If you’ve been following the career of Quentin Tarantino for the past 20-odd years, you know that he belongs behind the camera. Nothing good has ever come of putting him in front of it. Well, except for Richie Gecko. That was pretty cool.
His latest starring role was not. Anita Bennett, The Wrap:
After a week of silence and rising police outrage, Quentin Tarantino has let colleagues know he intends to apologize for his comments calling police officers “murderers,” TheWrap has learned…
“When I see murders, I do not stand by… I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers,” the director told a crowd of about 300 a week ago.
One police union after another has boycotted Tarantino, and by Friday protests reached a crescendo with the National Association of Police Organizations — a group representing 1,000 police units and associations and over 241,000 sworn law enforcement officers — calling for a total boycott of his films, including the upcoming “Hateful Eight.”
So it’s about money. But then, so is the Black Lives Matter movement in the first place.
Apparently, Tarantino is writing an op-ed to apologize and explain. I hope he gets a bit more specific. Which cops are the murderers? What constitutes murder? Does self-defense become murder, in spite of the facts, if enough people get angry enough about it? If a white person is killed while attacking a police officer, does that still constitute murder?
And is it possible that Quentin Tarantino was spouting off about something he doesn’t really know much about, because he wanted black people to stop yelling at him for using so many racial epithets in his movies? Could that be what really happened here?
Whatever the case, I can’t wait to see which films he rips off to piece together his apology.
Tarantino has the right to say what he wants, no matter how ignorant it is. And cops have the right to boycott Tarantino’s films and refuse to provide off-duty security for him. If he’s going to call them murderers, let him fend for himself. Let him see what the world would be like if he lived inside one of his own movies.