Slow Fuse, Fast Blood

After Death Proof, I kept thinking about feet. Specifically those bare legs dangling from a car window, toes catching highway wind, an image that shouldn’t be as erotic as it is—and Tarantino knows exactly what he’s doing when he frames it that way. The man has a foot thing, famously, and he’s never tried to hide it. What’s interesting is how that particular obsession fits so neatly into a broader aesthetic: the fetishization of surfaces, textures, objects. The way a foot gets a close-up that holds longer than it should. The way a briefcase glows. The way a burger gets eaten.

You either love Quentin Tarantino or you want him gone. His films live somewhere between Kung Fu cinema, grindhouse exploitation, and spaghetti westerns—genres he didn’t invent but clearly loves more than their original creators did. He packs that love in so dense it sometimes curdles. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds—each one has his fingerprints all over it, not just stylistically but structurally. The long, slow, circular conversations that build like a pressure cooker before the lid blows off and suddenly there’s blood on the walls and someone’s screaming and you realize the whole quiet first act was just the fuse.

Kill Bill made me want to hold a sword. Not metaphorically—actually hold one, feel the weight of it. That’s the Tarantino effect: the films colonize your fantasy life. After Natural Born Killers—which he wrote but Oliver Stone directed—I stayed in for a few days out of mild self-preservation. That’s probably normal.

Someone named Joel Walden put together a video tribute to him, and it’s as sharp as you’d hope. A reminder that this is a body of work built from an almost embarrassing amount of love—love for cinema, for genre, for the specific pleasure of a scene that takes its time. That patience is unfashionable now. I miss it every time I watch something that cuts before anything has had room to breathe.