The 'worrisome trends' that you list are neither worrisome or even trends. Cronyism? It's seems it's only cronyism when you don't like the result. For example, was putting Rodrigueuz score on KB2 cronyism? Or a furthering of their collaborative friendship? Next you say 'essentially' for no reason, 'inert narratives' is is an oxymoron and 'substandard dialogue' is opinion. I liked the dialogue in 'Death Proof'. The next point is laughably overstated and wrong: 'a debilitating creative inhibition created by the strictures of the typical commercial film running time'. Say what? Creative inhibition? From Tarantino?! And you include Death Proof in this analysis? How was this film 'inhibited' may I ask? As for the use of music – his music selection has always been inspired. It may not be quite so in IB, but I have yet to see it. As for the criticism of Richardson, this really hammers home that you DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. He is famous for the variety of techniques he uses. Have you seen 'Eight Men Out'? This is exactly why Tarantino hires him, because (you may have noticed) Tarantino uses a variety of styles in each of his movies. I mean, c'mon, saying "misplaced loyalty to technical staff who aren't really with the program" is just idiotic.

Anyway I could go on (and on) but I won't. It just annoys me when people write such garbage in such a pompous way and think they're clever. But then this is the internet…

Take as an example the look of the recent films. Richardson is generally a good DP, but was his extreme one-overhead-light-source look appropriate to KB, especially the more spaghetti oriented part two? Tarantino was the cinematographer of Death Proof, and that film had the sun washed look appropriate for a drive in movie imitation found in Reservoir Dogs, shot by Andrzej Sekula, a look that Tarantino was carefully recreating from the blaxploitation and other outsider films he was emulating. IB is a “spaghetti war film,” and Richardson is not the sort of person destined to recreate the look of Castellari’s Inglorious Bastards (if that’s what Tarantino wanted to do).

Tarantino is famous for his signature long and intricate dialogue sequences. But as of Death Proof, these days they are just long. It was clear what he was trying to do in that film: make the viewer intimate with both sets of girls so that their deaths or potential deaths would mean something, but also, and more important, so the viewer could see the moral difference between the vain and selfish girls of the first half and the more congenial and generous girls of the second part. The girls of the first part did not earn, in Tarantino’s moral universe, the right to survive. Unfortunately, the banality of their personalities is not only intentional but too successful. It skews the film off the rails in favor of the pursuit of a larger (and theoretically interesting) framing or structural device. Paradoxically, these sorts of scenes and other parts of his scripts might be better if he made them longer, as you suggest, in a television format when he wasn’t forced to impose some compression on his imagination.

I’m worried that the tricks are getting tired. For example, Rod Taylor is in the film partly because he is in the great Dark of the Sun, a superb example of the mission film (with an excellent score by Jacques Loussier that Tarantino perhaps should have chosen to emulate). But now it has become a marketing trick, the use of a near-forgotten actor whose career is revitalized by contact with Tarantino’s golden touch (the equivalent of the “Colbert Bump”?).

But maybe the film will grow on people after the full force of the promotional-industrial complex has spent itself and one can watch the movie without that sense of urgency.

I appreciate the 26-minute conversation at the beginning on the page, but man, onscreen it hardly builds the tension it should. He won’t touch it cause he thinks its masterful, but that sequence needs a new edit or some deep cuts.