This Friday, Quentin Tarantino essentially arrives to save the summer from the sequel (Transformers), the retread (Star Trek, doing its own lazy merge of Lucas and QT) and the Pixar repeat cycle (apt name: UP!). The only practicing voodoo artist of cinema history, QT is an allusionist of wildest merit, his films are the only divergence in town from the form-shifting of Lynch, Kubrick and Lucas. He laughs and mocks 60's visual existentialists like Antonioni and embraces the more animal pulses of Bava, Yakuza, Blaxploitation, fake snuff, and  B-teen camp. His toil is so good it inspires many, many lesser retreads (Three Days in the Valley) and even converts items like once-linear, rank L.A. sentimentalism like Crash into an Oscar-winner simply by forcing Haggis (out of jealousy?) to copy the plot-structure of Pulp Fiction. It's the same way Minghella scored his Oscar by copying Lean's technique inside The English Patient. Cheap Tricks. Even his two after-thought films are masterpieces (Jackie Brown and Death Proof). Tarantino takes an Elmore Leonard book and manufactures a Hollywood actor's insurrection: he subjecates the then-current acting elite (DeNiro, Fonda, Keaton, Jackson) as low-life has-beens or pussies that can barely keep their pants on and in their place he canonizes Robert Forster and Pam Grier who outwit and outclass them, Jackie Brown is a contained revolt against the acting nomenclature of the nineties (he even demonstrates: he has Samuel L. Jackson kill his young competition for lead when he annihilates Chris Tucker in a trunk, and in succession go the other eliters). QT is a deceptive genie, reviewers, film-historians and deep fans can troll the VHS bins for obscure sources he's encyclopped, but his films are flooded with inherent questions left unasked, unanswered and unsaid. His trick is to make you think you know the film by knowing its references, which he mutates anyway to make the scent murkier. A myth is at the core of each film and it is orbited by these referenced characters and sequences (even costumes and props) to keep hidden a splinter of plot that no one can answer, and sometimes it remains unanswered across films. Like Lynch, who ends some films with the first shot of his next film (the ocean of Dune to the blue velvet of Blue Velvet/the roads of Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mullholland Drive) , QT launches his films with pre-existing characters in forms of identity flow. Mia Wallace, who wins the dance contest of Pulp Fiction, mentions her appearance in an unaired Pilot for a show called Fox Force Five, appears suddenly in FFF's mutation, The Deadly Viper's of Kill Bill, herself now a renegade formerly under the Viper's leader's control: a television guru from Kung Fu, while a variety of TV actor's, foreign exploitation stars, and feature film actors fight for screen time, KB is one of the most insidiously ingenious medium battles, literally a TV versus Film war, with The Bride (a film character herself almost birth-wedded to a TV action anti-hero, Carradine playing Grasshopper to a tee) mowing down a Television concept and anyone in her way. That she and the daughter of this genre-union watch TV giggling as a post-script to The Bride's literally breaking Bill's heart with a move from a film-hero (Pai Mei's five-finger exploding heart technique: Fox Force Five) tells you QT has all his i's dotted. She's wearing the outfit of Bruce Lee's, himself denied the Kung Fu role by ABC, and again: film avenges a television slight. The complexities of KB are ripe for a lengthy breakdown later, but some are too good to be ignored now. Watch, for example, how color is introduced in KB. Like Pulp Fiction, QT isolates his world's color use to suggest fantasy/time travel (the Jack Rabbit Slim's), in KB, The Bride brings color, the instructors Hanzo and Pai Mei are both Black and White. The paired dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction are evolved into the ultimate solo: the House of Blue Leaves massacre (notice the floor from Fever evolved, people even dance on it before the blood flows) ends with the Bride and O-Ren Ishii's paired sabre dance.

Probably QT's most enduring taunt is the ending of Pulp Fiction (which he hides by ending the film in the past of the film with Vincent Vega still alive) and the fixation on Tony "Rocky Horror"'s inglorious ending off screen. What QT is asking the audience unconsciously to do is replace Tony "Rocky Horror" with Vincent Vega and explain to future sewing circles the reason for Vincent's demise since Marcellus must hide it in the same kind of myth. It's one of the more unusual and hidden of unanswered questions since the film is about another mythical rationale for a very real act. How can we tell? The name of the subject of the myth is Tony "Rocky Horror", an in-joke: Travolta's film role QT channel's in PF is Tony Manero's (Saturday Night Fever) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a film released into midnights across America the same year. QT shows us a logical progression (Mia Wallace's dance contest evening, Vincent Vega's death, Butch's exoneration) to explain a myth (Tony "Rocky Horror"'s demise) that parallels the film. This is something the New Wave could never have achieved. An earlier log entry explores this.