Earlier this week, we sharedQuentin Tarantino's list of his favorite movies of 2013 so far with some confusion—while obvious picks like Frances Ha and Gravity were on there, we were all pretty surprised to see The Lone Ranger, pretty much universally regarded as a flop, sitting at the number 9 spot. Was this film worth revisiting, we wondered, if QT was giving it his seal of approval?
As it turns out, though, QT actually didn't like the film all that much either—he just really enjoyed the trains. All the parts with the trains. That's it. "The first forty-five minutes are excellent," Tarantino commented to a French weekly, Les Inrockuptibles. "...the next forty-five minutes are a little soporific. It was a bad idea to split the bad guys in two groups; it takes hours to explain and nobody cares. Then comes the train scene—incredible! When I saw it, I kept thinking, 'What, that’s the film that everybody says is crap? Seriously?'"
Everything else, he explains, sucked as much as we all remember it did: "That being said, I still have a little problem with the film. I like Tonto’s backstory—the idea that his tribe got slaughtered because of him; that’s a real comic-book thing. But the slaughter of the tribe, by gunfire, from the cavalry, it left a bitter taste in my mouth," he said. "The Indians have really been victims of a genocide. So slaughtering them again in an entertaining movie, Buster Keaton style...That ruined the fun a bit for me. I simply found it...ugly...making fun of this, when America really did it, it bothered me."
So, mystery solved.
[via Indiewire]
