Devil's Advocate: The Cinema of Quentin Tarantino

In the cinema of Quentin Tarantino there are two distinctly different universes. First there is the "real world" where films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs take place. These films tend to be shot rather simply in  long takes and on real locations. On the flip-side there is the "movie universe" which consists of movies characters in the "real world" would go see, stuff like Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds. These films are characterized by bravura camera moves and highly stylized sets. Up until Basterds, the scale was pretty balanced. Three films in the "real world", three films in the "movie universe". Yet as we can already see in the trailer for Django Unchained, that balance is about to shift in favor of the "movie universe". Is this a good thing?

When Quentin first made the changeover from Jackie Brown to Kill Bill it was like a revelation. We were granted a chance to see an artist spread his wings and soar. Suddenly the dialogue guy was doing action, and doing it well. And if you thought it was a fluke there was the car-chase in Death Proof to confirm it as the real deal. And then there was Inglorious Basterds... Now please don't get me wrong, Basterds is by no means a bad film (I actually saw it twice on opening weekend and own the blu-ray) but to me it feels a bit like Tarantino starting to crest. I don't care who you are, if you're constantly trying to out-do yourself, you are eventually going to find yourself running out of steam.

How do I out-do the House of Blue Leaves and that car chase? WORLD WAR II!

Three years later...

How do I out-do World War II? SLAVERY!

But where do you go after slavery? A Bible story? The story of creation? Is Tarantino going to become the next Tim Burton, hopping from genre to genre, putting his little spin on it (verbose dialogue, graphic violence and anachronistic music), and moving on to the next one? And at what point does style become self-parody? Orson Welles once explained style thusly:

A man goes to his doctor and says, 'I don't know what's the matter with me, Doc, but I just don't feel right.' So the doctor says, 'All right - well, tell me everything you do from the moment you wake up till you go to sleep.' The guys says, 'OK - well, I wake up, then I vomit, then I brush my...' 'Wait a second,' the doctor says, 'you mean right after you wake up every morning you vomit?' The man says, ' Yeah, doesn't everybody?' That's me and my supposedly strange way of seeing things. To me it all seems quite normal.

Has Quentin reached the point where he has to gag himself in order to vomit? Discuss!