Master of the ultraviolent Quentin Tarantino has shocked film audiences around the world since 1992 with accomplishments such as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 – 2. His most recent masterwork, Inglorious Bastards, is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Tarantino with nominations for best director and screenplay.
During a Feb. 11 interview with Tarantino, Larry King called it his favorite film of the year and that Tarantino “had his vote” for best director. Tarantino responded with his expectation that Kathryn Bigelow would win for The Hurt Locker. Over the last 18 years, Tarantino has produced “the cinema of cool” with his electric dialogue and unpredictable storytelling with a touch of amusing never-ending violence.
Along with the announced Kill Bill: Vol. 3 to hit theaters in 2014 and having produced Robert Rodriguez’s Machete scheduled for April 16, Tarantino has also mentioned the idea of a future Western project. Rather than actually having it in the West, he plans on having the story occur in south Texas during the slavery era, a subject that many people are afraid to deal with. He mentioned to The New York Daily News that it’s going to be an exciting adventure rather than “a ponderous history lesson of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad.” He’s going to call this film a “Southern.”
This will most definitely be a huge hit for Tarantino fans and fans of the Western genre. Not only for the combination of those two, but Tarantino also has a passionate love for film and for the spaghetti western genre in particular, as his favorite film of all time is Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Tarantino loves to pay homage to this fantastic film by using the epic soundtrack for scenes in his own movies to create a sense of contempt, suspicion or tension for upcoming atrocities. Other than his love for the Western genre, he also has some acting experience in acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike’s 2007 film, Sukiyaki Western Django, where he amusingly played the only white man named “Piringo” in an alternative Japanese universe of 19th-century Nevada.
It is unclear whether Tarantino is writing his upcoming “Southern” now or if it’s just in the idea stage, but more information will surface in time. With all the elements to Tarantino’s repertoire in the respect of the Western genre, it is almost certain he will make the “Southern” a new genre in and of itself that, with a few films, could possibly be referenced as much as the spaghetti western or the Western.
The 82nd Annual Academy Awards has a promising selection of nine Best Picture nominees other then Inglorious Bastards. These are the most nominations since 1943, when Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca was nominated for eight Academy Awards.
