Last Friday Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein told CNN’s Piers Morgan that he’s going to stop making films with cynical, exploitation-style violence for its own sake. — i.e., violence as style, violence in air quotes. Doesn’t that mean he and that bloated, over-praised, low-rent hillbilly known as Quentin Tarantino are pretty much done? Is there any major Hollywood director who has demonstrated more conclusively that he’s incapable of making a film without blowing people away or roasting them alive or beating them to death with baseball bats or what-have-you? Tarantino has never written or directed a film that deals with anything intimate or emotional or humanly vulnerable — he basically directs “covers” of ’70s exploitation-style genre films in which bad guys get killed, period. QT is creatively incapable of working outside of that safe little splatter box that he’s been operating out of since Reservoir Dogs.
In other words, Tarantino doesn’t fit in the new violence-averse Harvey Weinstein universe. Unless, of course, Harvey is just “saying” this and doesn’t really mean it. But he sounds like he does.
“The insensitivity that the average person has now because of violence is because people have become so used to it,” Weinstein told Morgan. “It’s an obsession as well as almost an addiction. It’s a cheap way of getting an audience, more people shot and more explosions, but it’s at the expense of the story. Abject violence has proven successful, and as long as it is, it will be produced because it’s profitable. It’s the accepted way of life rather than asking is this the right thing to do?”