Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino review: like a monologue from a relentless 19-year-old geek

Tarantino would have made a great gossip columnist, as the director proves in this chatty memoir about his favourite blood-spattered flicks

When he was 10, Quentin Tarantino’s mother introduced her son to her new boyfriend, a Blaxploitation fan called Floyd. Warily, the junior geek tested the knowledge of this interloper, who was black and in his 30s. Floyd passed. “Finally,” sighs the director Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, “I was going to be able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the f— I was talking about.”

Few can clear such a high bar. When he was old enough, Tarantino would cross Los Angeles by bus to catch an arcane double or triple bill of revenge-amatic gorefests in distant fleapits. Those rides were probably the only time he saw the sky. Afterwards he’d annotate what he’d watched in scrapbooks and index cards: who was in it, who wrote/shot/cut/scored/financed it, and what each and every critic said, however much he loathed them.

Those impressions are sifted and funnelled into his new book Cinema Speculation. It is a curiosity, a sort of memoir shaped into essays about movies that, viewed countless times, fed a nerdy imagination. Why did Steve McQueen barely seem to act? Is Dirty Harry right-wing? Was Travis Bickle in ‘Nam? Exactly how fantastic is Jaws or Rocky, and why? All titles fall within the great epoch of independent film-making from the late 1960S to the advent of the VHS.

On one level this is quality mainstream analysis of plot and performance, either good or bad. But this is also Tarantino, a human listicle who loves truffling down counterfactual rabbit holes. There’s a whole chapter on the version of Taxi Driver which Brian De Palma might had made had he not passed Paul Schrader’s script on to Martin Scorsese.