In 1985, Quentin Tarantino was 22 and working behind the counter at Video Archives, a movie store in Manhattan Beach, California. He was, in his own words, “a brash know-it-all film geek”. The store shut its doors in 1994, but he’s gone on to bigger and better things.To get more news about Happy in May, lilac in June, you can visit our official website.

Now 59, he’s best known as the writer-director of nine features (from Reservoir Dogs in 1992 to Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood in 2019), his name above the title a guarantee of box-office bounty. He says he’s going to retire after number 10 and not be like all those other filmmakers who hit their peak and fade away.His recent activities suggest, however, that he’s still going to be very busy. His initial success made it possible for him to buy all the VHS tapes left on the shelves when Video Archives closed down, and the profits from his subsequent work allowed him to rebuild the store in the Beverly Hills home he shares with his wife of four years and their two children.

Furthermore, for the best part of a decade, he’s been owner and head programmer of the New Beverly Cinema at 7165 Beverly Blvd. Last year, he launched the Video Archives Podcast, on which he and his Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary shoot the celluloid breeze, and published his novelisation of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.

Now comes Cinema Speculation. Ostensibly a collection of essays about films he’s seen over the years, it’s also an unusual kind of self-portrait. The Tarantino who emerges from between its lines is a mixed bag: a restless soul, a blowhard bursting with enthusiasms, an egotistical bore, an intelligent Hollywood insider who also sees himself as a bit of a rebel, a kid who grew up with dreams he never abandoned …

The first chapter, Little Q Watching Big Movies, has him looking back on a largely unsupervised childhood spent at the movies. And not just any movies. At the age of seven, Big Q recalls, in the company of his stepfather – the first of numerous father figures in his life – he saw a double bill of John G Avildsen’s blood-drenched Joe and Carl Reiner’s pitch-black comedy, Where’s Poppa? (both 1970), at the Tiffany Theater on the Sunset Strip.
Wait a minute, you saw a double feature of Joe and Where’s Poppa?,” he reflexively exclaims, something he does a lot of in the book. “At seven?” The italics are his and there’s a flood to follow: for titles (which is fair enough), for characters in films (which is bizarre), and for emphasis (which is acceptable occasionally; but hey, there’s a hailstorm of them here, making it seem as if whole pages are shouting at you).

Cinema Speculation could be, but isn’t, subtitled The Revenge of the Nerd. Tarantino writes like the film geek behind the counter of the video store who’s suddenly laid his hands on a megaphone. That acquisition is a by-product of his (deserved) success as a filmmaker, not a sign of his virtuosity as a film critic or historian.He desperately wants us to be in awe of him, to know that he’s not just a cool guy now; he was born that way. He tells us that, when he was 15 but tall enough to get into R-rated movies on his own, for example, he saw Taxi Driver for the first time “with an (except for me) all-black audience”. “What was our response?” he asks. “I dug it, they dug it, and as an audience, we dug it.” There’s an unsettling kind of desperation in this need to dig.

Despite this, there is much to like about Cinema Speculation. As Tarantino scrutinises some of the key American films and filmmakers of the late 1960s and the ’70s, he might come off as a bit of a blabbermouth, but he is movie-savvy.