Once Upon a Time In Hollywood

[Piano Mouth]

The 9th feature film from our friend Quentin Tarantino. The trailer looks good, but not as good as the footage they had on IMDB, which goes on to describe the film and some fun facts surrounding it in more detail of course than the actual trailer. Anyone planning on seeing it opening weekend?

Official Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeMaP8EPAA

[Steve Minkin]

Opens next Thursday locally, we'll might catch it Friday or Saturday.

[Piano Mouth]

It comes to our theater in two days, I'll probably see this a few times in the theater with different friends. I'm planning on going to the first showing tho during the day haha.

[Steve Minkin]

.

[Steve Minkin]

Whatchya think Piano Mouth?

My wife and I saw it tonight, and were underwhelmed. We thought it was too long, too leisurely, too unfocused (indulgent?), with a weak and rambling plot vector. There was much to like about the film -- it's a film about films and tv that is often revealing and fascinating in its backlot looks and technical digressions. The all-star cast delivers almost uniformly fine performances. In many ways, the film humanizes and embraces the daily lives of Hollywood folks. It's set in 1969, so there's a lot of great music (although starting off with Roy Head's "Treat Her Right" pretty much guaranteed it was all downhill after that).

I think if they cut an hour from the movie they'd improve it, although it would still need a more involving plot to really work. And yet there's still so much of interest I might still recommend it, certainly to anybody with a keen interest in films.

[Piano Mouth]

I liked how they set it up to be a twist on the Manson killings, which made the movie I think. Otherwise, it would have been kind of dull and boring, there were parts they should have cut out, the scenes with the little child actress was really dumb imo.

[Dan Warburton]

I liked how they set it up to be a twist on the Manson killings, which made the movie I think. Otherwise, it would have been kind of dull and boring, there were parts they should have cut out, the scenes with the little child actress was really dumb imo.

No, I think the clash between her Method Acting and Leo's approach to his job is an important element of Tarantino's explanation of his character. My own take on this film coming up

[Dan Warburton]

Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time.. In Hollywood, 2019

I like reading the review aggegrator over at Rotten Tomatoes, especially the negative write-ups (the ones with a green splat next to 'em), if they happen to be of a film I enjoyed. Or, if it's something I didn't care for, I'm curious as to why others thrilled. I like to check out the opposing point of view, which probably explains my aversion to social media, wondering why people would willingly subscribe to a system that provides information and opinion that only reflects their point of view on everything and little else. Case in point, I'm seriously anti-Brexit but I've spent plenty of time lately reading Dominic Cummings' blog. So here are three green-splat review of QT's penultimate (if we're to believe him when he says he's going to retire after ten movies) film - and I was so relieved it didn't begin with a huge screen with The Ninth Film Of Quentin Tarantino in red Django typeface:

https://www.salon.com/2019/07/30/once-u ... ist-worst/
https://altfilmlens.wordpress.com/2019/ ... ns-review/
http://ex-press.com/2019/07/26/review-o ... hollywood/

From here on, if you haven't seen the film, don't read the following. No, please. There's no point discussing this film if you don't mention the ending, really. Just as QT rewrote history in Basterds (Hitler and his inner circle got blown away) and Django Unchained (the slaves burnt down the plantation), in Once Upon the four Manson Family hippies pick the house next to Sharon Tate's, which happens to belong to Rick, Leo DiCaprio's character, and get wiped out themselves by Leo's trusty sidekick stunt double Cliff (Brad Pitt). Then, when it's all over and Pitt gets trolleyed off to hospital to recover from a stab wound in the thigh - which didn't stop him beating one of the hippy chick's head to a bloody pulp in what must be the most vicious headbashing since Irreversible - Leo nips next door for cocktails with Sharon, Abigail, Jay and Wojciech.

I wonder what this will all mean to anyone unfamiliar with the Manson Family backstory, and with the received notion that the Tate killings, along with the Altamont festival four months later, were somehow pivotal moments in history (Hollywood history, American history, world history...), somehow as significant as the King and Kennedy assassinations that preceded them. The assumption is that Manson ordered his goons to go to 10050 Cielo Drive because Terry Melcher (whose lack of interest in Manson's music basically put an end to his dreams of pop stardom) used to live there. It just so happened that Terry had moved out and the place had since been rented to Roman Polanski and his young bride. Bad luck. So why did the Tate killings assume such epochal importance? Was it because she was an actress "on the cusp of world fame"? Or because she was eight months pregnant? Not much mention is ever made of the four other victims that night, and the two unfortunate LaBiancas the following night. Indeed, if it had been the LaBiancas on August 9th, would the story have gone viral, as we say today? I doubt it. There's a nice exchange between Manson and prosecutor Bugliosi at the end of Helter Skelter (don't know if these were the words really spoken, but I like to think so) - as Charlie is being led away to the cells, he stops to speak to the prosecutor:
"I almost did it, didn't I? I almost pulled it off, almost made it." ["it" being the apocalyptic Helter Skelter race war he dreamt of kickstarting] To which Bugliosi replies:
"No, Charlie, you weren't even close. You killed some people, that's what you did. You accomplished murder. You took a bunch of sad kids, human flotsam, and you played jailhouse games on them. That's it, Charlie. You're not even important anymore."

