Is this anyone else's favorite Tarrantino film?

Jackie Brown usually resides in the middle of my Tarantino rankings but it’s a great film. There really isn’t anyone quite like Pam Grier and I can’t get enough of her. The sound track is great with several throwbacks to 70’s blaxploitation. Great dialogue with tons of laughs, especially leaving the mall. The entire theme of aging - missed opportunities and the open ending is beautiful. I like to think Max Cherry eventually goes to Spain to find Jackie, but I know he won’t.

What a great film.

Whenever I hear anyone say Jackie Brown is "Tarantino's best movie" or "my favorite Tarantino movie" or whatever, I have to assume either they're trolling, or they're the biggest hipster douchebag in town. It's a good movie, I like it. And I like it a little more every time I watch it. But I'd rank it toward the bottom of his collected works, not the top. Don't get me wrong, even Tarantino's "worst movies" are still pretty fucking great. It's just such a banal textbook formulaic thing relative to his other stuff. I remember being super disappointed the first time I saw it right when it hit theaters, and then when I found out it was adapted from a book instead of his own idea from scratch, "Ah, well, then no wonder."

Whatever secret sauce Tarantino has that makes a movie "a Tarantino movie," Jackie Brown has far less of it than any of his other movies. It's as if he said "OK, I've made two movies that are weird as shit. For my third, I'll make a regular straight-line movie." Thankfully he never did that again.

No surprise it's the favorite of people who say idiotic things like "Most of Tarantino's movies are for dumb teens" i.e. people who don't like Tarantino.

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It's his best movie because it's the only one adapted from a novel. Having a pre existing framework for his story stopped him from indulging in his usual excesses

No

Yes.

Most reasons are stated all over the place here, but they bear repeating.

After Pulp Fiction, there was a LOT of pressure put on QT to deliver "another great one" for the next one, and he made every body wait almost 3 years to get it(there would be longer waits ahead between later films.)


And -- evidently particularly for the "young people" that QT had cultivated as fans of Pulp Fiction -- this one was much more low-key, very "middle aged" (only Bridget Fonda really represented a youthful character), plotty and straightforward in the narrative.

QT made sure (eventually) to compare Jackie Brown to one of HIS favorites -- Howard Hawks comedy-talk-Western Rio Bravo" (1959) as a "hang out movie" in which just sitting back watching the CHARACTERS sit back and shoot the (well written breeze) for "a little too long" became the whole reason to enjoy the movie. NOT for the Western action in Rio Bravo; NOT for the crime caper action in Jackie Brown. Just to "hang out."

Robert Forster in "the role of his life" proved to be the guy we wanted in movies for a long time: quiet, polite, wry, observant, a little bit sad and lonely(he goes to matinees during the weekday from work)...but tough enough in a sometimes dangerous profession(bail bondsman). He's really more key to the movie than Pam Grier as Jackie Brown(also getting the role of her life) because we see HER often through HIS eyes.

Robert DeNiro wanted Forster's "bigger" role, but QT wouldn't allow it -- so he gave DeNiro a "secondary role" which is one of the most entertaining parts he ever played(thanks to the writing of QT and, I would expect, Elmore Leonard's original novel but very much in DeNiro's playing.) DeNiro plays a recently released convict who spends much of the movie sitting around doing nothing, vaguely reacting to others around him...looking cool but dim at the same time. He's not THAT dim -- he manages to get some quick sex from the younger Fonda. He's a lot of fun.

CONT

No. This is an accurate take: https://moviechat.org/tt0119396/Jackie-Brown/58c7737593cef4080d7a6ec4/Is-this-anyone-elses-favorite-Tarrantino-film?reply=624cd4947cd228487c2f1ca8

It's his best movie. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his second best.