Filmmaker, screenwriter and author Quentin Tarantino stopped by realtime Friday night to talk to Bill Maher about his new book, speculation in the cinemaappears on Tuesday.
Tarantino watched a lot of challenging movies as a young kid, he admitted, and sometimes saw subjects he didn’t quite understand, like a certain infamous Ned Beatty rape scene liberation.
Of that scene, Tarantino said, “I see it in 1973, so I’m about nine,” he said. Tarantino admitted that he knew nothing about bestiality, but knew that Beatty was subdued because everyone in the schoolyard was subdued to some degree.
“I’m not sure what the lesson here is,” Maher joked.
Tarantino got back to his point about young viewers of sophisticated films. “There will be some things that are beyond her head,” he said. But like him, “I got the gist.”
That was true while watching the Jim Brown and Raquel Welch film 100 rifles. He was taken to a theater with an all-black audience by his mother’s boyfriend, Tarantino recalled. The crowd was loud for the opening film, The bus is coming, yells at the screen. “The first time I heard ‘suck my dick,’ there was someone in the audience,” Tarantino said. Captivated by the raw energy and fun of the moment, Tarantino himself eventually spouted a similar epithet.
Maher reminded him, “If you’re promoting the book on the ‘Today’ show, don’t tell those stories.”
but 100 rifles stimulated something in young Tarantino. “Being taken to a Jim Brown movie in an all-black theater was the manliest experience I’ve ever had.”
This moment shaped him. “Whether as a film consumer or creating films for an audience, I’m trying to recreate that goal of a Jim Brown film on a Saturday night in 1972.”
Gillian Tett, the US Editor-in-Chief, joined Maher in the panel discussion financial times and author of Anthro-Vision: A New Way of Seeing Business and Life and Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Unstoppable Us Volume 1: How Humans Conquered the World
The discussion was a civilized conversation with plenty of chatter about how people and politics are being warped and wooed by social media and technology.
“Something is broken in the information system,” Harari said. “People can no longer converse and agree on the most basic facts.”
Tett argued that such a state is the product of the ability to program one’s own world, whether through music or social media.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter won’t necessarily help, Tett said. She said Musk is “more and more godlike and moody.”
Harari was also skeptical. “(Musk’s) view is that it’s the town square. It is not. Twitter is more of a gladiatorial arena.”
Finally, in his “New Rules” editorial, Maher blasted the rants at BuzzFeed and other publications for constantly whining about “banned” Halloween costumes.
“If Halloween is too much for your fragile sensibilities and you’re worried about seeing something on the banned costumes list, stay the fuck home,” Maher said, adding, “I’m so sick of a Handful of emotional bleeders it tells us what not to do on Halloween.”
On the list of banned costumes: Queen Elilzabeth (“too soon”), no sexy schoolgirls, no playboy bunnies, can’t dress up as Elvis, and “don’t even think about characters outside your race.”
Worse, “no homeless person” which eliminates the “default costume of every child in the story”. No drag queens either, “because if kids want to see drag queens, they can go to story time.”
Also banned: No Putin, no Trump, no Johnny Depp, especially no Amber Heard (“no shit”) and nothing related to vaccines and monkeypox.
“Listen to me,” Maher said, addressing an imaginary audience of teenagers. “I’m your last link to fun.” He encouraged mixing and matching. “Making the Queen shit in Johnny’s bed, making Will Smith bang a tramp, making Kevin Spacey bang a mariachi band. Jeffrey Dahmer is the perfect Halloween costume.
Ironically, it’s Gen Z who’s being snubbed about it. “Your parents protected you, and now you’re these assholes. Gen Z is the one telling you to get off my lawn.”