For a director who's obsessed with packing his movies full of subplots, tangents, and diversions, it seems appropriate that the side stories that have sprung up during Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds press tour are at least as entertaining as the movie itself. First, there was the Purple Dildo of Set-Napping Shame, and now Tarantino's topped even that with a truly amazing list of his twenty favorite movies of the last seventeen years. The kids-killing-kids classic Battle Royale was number-one on the list, but it's the number-two film Tarantino revealed that's the real shocker.
That'd be the Woody Allen film Anything Else, or, as Tarantino helpfully puts it, "the Jason Biggs one." Indeed! Others may know it as just one of the forgettable films Allen made at the beginning of this decade (including Hollywood Ending and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion) before the director began his creatively revitalizing European sojourn with Match Point. Sadly, Tarantino doesn't elaborate on what he sees in the film or how it earned a place on his list, which is split evenly between Asian crime thrillers and fairly respected American films like Boogie Nights and Lost in Translation. Here's the full list, followed by Tarantino's video tour:
Battle Royale
Anything Else
Audition
The Blade
Boogie Nights
Dazed & Confused
Dogville
Fight Club
Friday
The Host
The Insider
Joint Security Area
Lost In Translation
The Matrix
Memories of Murder
Police Story 3
Shaun of the Dead
Speed
Team America: World Police
Unbreakable
ยท Talking My Language [Hollywood Elsewhere]