The 7 best scenes that Quentin Tarantino has ever directed
Miramax
Quentin Tarantino’s films are famous for their non-linear narratives, for how they jump around in time like a skipping DVD, sometimes even willing their ways into alternate histories. And yet, despite all of their twisty plotting, his movies are increasingly defined by — and remembered for — self-contained scenes that stretch to the breaking point and seem to become iconic even as you’re first watching them. From the ingeniously knotted “Pulp Fiction” to the bifurcated “Death Proof”; from the sprawling “Kill Bill” (which is divided into 10 discrete chapters), to the snowbound “The Hateful Eight” (which limits itself to two locations and finds Tarantino challenging himself to hold a single note of suspense for hours at a time), these epic stories are shaped around chatty, taut, and indelible sequences that simmer with the potential for sudden acts of violence.
In honor of the filmmaker’s 54th birthday (and with a humble tip of our hats to his late, great editor, Sally Menke), we’re offering our list of the seven best scenes that Quentin Tarantino ever directed. Not every one of his films managed to earn a spot — “Reservoir Dogs” may have been a watershed moment for American indie cinema, but it endures as more of a (particularly blood-soaked) dry run for bigger things to come, while the climactic ass-beating at the end of “Death Proof” just narrowly missed the cut — but these glorious excerpts provide a telling cross-section of what makes Tarantino’s movies cohere into so much more than the sum of their influences.
7. The Candyland Massacre (“Django Unchained”)
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The Candyland Massacre is probably not the reason why “Django Unchained” earned Tarantino his second Academy Award for Best Screenplay, but… well, maybe it is. The immensely cathartic shootout, an orgasmic release that comes after almost two full hours of build-up, is hardly the most nuanced sequence that Tarantino has ever devised, but he’s never made anything that feels this good. It arrives after a deliciously twisted dinner scene, in which Django gets a polite phrenology lesson from the sadistic slaveowner who’s keeping his wife. Watching our soft-spoken hero endure yet another denigration, it starts to seem as though the title of Tarantino’s film is a bit of an empty promise, and that the chains may never come off. Of course, that’s just what Tarantino wants you to think — he’s waiting for the moment when your nerves are stretched to the breaking point, and then he’s waiting for a little while longer after that. He’s got all day, and he’s got the confidence (or the ego) to know that audiences enjoy his cooking too much to leave before dessert.
And then it happens, slowly at first and then in cartoonish eruptions of blood. Turning the foyer of a house into a self-contained civil war (complete with gunshots that land with cannon splashes), Tarantino funnels centuries of racist violence through a kaleidoscope of the resilient black culture that’s survived it, giving Django his revenge as Tupac and James Brown cheer him on from heaven. It’s so satisfying, so cathartic, that even the white nationalists who are turning this damn whole country into Candyland might catch themselves cheering.
6. The House of Blue Leaves (“Kill Bill”)
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The most unabashedly fetishistic film he’s ever made — maybe one of the most unabashedly fetishistic films that anyone has ever made — “Kill Bill” is a lovingly pornographic orgy in which all of Tarantino’s favorite things get together and fuck each other to death with the fatal specificity of a serial killer. In other words, it’s heaven. The “Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves” sequence, in which Uma Thurman’s avenging angel slips into a Tokyo nightclub and makes a meaty stew from the entrails of different national cinemas, is the work of a filmmaker who’s woken up into a lucid dream. Combining Japanese rockabilly, Shaw Brothers fisticuffs, a Kurosawa-inspired sword duel, an overt nod to “Battle Royale,” some of fight master Yuen Woo-ping’s finest choreography, and an unexpected spanking, this is Tarantino’s Fellini moment, and he enjoys every second of it.
5. Operation Kino (“Inglourious Basterds”)
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They kill Hitler. You didn’t think they were going to, but they did.
Art doesn’t get more viscerally thrilling than this.
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