I’m okay with people disliking Quentin Tarantino’s movies. I have no problem with those who find him annoying as a person. His films aren’t for everyone.

But those who call him talentless? These I have a major issue with.

It may be tempting to say that all Tarantino does is cut and paste old films into fan-wankery collages – he is in effect a collage artist, and you can watch almost any scene in any of his films and point to an original he’s ripping off – most likely some forgotten ’70s B movie of dubious taste. But like all the most compelling postmodernists, Tarantino knows that there is nothing new under the sun… except in the recombination of old things. Kill Bill, for instance, is a collection of hommages, clichés, parodies, pastiches, but Tarantino pulls all these disparate bits together in a way that invigorates them. I came out of both volumes of his worship at the feet of Uma Thurman feeling energised in ways that few other films have managed.

Is Tarantino self-indulgent? Definitely. But more than almost any director who can be accused of this, he’s also usually in great control of his material. The films are more tightly constructed than is usually acknowledged, in ways that make it easy for audiences to underestimate their sheer formal accomplishment. Yet, in spite of this, the films breathe freely.

Death Proof was much maligned when it came out, and it’s perhaps Tarantino’s most self-indulgent film. Its first half is misogynist, its characters unlikeable, its humour sadistic and misanthropic. But it’s almost a textbook case of postmodern pastiche vs. parody. Again, I fully respect people who dislike or even hate what Tarantino does, but he does it oh so well: the second part of Death Proof desconstructs the male sex-and-death fantasy of the first half. Stuntman Mike’s wet dream of fucking over sexy but annoying chicks with his car (and yes, sometimes a dick extension on wheels is not just a cigar) is turned on its head when the girls of the second half fight back. And god, is it exhilarating to watch as they turn the tables on Kurt Russell’s leathery prick of a man.

And then the ending comes. And it feels like Tarantino ran out of ideas and the script just read: “And then they beat the shit out of him.”

That they do, indeed. But, as so often in Tarantino, the rewarding bits aren’t the bursts of violence – his reputation of wall-to-wall, bloody violence is undeserved, but he likes to punctuate his films with bursts of it -, it’s the conversations leading up to the violence. People who say they liked such-and-such film of his, “if only there wasn’t quite so much talking”? You might as well say, “I like Michael Bay’s films, if only it wasn’t for the explosions. And the stupidity.”

Hard Candy is one of the most uncomfortable films I’ve seen lately. Is it a good film? I don’t know. It’s an interesting film, and it’s definitely well acted. It’s a courageous film for the most part because it doesn’t go for an easy judgment of its characters, but neither does it go for an equally easy moral relativism. And then, in the last twenty minutes or so, it commits a couple of serious blunders that take away from its ability to disturb.

Like some of the most disappointing films, its first quarter of an hour is probably the strongest part of the film. The way it establishes the relationship between its two main characters – photographer Jeff and precocious 14-year old Hayley – and then turns this relationship upside down is very well done. Jeff isn’t an out-and-out creep, yet he is way too keen to play along with the teenage girl’s flirtation. He deserves it when she turns the tables on him… at first, but does he deserve the emotional and physical torture she puts him through? How far does his guilt go, and what puts her in a place where she can take it upon herself to be judge, jury and quite possibly executioner?

Jeff is too much interested in teenage girls, and he lets his interest go too far. He is guilty – but so far his desires are only different in degree from those who check out porn that advertises itself with “Hot Teen Sluts” or “Barely Legal”. You don’t have to go to the pornographic industry to see how teenage female sexuality is used to sell, well, just about anything, and how the line that delineates legal desires from illegal ones is blurred. Does this lessen Jeff’s guilt? No, but it puts it in context, and it makes it less easy to draw a line between him and they guy you work with who has the hots for the Olsen Twins or early Britney Spears or any number of nymph used by the marketing industry. If Jeff deserves castration, what do guys deserve who count down the days until some teen starlet becomes legal, or who fantasise about the high school cheerleader dressed up to be a sexual fantasy?

All of this only works so far, though. Throughout Hard Candy the question of a teenage girl who’s disappeared comes up, and Hayley insinuates that Jeff was somehow involved in this disappearance. A (chaste) photo of the vanished girl serves as incriminating evidence. Unfortunately the film comes out at the end and says that Jeff was either there when the girl was killed (by another pedophile) or that he killed her himself. Does it matter which of the two is true? Not really. He is culpable in either case, and his culpability is different in kind from the many, many men who have a hard-on for teenage girls. At this point we can easily draw the line, and Jeff is on the other side of the line. He’s a murderer or an accessory to murder. And at that point it becomes much easier to watch Hayley drive him to commit suicide. Most of the ambiguity of the film falls away, and with it the discomfort. And the movie’s previous courage to let its ambiguity stand gives way to a much more conventional moral simplicity, leaving us with just the window dressing of ambiguity.