That's the point. I suspect the reason Quentin chose to depict Sharon as little more than a wide-eyed, starstruck Barbie doll having fun watching herself in her own movie (pretty dire, too, that scene from The Wrecking Crew) is that he probably doesn't care much for the story either. The Tate murder is just a peg to hang his circus on. But in choosing this particular event as the anchor for his story - though to be fair, the film is more "about" Pitt and DiCaprio's declining careers, and of course QT's own obsessions, from spaghetti westerns to Italian cop films to exploitation flicks to Red Apple cigarettes to feet - he runs the risk of losing (confusing? alienating?) those who don't remember or never learnt what went down that night. Which means that the movie seems to have been made more for people of Quentin's generation and older, nuts like me who, once the blood alcohol level has crossed a certain threshold, will start spouting lines from Pulp Fiction (and Monty Python, and Fawlty Towers, and Snatch...) in inebriated nostalgia. We've all grown older together - how many times while watching did I think "Christ, s/he's really aged.." watching the Tarantino veterans trot out on parade: Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell, Michael Madsen, all, like me, older, fatter, greying and wrinkled.

So, for old QT heads like me, I have to say I enjoyed myself. Typically self-indulgent, of course, certainly at least twenty minutes too long, rather suspiciously lacking in good quotable lines (my favourite being Pitt's reply when he returns young hippy Pussycat back to the Spahn Ranch), accompanied by a predictably fine soundtrack, with solid performances from the lead actors and some truly impressive cinematography. Tarantino's masterpiece, as some of journalists gush? I don't think so, myself, but I'd say it's the best thing he's done since Basterds.

[Steve Minkin]

There's no point discussing this film if you don't mention the ending, really.

See, my wife and I both thought the counterfactual ending was so contrived, such an obvious pandering to Tarantino's big fans (of which we're not), that the film needed to succeed before the big bloody finish; and for us it didn't, it was slow and boring.

[Dan Warburton]

How do you guys look back on the Tate murders, and other key events of the period, Steve (forgive me if I'm wrong but I am assuming you were a tad older than I was when it all went down - I was 6 in 1969 )? Just curious. I suspect most people under the age of 40 will have to be reminded who Charles Manson was.

[Steve Minkin]

How do you guys look back on the Tate murders, and other key events of the period, Steve (forgive me if I'm wrong but I am assuming you were a tad older than I was when it all went down - I was 6 in 1969 )? Just curious. I suspect most people under the age of 40 will have to be reminded who Charles Manson was.

Yes, I had just turned 25, was a month away from moving from San Francisco to Sonoma County, where I've been for the past 50 years.

The chaos of '68 & '69 was like nothing else-- MLK, Bobby Kennedy, the ongoing war, the election of Nixon, the collapse of Haight-Ashbury ('68), the Manson killings and Altamont ('69). So it was part of a string of grisly news stories to which we were all becoming a little too hardened. The biggest impact of the Tate-LaBianca killings was felt locally, in the film and music communities of LA -- so I suspect Tarantino's finish plays better in Hollywood. For most of us, it was yet another unpleasant story in a multi-year-long stretch of bad news, and among the least important of the catastrophes.

There was a bit of a darkening of the attitude to hippies and alternative culture types, but that had already been underway with the collapse of the Haight and other places as the gentler people and drugs were supplanted by hard core drugs and more aggressive personalities. The northern exodus (to Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, and to Oregon and Washington) was well underway. Sonoma County was a safe haven -- I started a literary and arts little magazine the following year, and we had great advertising support from the local merchants.

The most genuine positive feedback I've heard about the film (by people who didn't like the film overall) concerned the depiction of Bruce Dern's old western movie lot where the gang hid out -- local friends from Southern California say that they thought the physical space and the gang's mood accurately portrayed the gang's staging area. Being from SoCal, they have more vivid memories of the killings than Rita and I.

I used to like Tarantino. But if the end-point of every movie is a revenge-oriented blood bath (like all those Elizabethan revenge dramas, Hamlet and Titus included), I'm out as a fan. This is the first film of Tarantino's we've seen in a while. It may well be the last.

I am interested in seeing Jakob Dylan's film "Echo In The Canyon," about the music scene in Laurel Canyon, 65-'67.

[walto]

Everybody here liked it.

[jon abbey]

finally saw this and was pretty irritated by it, Tarantino seems to write in the same voice for all of his characters, even the 8 year old girl here (reminded me of Mamet, not really a compliment). there was some good acting (Brad Pitt and Margaret Qualley particularly) and I would actually be pretty curious to see the five hour version (although not if it was more commercials and old movie recreations, it is rare to see a director disappear as far up his own ass as QT does during the spaghetti western montage here) but the revisionist history I just thought was stupid and juvenile, another subpar effort from our man Quentin.

also since he is so keen to have his career looked at in a macro sense with its ten films (this is number 9), it struck me that it seems quite clear that his first four (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill) are all clearly better than all of the next five (Death Proof, Inglorious Bastards, Django Unchained, Hateful Eight and this). I liked IB and DU even, but if you were going to stop, maybe you should have stopped at four and really been a legend.

[Dan Warburton]

Right. Retire early, or die young Not much fun in a bunch of old guys playing rock & roll.. Re OUATIH, I'll buy the DVD when it comes out just in time for Christmas (of course) and watch it again, a couple of times maybe. Three or four viewings are usually more than enough; I think I've seen JB five times, as I recall, RD, PF, DP & IB four, KB, H8 and DU twice (and will not be returning to that one: his weakest by far, imo).

[Mo Noyz]

People still buy DVD’s?!

[Antoine]

Even from Netflix: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/04/medi ... index.html

[Mo Noyz]

Even from Netflix: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/04/medi ... index.html

I had completely forgotten that Netflix still offered that service. A lot of excellent points made in that article, so thanks for sharing it.

I guess living here in Sleepy Hollow, USA and having “graduated” from DVD to Blu-ray to straight up HD digital downloads made me think the rest of the world certainly must have already beaten us to the punch.