Can Tarantino Revive Himself?
He brought back Travolta. He revived Pam Grier. Can he resuscitate himself?Thats the question that Slate is asking. Everybody is sooo concerned for poor Quentin - as one guy said in the comments section of another article on this site - its like everybody thinks he was a cute boyband back in the mid 1990's, and now his audience has outgrown him.
Now, for the first time in his wunderkind career—at 40, he's actually past the wunderkind stage—Tarantino is facing real questions about his skill as a writer and a director. Like: After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix movies, will yet another kung fu movie choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping seem tired?There is one great little tidbit that I didn't know about Quentin in this article - his name was made up by his mother (first and last).
Seventeen-year-old Connie Zastoupil christened her infant son in 1963 by mixing high art with low and then infusing the blend with an arrogant, here-he-is-and-he'll-change-the-world bravado. "I wanted a name that would fill up the entire screen," she told Vanity Fair in 1994. "A multisyllable name: Quen-tin Ta-ran-ti-no." His first name was lifted from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, but it was also inspired by the Burt Reynolds character, Quint, from Gunsmoke. And his last name? She made it up. It just sounded cool.
