How It's Used

“What we have here is a standoff worthy of a spaghetti western. The players in this high-stakes confrontation are the domestic auto companies, their creditors, their unions, their dealers and elected officials in Washington. Each party seeks advantage by pointing the equivalent of loaded guns at the other parties. But none really wants to pull the trigger, knowing nobody is likely to emerge a winner in the ensuing financial and political shootout.”

—Steven Pearlstein, “The Big Three's Stalemate,” The Washington Post, December 3, 2008, p. D01.

“Taken as a yin-yang whole, 'Kill Bill Vol. 1' and 'Vol. 2' constitute a globe-spanning feat of genre scholarship, blithely connecting the dots from Chinese kung fu to Japanese swordplay, from blaxploitation to manga to spaghetti Western."

—Dennis Lim, "Quentin Tarantino: Has one of the most overrated directors of the '90s become one of the most underrated of the aughts?" Slate, August 20, 2009.

“But [Quentin] Tarantino, a famously derivative filmmaker, has managed to create out of these parts something that seems entirely new: a story of emotionally uncomplicated, physically threatening, non-morally-anguished Jews dealing out spaghetti-Western justice to their would-be exterminators."

—Jeffrey Goldberg, "Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger," The Atlantic, September, 2009.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
The Four Cardinal Directions

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Spaghetti Westerns