KATHY SHAIDLE: Nobody needs to tell me to boycott Quentin Tarantino:

Okay, it was faintly amusing, but Tarantino’s admirers insisted that this “meta” conceit—pop culture entities arguing about other pop culture entities—was somehow sui generis, and Tarantino, a genius.

I was the bore at every party pointing out that, in fact, the pilot for Cheers a full ten years earlier saw the soon-to-be-beloved bar regulars similarly quarreling about “the sweatiest film of all time.” (Cool Hand Luke won out, as I recall.)

And literally the same movie buffs who’d spent twenty years slagging Brian De Palma for ripping off Hitchcock were now hailing naked serial plagiarist Tarantino as the savior of cinema, knowing full well that he’d lifted entire scenes in Reservoir Dogs from Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s City on Fire. “Isn’t that, er, ‘cultural appropriation,’ you guys?” I’d ask. “Even maybe a kind of ‘colonialism’?”

When cornered, I’d spit out a Tarantino-themed variation on David Lee Roth’s (unfair in retrospect) line about why rock critics loved Elvis Costello so much.

Oh, well. Good thing I never much liked parties anyhow…

Heh. I tuned out Tarantino after Jackie Brown in 1997 — but it was fun watching him make the rounds back then saying that he had grown up and decided to be a man before he began shooting that film.

Well, it must have sounded good at the time.

Update (11/4/14): At some point in the night, the article’s URL was apparently changed; link should be working now.