1994 also brought The Lion King, Clear and Present Danger, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Quiz Show, Bullets over Broadway, The Crow, Little Big league & Angels in the Outfield (personal nostalgia), Ed Wood, etc... You can find examples of films like this in any year, of course.
I'm no fan of The Mask or Dumb and Dumber, but I do appreciate Jim Carrey's work in The Truman Show, Man on the Moon, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I completely get the disdain for certain actors; mine are Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller.
As far as the films from 1992 that you mentioned, not too many know of Bad Lieutenant. I did plenty of cringing during that one. When he pulled over the two girls? Yikes... Despite my cringing, it is still a great film. I'm also curious about what turned you off to Tarantino after Reservoir Dogs? I'm a big fan (with Pulp Fiction being my favorite film).
I was maybe a bit over the top with my earlier post, but 1994 in particular held a lot of disappointment for me. A little context--in 1992 I decided to go back to school and study film. I had aspirations of writing and/or directing and decided to take the leap. As it happened, 1992 was (at least to my taste) a tremendous year for film, not only for major Hollywood fare, but also for independent and foreign films. It set a very very high bar. Reservoir Dogs, in particular, came from what appeared to be a unique voice in film that was continuing the boom in American indie film that began to blossom a few years earlier with Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Flash forward to 1994. QT has written the screenplays for Natural Born Killers (which I thought was tremendous. Oliver Stone was probably the greatest filmmaker of the 1990s) and True Romance (which was fun but a horribly flawed script. Sonny Chiba--say no more), and word is that his next film is going to be epic. I saw it with a bunch of my film school friends and we were pretty evenly split--half loved it and the other half despised it. The funny thing is that those receptions were mostly based off of the same things.
So the specific gripes I have with QT are:
1. He's horribly derivative. Yes, he "mashes up" from multiple genres/inspirations, but it is derivative none-the-less. I'm all for homages and winks to films/filmmakers when they work within the flow and tone of a film, but Tarantino wears his influences on his sleeve.
One thing I forgot to mention is that he spoke at my school a while after NBK came out and essentially said that he's out to demonstrate to his audience how many cool films he's seen. He's going to pack as many references in as he can, regardless of whether or not it makes the film work.
2. His dialogue is--in my opinion--deplorable. Even parts of Reservoir Dogs are hard to listen to (like the Madonna bit), and don't do anything to advance the film other than to thrown in "cool" dialogue.
3. He casts himself in many of his films, and he is a terrible actor. The Jimmie scenes in PF crash to a screeching halt. The same thing happens in Desperado when he's on screen.
4. He either can't or chooses not to maintain an even tone in many of his films. Pulp Fiction is all over the place, as is Django, and especially the Kill Bills. On the other hand, Jackie Brown and Inglorious Basterds are, for the most part, films that flow quite well. They're also the two that manage to channel QT's fan-boy-ism into the story rather than derail it.
That's obviously all just my opinion, and sorry if my original post--or this one for that matter--came off as offensive. The over the top love shown to Tarantino by some of his fans doesn't do anything to temper my disdain either. In other words, it's fun to have someone to hate.
