This is a grammar rant that could very well come back to bite me in the ass some day but I don't care. I'm an English teacher and a writer and I can't let it go without speaking my little piece.
A few days ago I read Tarantino's latest,
Inglorious Basterds.
Why is it spelled like that? Because Tarantino is too important and busy to run spellcheck.
By now you may have heard about the typos. The script is riddled with them - apostrophe errors, spelling errors, misused words, awkward sentence structure - it reads like an essay written by a smart, lazy 12-year-old.
Okay first of all, Tarantino has done some amazing work.
Reservoir Dogs will always be one of my top ten films of all time and
Pulp Fiction is brilliant. I confess I didn't love
Kill Bill. In fact I think as you go backwards in his career Tarantino's films get better. He had some great ones right at the beginning.
And to be honest,
Inglorious Basterds is an interesting story. It's sort of revisionist history: A group of Americans and a Jewish French girl independently conspire to assassinate Hitler and other lead members of the Reich.
It's got its moments, but it's a Tarantino world. He loves mixed race relationships so he put one in here. A Jewish girl in hiding falls in love with a Negro man who wanders freely during the day. In occupied France. Because apparently while Jews were forced to hide, black Europeans were free to roam the streets as Goebbels talked about their glorious culture in admiring tones.
In case you're wondering, there were about 600 or so black Europeans in the occupied territories and as far as I know none of them made it to the camps. They were mostly shot and dumped into pits. It's not as easy to hide if you're black as it is if you're Jewish, and Goebbels certainly didn't think the Negros of the world were swell beings.
(And in case you're wondering what makes me such an expert, the home front during WW2 was the subject of my masters thesis. I don't know everything, but I've done a shitload of research.)
But this is Tarantino land, and the story changes history anyway, so maybe we can pretend Nazis liked black people.
There are some cool scenes in the script. There's good tension and there's a pretty cool standoff in a bar that I enjoyed very much. I'm not so fond of the ending because I feel like it sort of fizzled out a bit, but the story isn't a bad one.
No, the big problem here is the grammar and spelling. He spells gun "gunn" for instance. Basic stuff. I mean hell, he misspelled the title of his own movie.
Some have said it's no big deal. It's just spelling, the story is the important thing. Everybody makes mistakes.
Well, yes and no. Everybody does make mistakes and I usually hate people who correct minor grammar errors in others' work, but the mistakes in
Inglorious Bastards are ridiculous in number. And it's a problem for two reasons.
One: for God's sake, the man's a professional writer. The least he can do is run spellcheck, just for integrity's sake. I doubt very much that Bill Goldman sends out screenplays covered in typos like this, but I guess since Tarantino has gotten older and can make anything he wants, he doesn't have to slum like the rest of us saps who are expected to make our work look professional. He can turn in his screenplay written in crayon and he'll still get funding for his next picture.
But that only works as long as his films keep making money.
It's not just about professionalism, it's also about readability. There is a scene in the beginning of the film where a Nazi officer speaks to a French family in French, but in the script it's written in English. The officer continually says "purpose" instead of "propose."
Now here's the problem: Is he doing that because his French is bad? Is that an intentional mistake? Or is this another Tarantino typo? It's impossible to tell. How are the actors supposed to know? There are places all over this script where I had to halt and go back to reread something because the words didn't make any sense.
And before anybody rushes to exclaim that this is probably just a draft Tarantino sent to his agent that got leaked, I heard from a medium level reliable source that this is indeed the version being used on set.
If this is true, it means Tarantino did not even bother to have someone proofread his script before sending it to the actors, the producers, the location manager, the thirty thousand other people who have to read and understand this script to do their jobs. So instead of taking a couple of hours to spellcheck and proofread, or pay a couple of bucks to an assistant to do it for him, or even ask a friend - hell I'd do it for free - he allowed his script to go public as a working document riddled with mistakes.
He's eccentric, see. He doesn't have to use spellcheck because he's a rich genius.
He has every right to do what he wants of course. As long as people keep seeing his movies he can write how he wants. But it's pretty rare you see a prima donna writer, you know? The least you can do is run spellcheck on your title.
