Tarantino’s Favorite Year | YouTube Clip of the Month

Came across this recent clip of director Quentin Tarantino talking movies on journalist Lynn Hirschberg’s podcast, and it’s quite a delight. Playing along with Hirschberg’s “Five Things” shtick, in which guests talk about five things that made them who they are, QT decides to discuss every film he saw in an actual movie theater in the year 1979. For most of us that would take about two minutes, but this clip runs for an hour and 11 minutes — proving the man is indeed every bit the film buff his press clippings always claim. Impressively, the video never gets boring. More than a simple recitation, we get snippets about the impressions these films made on an adolescent Tarantino — plus whoever made the video helpfully provides thumbnail images of the original lobby posters to jog our memories, or whet our curiosity in the case of several true oddities I’d never heard of.

One is left with a great appreciation for that particular year, as American cinema closed out a golden decade of artistic freedom. 1979 was a time when grand filmmaking adventures like Apocalypse Now and gritty adult dramas like Hardcore, All That Jazz, and North Dallas Forty existed side-by-side with old-fashioned Main Street fare like The Electric Horseman and The China Syndrome — all within spitting distance of schlocky Star Wars ripoffs and exploitation films like Skatetown USA, Penitentiary, and H.O.T.S. … the latter group more likely to be enjoyed at the drive-in or in the late-night cable showings of the subsequent decade.

Whatever you think of Tarantino’s own films — and they’re a decidedly mixed bag in my view — you’ll be impressed with his knowledge as he rattles off revealing details about such forgotten (never remembered?) 43-year-old titles as Malibu High and Sammy Stops the World from memory. (Did you know that Hot Stuff, starring Suzanne Pleshette and Jerry Reed, was both Dom Deluise’s directorial debut AND his directorial swan song? Bet you didn’t.) You may also be charmed to hear how QT cried after The Promise, saw Rocky II VII times, or sat in his bedroom at age 14 and grappled with his confusing emotions after seeing Annie Hall two years earlier.

Listening to Tarantino wax nostalgic brought back similar memories of my own youth (I’m just five years younger). These include a lazy summer afternoon when I rode my bike for miles along train tracks to the lone multiplex in Simi Valley, California — without telling my parents — to see the James Bond flick Moonraker, the smell of popcorn and the thrilling on-screen stunts lifting me far above a dreary, undernourished childhood and burning a memory into my mind that will endure into my dotage. Or the night my older sister took me to see Apocalypse Now, where we sat in the very front row and I had to lean back and crane my neck to stare up at a giant screen, while the trippy opening chords of The Doors’ “The End” ushered me into a new, Uber-adult kind of movie experience. Or the night in 1980 when my cousins took me to see Airplane! at a theater in downtown Chicago. To this day I’ve never laughed so hard at a movie.

We’re in the streaming era now, though. Never again will teenagers ride their bikes to a matinee, sit their lonely, angst-ridden asses in the dark and surrender their developing minds to a challenging work of art that leaves them reeling and forever changed. Viewers of this clip will inevitably be tempted to lament the loss of cinema as a personal experience. But at least they’ll get a few choice titles to search out on their favorite streaming service. Gotta take your pleasures where you can in this world.