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I honestly have nothing egregiously against Quentin Tarantino, but I feel like every time I buy into a new venture of his I honestly come away with the reaction that he's a lot shallower and less insightful of a personality than he's famously given credit for. Cinema Speculation, his latest one, and very first non-fiction book, is far less disappointing than Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: The Novel, and at the same time only feels slightly inconsequential instead of completely pointless.

This book is totally fine, easy to read, and its greatest sin is that I just found it to be kind of empty and pedantic. The point of it is, obviously: read Quentin Tarantino, with the complete lack of an editor ramble aimlessly about movies, and if you loved that about it, that is great. A more definitive point than just being a vague collection of aimless musings about movies of the New Hollywood period (and also Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse thrown in, for some reason) would really have made this a more worthwhile, intelligent, and purposeful venture, though.

QT is obviously fun to listen to talk about movies (I subscribe to his freaking podcast, after all) but the more I indulge him as a personality, the more I find his opinions to be pretty shallow and sometimes botheringly self-indulgently biased. His dissertative writings in Cinema Speculation boil down pretty much to three things: completely obvious and already historically overused conclusions (guys, did you know that Bullitt is a movie that works completely on Steve McQueen's cool instead of a coherent plot?), edgelord contrarian opinions (aw, how sweet that you think Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy is "a piece of crap"; your thoughts are very cool and unique, Mr. Tarantino!), and confusing psychoanalysations of famous directors based on what QT wants desperately to believe (the notion that Brian De Palma actually doesn't care about thrillers as a genre or that Martin Scorsese has been lying for decades about his intentions of the climax Taxi Driver is so hilarious that it's almost sad that he really believes either of them).

But like I said (and will probably say about everything of his in the future), if you like him, I'm glad this book was for you. And honestly, maybe I'll be honest and say I was misleading myself when I said at the start that I have nothing egregiously against Quentin Tarantino � maybe I do totally disagree with his assertion that transgression and impact are the greatest points of cinema, instead of craft and intellect. Maybe I've always disliked that he lionizes some of the worse pieces of crap in cinematic history while excruciatingly nitpicking some of its greatest works of art at the exact same time.