Michael Winterbottom’s an odd one for me. I appreciate his talent, and his films clearly don’t compare to anyone else’s – they’re always very clearly Michael Winterbottom films. I like that he doesn’t tell me how to feel about his characters and their actions. At the same time, though,  I sometimes end up not feeling anything much; I watch his films feeling remote and strangely indifferent. It’s as if I have to take a conscious decision to care about his characters.

I first watched The Claim, his loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, years ago. I didn’t dislike it, but the film felt cold and distancing – which wasn’t what I’d been expecting after reading Hardy’s novel. Winterbottom’s earlier film based on Hardy, Jude (wisely leaving out the Obscure part in its title), pretty much came across as an exact translation of one of English literature’s most depressing books into celluloid. (The very ending of the book was gone, but that only meant the film was depressing rather than suicidally depressing.) The original novel came through so strongly, I couldn’t see a director’s handwriting in the film, nor did I need to.

The Claim was perhaps the second or third film by the director that I’d seen, and to some extent it felt like I didn’t fully understand Winterbottom’s idiom. I only got the coldness that crept out of almost every single shot of the film, muting the emotions. Then, some years later, I saw the director’s Wonderland, and while it didn’t turn me into a Michael Winterbottom fan, it helped me see things in his approach and style that I hadn’t been able to see before.

Having rewatched The Claim, I’d say that the film has rewarded my renewed attention. The film is no longer Hardy’s Mayor, but it is a worthwhile take on the original, evoking its own flavour. The casting is pretty much pitch-perfect, especially with Peter Mullan, the go-to man for stubborn, self-destructive men who should know better but who eventually don’t have the strength to act on this knowledge. And the muted, remote style keep the story from becoming melodramatic; instead we’re invited to observe and eventually mourn from a distance. It’s pretty much the opposite of the easy emotions of a Spielberg or a Ron Howard – the film isn’t conventionally touching or moving, it gives you a choice and asks you to act on this choice: will you become involved, or will you remain cold and distant? Do you want to be touched by this? Because, if you do, you need to know that it may hurt. It may get close, closer than is comfortable. That is the proposition the film makes, like Wonderland, and that I’ve come to find not just puzzling but, in equal measures, beguiling.

There is much that is cheesy and dated about Chariots of Fire. The Oscar bait heavy inspirationalism. The frequent slo-mo sequences that suggest the film’s director, Hugh Hudson, was a sort of pacifist late 20th century Zack Snyder. More than anything else, that icon of ’80s cheese, the Vangelis soundtrack.

And yet, the film works. Even as I was watching it, thinking how its brand of male bonding would make Freudian critics and queer theorists giggle with glee, how it was manipulative and tear-jerky, I couldn’t escape the pull of its pathos and earnestness, nor its nationalist nostalgia. The latter is easiest to accept, perhaps, as the film’s idealisation of the Britain of Yore nevertheless permits a critical note or two: the anti-semitism of the Cambridge deans, the echoes of a recent war defying patriotic re-interpretation, or the way that one character’s beliefs trump the pride of the British empire even in the face of its future king.

The film even pulls off the Vangelis, although just about (and you have to be willing to accept it as a product of its time), because its synth strains add an intriguingly anachronistic note to the movie’s nostalgia for a better, nobler time – filtered, by now, through our own ambivalent, ironic nostalgia for the ’80s. The movie’s editing, too, helps with its Nicholas Roeg-like fragmenting touches, adding a touch of strangeness to what might otherwise be too reassuringly – and boringly – familiar.

Chariots of Fireworks as a one-off thing: if there was another film like it (and there very well might be – can’t say I’m too versed in sports movies), even if that film was equally well-made, it would feel like too much: too much pathos, too much British nostalgia, too much Inspiration with a Capital I. In itself, the film holds up. At least if you have a touch of yearning for that silly, gentle, noble Englishness that never really existed except in the minds of writers, poets and the people who made the Hovis bread ads.

P.S.: After my long hiatus from this blog, I’ve decided this: I’ll aim for one entry per week. No more, no less. It’d be cool if you stick around to find out together with me whether I’ll manage.