Bullitt, 1968, dir. Peter Yates. Streaming at home on Thursday, November 10.

So recently I picked up Quentin Tarantino’s book, Cinema Speculation. I have complicated feelings for Tarantino–on one hand, he seems like a macho dickhead, he uses the ‘n’ word way too much, he was a shit to Uma Thurmond, he can be a prick in interviews and, probably, in life. He seems like a spoiled brat.

On the other hand, well, he also seems like all those things and a cinematic genius whose films are deliciously entertaining. When I hear there’s a new Tarantino movie coming out, I admit that I’m excited. I admit that I am really excited. When they come to town, I catch them right away, and only once have they disappointed (The Hateful 8 is as bad a movie from a great director that’s ever been made). Inglourious Basterds is one of my favorite films. His movies are funny, they’re exciting, directed with ultimate panache, there’s a very definitive worldview, he elicits amazing performances from his actors (and discovers new ones or gives old, forgotten ones top billing), no one makes movies like him, and the critical whirlwind cannot knock down the very enjoyable experience of seeing one of his pictures.

Additionally, speaking of the ‘n’ word, his movies are racially complicated, in ways that are much more complex than his white counterparts. He seems genuinely interested in race in America, and in making movies that audiences, white or Black, will enjoy, but will have to think about. Sometimes, like in Pulp Fiction, I think he goes way too far in having his white characters drop the n-bomb, but other times it’s clear he’s addressing America’s fraught racial history with in a way that’s fascinating–he is as influenced by Godard as he is by Black Gunn, and he uses this to make his films seem uniquely from this country. Plus, he employs a lot of Black actors and creates great characters for them. Considering the time period in which it takes place, Inglorious Basterds could’ve easily not had a Black character, yet he cast the French actor Jacky Ido as Shosanna’s lover and partner in crime, and, of course, Samuel L. Jackson narrates. This is no small feat–I hope I don’t need to say that giving Black actors good work is important. Tarantino has essentially nine films under his belt (he counts Kill Bill as one, so I will, too), and in those nine films he has more Black actors, with great roles, than all the movies by Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, Scorsese, Francis and Sofia Coppola, Cronenberg, Polanski, Woody Allen, Ridley Scott, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, and James Cameron put together.

Then you also have movies like Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, with its utterly disrespectful treatment of Bruce Lee and his weakest character ever in Sharon Tate, and yet that movie has a warmth and affection you don’t see in 100 movies a year, and it’s thrilling. But why did he have to diss Lee like that? It doesn’t add anything to the plot. And for God’s sake, make a Tate a real person, please.

Thus far (I haven’t finished it and that doesn’t matter because this isn’t a book review), Cinema Speculation, is a blast, especially the chapter where Tarantino discusses growing up in late 60s, early 70s Hollywood with a single white mother who dated Black men and took him to every movie that she wanted to see. His stories of seeing the great Blaxploitation classics is worth the price of the book alone. His mother didn’t care if the flicks he enjoyed were disturbing or violent, but she did care if he saw violent newscasts. The violence in movies, she explained, was better endured in the context of the film and often contained good lessons. This is perhaps most crazy in a double-feature he saw when he was nine, with his mother and a boyfriend: The Wild Bunch and Deliverance. I mean, holy shit. That first one would have killed me at that age, but Deliverance would have kept me from the woods forever.

Anyway, the book departs from memoir and goes into criticism of his favorite movies, including Bullitt. Now, I have friends who think Steve McQueen is the paragon of masculinity and a great actor and I have friends who think plywood left in the rain would be more entertaining as a male lead. I tend to be somewhere in the middle, though mostly due to Junior Bonner, which I think is a legitimately great film.

But for the longest time I agreed that Bullitt is a hugely overrated movie. Having read Tarantino’s essay, I appreciate it more, and understand its impact on the cop film and movies at the time, but I’m still very meh.

Tarantino (and others he quotes) make a big deal of McQueen’s Bullitt being a different kind of cop in that he seems happy and he’s cool. Back then, movie cops were beleaguered, unhappy people in bad relationships who look frumpled and depressed. Bullitt changed this, drastically. Consider the scene without dialogue of Bullitt enjoying a hip dinner out with his girlfriend, Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset); he wakes in a cool apartment in swank paisley pajamas; his suits are tailored. Bullitt drives a cool car. Everything in the film is understated, with Bullitt rarely confronting his boss, even when said boss is a jerk. Bullitt just goes about his work with the calm of a zen samurai. And of course, there’s that awesome chase scene. Tarantino acknowledges that the plot is awful but it doesn’t matter because the film is about cool.

That may be well and good, but Bullitt is also deadly creaky. The chase scene is fun but makes no sense–the hired killers are tailing Bullitt, and then suddenly he tails them, so they zoom away with Bullitt in hot pursuit. What was he going to do, smash into them to stop them? Why are they suddenly on the run? The continuity is awful, the killers’ car losing five hubcaps, and supposedly audiences in San Francisco laughed because one scene cuts to another and takes the car from one side of the city to another in an instant, and then back again. There’s a dumb emotional moment later when Cathy sees him working at a scene of a brutal murder and accuses him of having no emotion–would she confront her boyfriend if he was an ER nurse, you know, because they also have to approach their work with similar detachment? Apparently, Bullitt loves those PJs so much he puts them on after making love to his girlfriend, who remains naked. No one does that.

But Tarantino succeeds in making you feel excited to watch this movie, mediocre as it is, because of his unbridled enthusiasm. And that’s a lot of fun. Probably I won’t be watching Deliverance anytime soon, but it’s worth it to check out his book and choose a movie or two on his recommendation.