A betrayal...

By Matt Holmes / June 24, 2011

Quentin Tarantino keeps hinting that once he has given up directing he will become a writer, not just of epic character-driven, narrative-bending novels but also of film criticism. I imagine that one day we will see him host his own kind of Siskel & Ebert sydincated movie talk show. And he would be damn good at it too. Right now, I'm putting my hat in the ring to be the co-host of Holmes & Tarantino: At The Movies! As part of a Sky Movies "take over" that Quentin did to promote Inglourious Basterds last month, the always game director filmed an introduction/analysis of eight films he wanted to screen for the channel, the most passionate being his take on Danny Boyle's 2007 sci-fi offering Sunshine. His review is 1000000% accurate and I agree with every damn word of it. Even to what he calls "a betrayal" of a third act which in my original review, I opted to use the word "sickening" instead.

From my 08.04.07 review...

There is a moment 2/3rd's into the film, where you are completely in the hands of the storytelling masters and the tale they have crafted when BOOM... like the thundering Titanic after it hit the iceberg, the movie quickly, without any kind of logic, sinks and fumbles into an afterthought. It's great ideas laid to bury under the surface. I was left cringing by the creative decisions in the final 30 minutes and personally, I felt rather sick, as a movie I thought was on it's way to being a classic Science Fiction movie along the same lines as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, completely committed cinematic suicide and fell to the bottom gutter depths of a horror/slasher movie in space. It went from Kubrick like visuals to Paul W.S. Anderson's stupidity in a matter of seconds, as it changed from wanting to be 2001: A Space Odyseey to Event Horizon. Why the film was allowed to make such a stunningly stupid transition is the only thing I kept asking myself as I walked out of the cinema. Sunshine ended up forgetting about the plot and the interesting characters they had setup started making decisions that were completely out of the context Boyle had formed or even worse they were just discarded pretty much altogether.

You can see Tarantino review There Will Be Blood, Taxi Driver, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, his own movie Death Proof and apparantely he reviewed Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Psycho... but that one I can't find on Youtube.