I hate to be one of those guys, but the other night I was sitting at a bar and making nice with the couple next to me and I asked them all friendly-like if they'd seen Django Unchained. They said that they had, and I thought: Aw, perfect, we have a lot to talk about. And so I asked, "Did you like it?"—the traditional first question before launching into a shared reverie with some strangers about a thing you both just recently experienced. And the woman pinched up her face and said, "It was okay. It was fine." Okay? FINE?! "Fine" is what you say to the Rite Aid lady when she asks how your day is going. "Okay" is what you say when the lady at YogurtLand weighs your fro-yo and tells you how much you have to pay. Just to get a clearer picture of where these idiots were coming from, I asked if they liked Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds, and the woman said, disgustedly, "I just—he just looks really unhealthy, did you see him at the Academy Awards? He needs to go on a diet or something."

God, I really wanted to fly into a mini-rage. I definitely had a mini-rage brewing. Would have been so fun to shove all the glasses off the bar and stand on top of it and shout, "I'm not gonna take this shit anymore!" Just to frighten them into having better thoughts. I hate to be one of those people who, if you disagree with me, flies into a mini-rage, but not liking a movie because you think the filmmaker is fat is bonkers. Soon the lady was saying, "Is there like some law that on Capitol Hill everyone likes Quentin Tarantino?" and I was saying, "There should be!" and so on. And then I walked home in the worst mood, vowing never to strike up conversations with idiot strangers again. And then very soon after I woke up on a bright Saturday and read this wonderful piece in Vanity Fair looking back on the making of Pulp Fiction and felt so much better.

As Tarantino says: "I don’t make movies that bring people together. I make movies that split people apart." God bless him.