THE road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Blake wrote, and for the last few decades no one in Hollywood has followed that road more assiduously than Quentin Tarantino. His movies are famous for their violence and bloodshed; their blaring soundtracks; their offbeat, Pinteresque dialogue; their startling performances from actors you had almost forgotten about; and their encyclopedic range of references to other movies, especially schlocky ones. He spent his formative years — the period when everyone else was in film school — working as a clerk in a video store, and it shows. His films are apt to allude to Godard in one frame and a movie like “Candy Stripe Nurses” or “Dead Women in Lingerie” in the next.
