2. Butt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkr9LNyaNJQ Quentin Tarantino's latest meltdown is destined to become his best-known, what with the huge amount of media attention that it's attracted already in these "movies make people shoot other people" times. This little confrontation occurred during the press rounds for the director's latest film, spaghetti western homage Django Unchained, on Channel 4's news program in the UK. What starts as a relatively gentle conversation about slavery soon erupts into a bizarre explosion when news anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy asks Tarantino: "Why are you so sure that there's no link between enjoying movie violence and enjoying real violence?" Tarantino seems instantly agitated by the fact that he's having to answer a question he's probably answered a zillion times over the course of his career and leaps to his own defence: "I'm not biting. I refuse your question." He then adds: "I'm not your slave and you're not my master," presumably because he had made the effort to turn up and wanted to promote his movie. A bewildered Krishnan tries to change the subject to something Jamie Foxx said, to which Tarantino - still peeved - tells the anchor to ask Jamie Foxx about instead. Tarantino looks genuinely furious for a while afterwards, and at one point a small fire seems to light in his very eyeballs. It all ends unhappily, with the director stating the now meme-worthy classic: "I'm shutting your butt down." And make no mistake: Krishan's butt was most definitely shut down. Was It Justified? On one hand, Tarantino doesn't seem to realise that he's on a news program and not a film program, and the questions that Krishnan asks him are extremely typical of that format. Krishnan himself handles the whole thing surprisingly well, and given a time machine, he probably wouldn't go back and change his line of questioning: he's more famous than ever! As a filmmaker, Tarantino doesn't have to talk about anything he doesn't want to, but if he's keen to get a slavery dialogue going, he probably should've just stated his opinion about the violence and moved on. We all know his position on movie violence (he thinks the real issue is gun control and mental health, and I agree), but it might've been better to have just said that instead of shutting butts down. Now he kind of looks nuts, despite the fact that he's pretty much in the right. What else is there to say on the matter? Cue Miserlou.