Remembering 7 Quintessential Clips From the Quentin Tarantino/Sally Menke Canon

4. Jackie Brown -- Chicks Who Love Guns

All Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) wants to do is rave about the firearms on display in the infomercial-within-a-movie Chicks Who Love Guns, but Louis (Robert De Niro) is too distracted by Bridget Fonda's chick with bare feet to his right. It's another virtuosic deployment of reaction shots, but this time with words secondary to motivations. And what words!

5. Kill Bill Vol. I -- The Bride, Gogo and the Crazy 88

All that practice cutting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990 paid off with arguably (inarguably?) the bloodiest, eye-gougingest, most kinetic land speed record for deaths in a martial arts film.

6. Death Proof -- "That Was a Close One"

What Kill Bill's action sequences lacked in dramatic punch, Death Proof compensated for by turning the lady-in-peril trope on its head. To wit, this unforgettable sequence featuring Zoe Bell goofing around on the hood of speeding pal Kim's (Tracie Thoms) car -- until Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) descends with his vehicular-homicidal rage. Menke and Tarantino advance the art of the car chase yet transcend it by taking the victim out of the car -- an extraordinary bit of triangulation (Russell/Thoms/Bell) made all the better by wide, action-resetting shots and Rosario Dawson's galvanized witness.

7. Inglourious Basterds -- "About This Pickle"

That the crucial scene in the basement bar goes on way, way too long isn't Menke's fault. However, that it climaxes with the flawless, suspense-ratcheting intercutting of enemies in every corner of the room -- setting up the spectacular shoot-out to come -- is most definitely her doing.

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