The first time I heard the name Quentin Tarantino, I was seventeen. Or anyway, the first time I remember hearing it; given my mother’s consistent At the Movies viewership, I’d probably heard it before then. But I don’t remember hearing about Reservoir Dogs. However, my then-best friend, Patrick, was very into Pulp Fiction. I don’t remember specifics of the conversation, but he was one of several friends I would have over about the next four or five years who were very into Pulp Fiction.

Which is why I bought a copy in 1996, and I’ve owned one ever since. But you know, I don’t watch it. And when I finally did again, not that long ago, I realized that I didn’t like it all that much. I’d never felt the need to revisit Reservoir Dogs until I went through “R,” and I don’t think I’ll watch it again. Jackie Brown? I tried to watch it last year and literally couldn’t get through it. I find his segment the second-weakest of Four Rooms (I really don’t like “The Wrong Man”), and I intensely disliked Inglorious Basterds.

As you can imagine, this is a stance I have to defend a lot, because Quentin Tarantino is greatly praised in film buff circles. There’s only so far being annoyed by him personally gets you, too, because it seems a lot of his fans are annoyed by him personally, too. He’s insufferable in a lot of ways, and most people are perfectly willing to admit that. But so what, if the movies are good? So then I find myself having to explain why I don’t think the movies are very good, and that gets harder.

The first, most obvious issue, is that his movies just aren’t my thing. You can’t really argue around that, though goodness knows people have tried. If you get bored with fight scenes, there’s really not a whole lot that Kill Bill: Volume 1 is going to do for you. I don’t have the same sort of idealization of ’70s grindhouse cinema that drives a lot of Tarantino’s work, and right there, we’re pretty much parting ways. No matter when and where his films are set, that’s what they’re drawing from.

And yet I like blaxploitation, so there’s got to be more going on there, right? And that’s where I have to start explaining myself further. What’s more, the explanation has to be very precise to avoid being written off altogether. While a lot of people are willing to let you like or not-like whatever works or doesn’t work for you, Tarantino is one of a handful of directors who have fans who won’t let you get away with “it just doesn’t work.”

So let’s get into details. Someone with whom I was discussing this piece before I started it referred to his movies as “vulgar,” but that’s not entirely the issue. It’s not that I mind the swearing, exactly, but it does get awfully boring awfully quickly for me. It just doesn’t feel like the sort of clever dialogue he’s given so much credit for. But that’s okay; that’s purely a matter of personal taste. It’s also one of the differences when it comes to blaxploitation, which tended to have considerably less swearing.

But, yeah, when we’re talking language, we’re talking a certain other word that comes up. I freely admit that it was thematically appropriate in Django Unchained, not that I’ve seen Django Unchained. (Now might as well be the time to admit that there are several of his films that I haven’t seen, and this will not be changing.) Perhaps it didn’t need to appear quite so often, but sure, it could well be argued that it would have been anachronistic not to have it. And that’s fine. But what’s the excuse for Reservoir Dogs, which doesn’t even have any black people in it?

Though it does have a nasty description of what “all black women” are like that remains uncontradicted throughout the movie. Okay, I suppose the argument can be made that the characters are racist; that’s certainly true. And I’m sure, if you asked him, Tarantino would hotly deny being racist. Most people do. It’s hard to be angry at him for only presenting caricatures of black or Asian people, since he doesn’t get too in depth in any of his characters, something I’ll get to in a minute. But it still feels unpleasant to me. The only Asian characters in the movies of his that I’ve seen are the various martial artists of the Kill Bill movies. The only Hispanic characters are the actual Mexicans in From Dusk Till Dawn.

And here’s why I saw Kill Bill—it was strongly suggested that I couldn’t talk about his treatment of women without having seen it. In fact, I was told by a few people that it was his “feminist” film. But let’s talk, now that I have, because if it’s his feminist film, he needs to actually start talking to actual women at some point. And, yes, I know Uma Thurman helped develop the character. It doesn’t help.

We don’t know what makes the Bride end up working for Bill (I’ll be getting back to that), but we do know that wanting revenge is what drives the movies. Okay, fair enough. But O-Ren rises in the criminal underworld because of her daddy issues. The only thing we know about Vernita is that she stops killing to be a suburban housewife and mother. The only thing we know about Elle is that she’s in love with Bill. These are all women solely defined by the men in their lives, and they’re supposed to be his “strong female characters.” Mia Wallace goes on a date with one of her husband’s employees, because I guess he tells her to? Fabienne gets to be a sexual being, which is nice, but she also crumples pretty easily.

Yeah, yeah—if I saw Death Proof, I might have a different opinion. (We’ll leave Jackie Brown out of this discussion, both because I don’t remember most of it and because it’s an adaptation.) But the women in Tarantino films are pretty much exclusively defined by the men around them. And there are no women at all in Reservoir Dogs, or anyway no named women. The woman in “The Man From Hollywood” drifts in from another segment and has nothing to do with anything.

What about Shosanna? You know, yeah, I did like her. To the point that I didn’t care about most of the rest of what happened in the movie, because I wanted more details of her story. On the other hand, I was quite confident that, if he tried to tell us more, he’d screw it up, because he doesn’t have a feel for writing women. Even with her, there were a lot of places where she didn’t ring true. What’s more, she, too, is defined by the men in her life, both living and dead.

Oh, and let’s talk about the feet. I grant you that I only like about half of what Joss Whedon has done, but I do like some of it, and it’s got the foot thing, too, so don’t think I’m just picking on Tarantino. Here’s the deal. I don’t want to know what fetish a filmmaker has. This goes for Joss, too. It feels deeply unpleasant to me to know that he’s basically using actresses to feed his fetish. That’s closer into their personal lives than I ever wanted to get, and it makes me uncomfortable on the behalves of those actresses.

Let us also now deal with the accusation that Quentin Tarantino is shallow. This is a place where I think people are talking past one another. It’s not that the films are shallow in the sense that there’s no thought behind them. There quite clearly is, although I frankly think he’s less smart than he thinks he is and that it colours the movies. But moving on from that, it’s that the characters themselves seem to almost be paper cutouts to me. They have no more depth than they need in order to make the story move. Why does the Bride work for Bill? Because we wouldn’t have a story if she didn’t. How did she find him, or the other way around? It doesn’t matter.

In many cases, this leads to actions that make little sense. Why didn’t Butch pack his own watch? Because we needed him to go back for it. And so forth. It also means that the look of the film is what matters above logic, which is why O-Ren is wearing a bright red jumpsuit as a sniper in the anime section of Kill Bill. Awfully conspicuous, but it looks cool.

I do have some good things to say about the films of Quentin Tarantino. He tends to cast well, if nothing else, though I’m not entirely convinced that John Travolta’s career should have been revived. There are a few individual shots I like, and I’ll admit the fight in the snow between O-Ren and the Bride is lovely. And, yes, I’ll also admit that I just don’t like him personally, because I think he’s full of himself and thinks that the only way to love film is to love it the way he does. But in the end, I can defend my dislike purely by what I see on the screen. And now that I have here, I don’t have to ever again.