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By Rudiger Kohoutova / Published on May 8th, 2008 / Entertainment

Picking their brains for years and they couldn't find any similarities between the fairy tale worlds of Peter Jackson's imagination and the quirky zigzagging of Quentin Tarantino's films. While there are so many opposites in the two filmmakers' aesthetic tastes, there isn't much distance between the two either. First off, they both like to end their films in a great bloodbath where good and evil battle it out and many die from each side. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy ended with one of the most stretched out and bloody battle scenes in the history of cinema - and not to mention his previous work in braindead. Tarantino ended Reservoir Dogs in bloodbath and a recent Jimmy Kimmel show that he directed where the audience pulled out guns and bullets flew leaving no survivors.

Peter Jackson began monopolizing the world of the fantastic when he made the Frighteners with Michael J. Fox and now King Kong with Naomi Watts. Tarantino focused on the Japanese trademarks including the sword fighting sequences that he insisted be Japanese choreographed.

Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino are two of those few directors that come through their filmmaking. "You can sit and watch a movie and know right away that Tarantino is behind it. He breathes that great of a vision through the camera that it completely tarantinizes the picture."

Of course, there are a few other directors in Hollywood like P.T. Anderson who made Boogey Nights and Magnolia and Shervin Youssefian (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1352346/) with Machiavelli Hangman who bring that sense of authorship to audiences. M. Night Shyamalan left moviegoers begging for more when he unveiled the stunning conclusion of the Sixth Sense.

Interestingly, however, Shyamalan slowly became a prisoner of what had made him famous: the twist ending. Unbreakable and the Village were redundant clones of the Sixth Sense, but unfortunately, they were shown to audiences who went in already expecting a twist ending. They looked for all the clues and signs and most of them figured out the ending before the middle of the film, which was a real disappointment.

Then, there are the writers-turned-filmmakers including Paul Haggis (Crash) and Brian Helgeland (Knight's Tale, Man on Fire) who bring with them a certain strength for their characters, an anchorship that really fuels the humanity of the story. While films like Machiavelli Hangman (http://www.hangmanmovie.com) and Pulp Fiction concentrate on dialogue and ingenious film structure, these writers' pieces seem to only focus on the human condition.

The point of this is: we are coming into a day and age of Hollywood cinema where there is not only enough material to wet our mouths but strong and meaningful enough material to quench our thirsts.




About the author:


Rudiger Kohoutova has a law degree and is
a fulltime writer at various publications
in Los Angeles. Machiavelli Hangman:
http://www.hangmanmovie.com