Quentin Tarantino needs to stop criticizing movies and start making them again | Quentin Tarantino

Has Quentin Tarantino put Paul Dano in the alpha league of the world’s most beloved and admired film actors?

His latest insults targeting Dano have sparked a torrent of defensive praise, publicly endorsed by Daniel Day-Lewis, Dano’s costar in “There Will Be Blood.” But was Tarantino’s statement just a fluffy threat? Will he end up casting Dano in his next film — a U-turn like Donald Trump did to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after he threatened him with nuclear war? Or are we witnessing a kind of midlife emotional crisis at the heart of one of the most brilliant directors of his generation? I speak as a superfan with reservations.

In his latest audio interview with legendary controversial author Bret Easton Ellis – and thus perhaps in the mood to provoke and incite épater Les Bourgeois This is no criticism – Tarantino revealed the 20 best films of the 21st century. When asked why Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood only ranked fifth, Tarantino declared Dano to be the problem: “[Dano] Weak sauce, man. “He’s the weak sister… He’s a weak, weak, uninteresting man.”

Hmm. This is not an accurate assessment of Dano. But it’s possible that Tarantino’s feelings about Anderson are more complicated than that anyway.

The first half of his selections are an almost ostentatiously ordinary, urban list from Letterboxd, in reverse order: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Tony Scott’s Unstoppable, David Fincher’s Zodiac, PTA’s There Will Be Blood, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, Sofia Coppola’s Lost. Translation, Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 and Ridley Scott’s wartime action thriller Black Hawk Down are at the top. Okay, okay. No one should patronize a cinephile like Tarantino by dismissing this selection as populist – almost all of them are absolutely brilliant, though I’m puzzled by the inclusion of Tony Scott’s terrible Unstoppable.

Is Tarantino preying on naysayers by including Woody Allen? I would choose Allen’s Blue Jasmine. I’m not quite as keen on Miller’s Mad Max revival as the others, but they’re certainly really good, and Scott’s Black Hawk Down is a very impressive two-hour-plus sequence – but please, Scott’s Gladiator is definitely a better film, released in 2000, and only a pedant would say this isn’t 21st century. As for the others: yes, very cool – and in patriotic terms, it’s nice to see Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, which in the early 2000s revived the British film industry’s self-esteem.

It’s certainly not the obscure choice you might expect, certainly from reading Tarantino’s brilliant memoir Cinema Speculation, for example.

The most obscure titles (and non-English-language titles) are in the 10 below, in reverse order from 20 to 11: West Side Story by Steven Spielberg, Cabin Fever by Eli Roth, Moneyball by Bennett Miller, Chocolate Prachya Pinkaew, The Devil’s Rejects by Rob Zombie, The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, School of Rock by Richard Linklater, Jeff. Tremaine’s Donkey: The Movie, Aharon Keshalis and the Big Bad Wolves of Navot Babushado, and Kenji Fukasaku Battle Royale.

This appears to be the QT we know and love. There’s Fukasoku’s survival masterpiece Battle Royale – which Tarantino correctly says was hijacked by the Hunger Games franchise – the Thai martial arts action film Chocolate and the Israeli horror film Big Bad Wolves. I agree with Tarantino that Spielberg’s West Side Story is great (although here Tarantino is also a bit salty about the casting: “I couldn’t believe I liked the lead.” [Ansel Elgort] Because I didn’t like him in anything else.” I like his praise of Brad Pitt’s movie-star mystique in Moneyball, though Pitt is much better in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’m not a fan of Roth’s Cabin Fever or the boring Devil’s Rejects of Zombie, and Gibson’s Passion is an unholy turkey fit only for the culture wars. Linklater’s School of Rock is great fun, but only the smug, inverted pose Only Twisted could put that out there and not Linklater’s true masterpiece, Boyhood.

But we go back to Paul Thomas Anderson and there will be blood; Tarantino wouldn’t be humane if he wasn’t aware of the PTA’s status as a competitor and of Anderson’s status as a filmmaker who seems to be creating more fluent and productive work than Tarantino at the moment, and he might have picked a tiff with Dano in the moment just to take the PTA down a few pegs.

Tarantino recently said that his next, and perhaps last, film will be a project called The Movie Critic — which has now reportedly been shelved — inspired by the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas, whom Tarantino idolized when he was young: the man entrusted with the task of making the popcorn that mainstream critics wrinkled their noses at. This interesting and entertaining list, in which commercialism and cinephilia form a complex mixture, may in fact constitute the performance of the ‘film critic’ that his abandoned film would have been.

How does Tarantino see himself now? Does he think he has one major masterpiece left in him? I think it does. Maybe more than one. He said he didn’t want to continue with the past 10 films, having made nine of them so far, and said a great master like Don Siegel should have quit while he was ahead of Escape from Alcatraz in 1979.

But it’s time for QT to stop sulking in his tent, and stop making irrelevant statements on the podcast. Tarantino came up with this ten-movie idea; Sure he can’t stop at nine films, but that’s a tremendous amount of pressure on himself. This 10-something has paralyzed him to no avail, and his Dano outburst is just a symptom of that. My prediction is that Tarantino will turn to an adaptation, his first since Jackie Brown: he will find a novel and charge the pulp with shock and flair. And Paul Dano will be in it.