide.
The filmmaker recently appeared on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast to drop his personal list of the best films of the 21st century.
We only have 11-20 now, so we'll look at them and eagerly wait for him to release his top 10.
As always with QT, the list is a masterclass in genre appreciation, unpretentious film criticism, and a reminder that filmmaking rules are meant to be broken.
Let's dive in.
Tarantino's Best Films of the 21st Century
'Moneyball'
Credit: Sony
We're still waiting for Tarantino's top 10, but this is his ranking of 11-20. I included a few quotes from him about some of the tiles as well.
11. Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku)
12. Big Bad Wolves (Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado)
“This has got a fantastic script and a similar storyline to Prisoners […] they handle it with guts and balls — you know the American movie wouldn’t do that […]”
13. Jackass: The Movie (Jeff Tremaine)
“I laughed the most at these last 20 years. I don’t remember laughing beginning to the end like this since Richard Pryor… As I was making ‘Kill Bill’ I thought this movie was so fucking funny I had to show it to the crew, so we found a print, and we watched the movie and just died.”
14. School of Rock (Richard Linklater)
15. The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson)
“I was laughing a lot during the movie. Not because we were trying to be perverse, laughing at Jesus getting fucked up — extreme violence is just funny to me — and when you go so far beyond extremity, it just gets funnier and funnier. We were just groaning and laughing at how fcked up this was […] Mel did a tremendous directorial job. He put me in that time period. I talked to Mel Gibson about this and he looked at me like I was a fucking nut.”
16. The Devil's Rejects (Rob Zombie)
"This rough Peckinpah–cowboy–Manson thing [from Zombie] — that voice didn't really exist before [in House of 1000 Corpses], and he refined that voice with this movie […] Peckinpah wasn't part of horror before this. He melded it with sick hillbillies, and it's become a thing now. You can recognize it across the street, but that didn't exist before."
17. Chocolate (Prachya Pinkaew)
18. Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
19. Cabin Fever (Eli Roth)
“There’s something so charming. Eli’s sense of humor, sense of gore — it just really, really works. People kind of forget how tense it is in the first half because it gets so genuinely funny in the last 20 minutes […] Hostel might be his best movie, but this is my favorite.”
20. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg)
“This is the one where Steven shows he still has it. I don’t think Scorsese has made a film this exciting [this century]. It revitalized him […] I couldn’t believe I liked the lead [Ansel Elgort] as I didn’t like him in anything else”
Summing It All Up
Tarantino's list is all over the place and is also a lot of fun. I love all the fun picks he has and his reasoning behind some of the movies.
There are a few on here I haven't seen, and I'm excited to rectify that.
Be sure to keep an eye out for the rest of his list!
Let me know what you think in the comments.
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