Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

Loved this. Could have happily watched a 6 hour cut.

I got emotional and teared up at the ending, the aerial shot seeing them all come out of the house to meet Rick, mentally reminded of the actual scene at the house by that time. I thought it was a unique & good way to honor their memory.

Charlie doesn’t need to be in the movie calling the shots. His presence is felt from the moment Cliff encounters the first girl. The movie doesn’t give him a pass at all - he’s THERE by proxy, you know that everything that comes out of their mouths is his spoonfeeding. That’s plenty. The mythology of him is already stupidly powerful - giving him any more screentime would weigh the dreamlike fairytale tone of the movie down too much imo.

i thought this was boring & i don't really understand why it was made

(xpost) That defense makes more sense to me than the idea of him as a footnote, that the best way to get revenge on a vainglorious blowhard is to ignore him--cf. current president.

i thought this was boring & i don't really understand why it was made

to make money

That's exactly what I meant - Manson himself is reduced to a footnote (he's not ignored, he does appear). VG otm, we all know the history and it hangs over every scene. that's what makes the ending so thrilling. Obviously QT isn't saying that Manson was insignificant - this is a fairytale, a dream like I said. And a triumphant one.

xxxp @clemenza

I think we're gonna have to disagree (or at least I'm going continue seeing it as a puzzling choice). If I understand Tarantino's reasons for rewriting history, then take a blow-torch to Manson too. I agree it would be a mistake to have him in the film much more than he is--it's not a film about him, plus what VG said about knowing all that stuff already--but in the film's universe, Manson lives and he's still out there walking around. I don't mean to get all stodgy and literal, least of all with this film, but that just doesn't seem right to me.

In clicking around today, found out that the part of George Spahn was originally given to Burt Reynolds...not sure if I knew that at any point in the last two years.

I loved the way QT spun Tex’s actual line from the murders — making them look as pathetic as they were

Cliff - (something like) “What was your name again?”

Tex - “I'm the devil, and I came to do the devil's business"

Cliff - “Naw it was dumber than that. Rex or something?”

Funniest line in the film.

There was almost an hour in the middle of the movie where nothing happened. It just dawdled with none of Tarantino's esprit.

Not seeing this until tomorrow night, and a little disappointed in letting myself be spoiled, but also fascinated by how polarized opinions have been so far.

I'll catch this at some point but it might be years from now.

Guessing the soundtrack does not include Guns N' Roses cover of "Look At Your Game Girl."

George Spahn (Burt Reynolds): "Do you girls have names?"
Susan Atkins: "I'm 'Sexy Sadie'--my friend's name is Squeaky."
Spahn: "Those are great names!"

(Sorry, Moodles...just assume anyone reading the thread at this point has seen it or doesn't care about learning details beforehand.)

I'm not blaming anyone but myself

but in the film's universe, Manson lives and he's still out there walking around. I don't mean to get all stodgy and literal, least of all with this film, but that just doesn't seem right to me.

Good point. Then again, a lot of burnouts and acid casualties could've been Manson. There were plenty of candidates. But it's a good point, even in the fairytale world of the film. Even though the three get annihilated, neither Cliff nor Rick can give the police any details or clues about where they came from or their motives. Even their car was gone. So for now you're right, the Manson family basically escapes, probably keeps a low profile for a bit, maybe tries again. But I think to not include him at all would've been much more ominous and menacing. Who knows how they would react to this version of events. Ultimately I think it's beside the point because this is not a film to be taken literally and it's not really about Manson or Tate - if Jackie Brown was about aging, OUATIH is about being old. And I take that last scene as a kind of raging against the dying of the light.

I sort of agree with Alfred about the middle but I'm still swooning over the ending enough to excuse it, and will reconsider it on second viewing sometime this week.

if Tex & crew get killed and noone knows who they are and the whole city doesnt fly into a horrified panic, the Manson balloon deflates. The girls start to wonder if he is maybe full of it. He’s stuck stalking Terry Melcher about his record deal until the girls get sick of him. He loses a lot of his power with that imaginary incident & it’s fucking great.

Sorry to bang on.

My favorite second act scene: Robbie reveling in the small courtesies shown her in the theater. Everyone wants to be a star.

"Even though the three get annihilated, neither Cliff nor Rick can give the police any details or clues about where they came from or their motives. "

well cliff was at the ranch and will remember after he recovers that he encountered them there. Remember they didn't even tie Manson to the murders for some time and they only got arrested due to theft charges.

I like it when Cliff can't remember the line exactly : "he said "i'm the devil and I'm here to do some....devil shit"

Only two things made me raise my guard a bit: not sure what the point of Cliff having killed his wife was; and I started to squirm a little with the girl actress but it didn't get creepy.

sorry, girl "actor" as she stated.

yea was the wife murder a reference to something? Was very specific - did anyone Hollywood adjacent get harpooned by their spouse on a boat?

True true about Cliff at the ranch

There seemed to be a darker Cliff story that was kept just in the shadows. Like his two weeks on a chain gang, or that close up of a gun he had in his trailer, etc. I did like that he was essentially an impervious superhero, someone who could kick Bruce Lee's ass and bounce up to a roof in three cartoonish leaps (replete with sound effects!). Though I don't know what any of that means, if anything.

More fantasy

well, he sure knows how to kill

and is happy to oblige if the opportunity presents itself

i thought this was boring & i don't really understand why it was made

nerds gotta nerd, esp over bad Hollywood stuff from '69

yr inner life must be so very rich

As much as I loved the movie overall, Cliff’s fight with Bruce Lee bummed me out. I get the macho stuntguy fantasy of beating Lee, but that always felt racist af. it just felt like bad faith to me. I mean, Cliff IS “that guy” but even so.

aero posted this thread this morning:

If it's a "white boy fantasy" that a white guy could best Bruce Lee, it's the same kind of fantasy that would posit Lee as the ultimate test of fighting ability for a fictional white guy. Your racism is either bigoted or paternalistic. Who would win? Bruce or imaginary guy?

— Walter Chaw 周瑜 (@mangiotto) July 26, 2019

POLANSKI'S AUSTIN POWERS SUIT

that was awesome

RIGHT??

already a couple years out of date too

Really, deeply loved the soundtrack. Full tilt AM radio boogie, suited the vibe of the movie perfectly.

cmon man, THREE Paul Revere tracks and not even one Tommy James? You cut me deep, QT. (Paul Revere and the Raiders are awesome so it’s not even really a complaint)

i thought cliff's backstory was a reference to robert wagner and natalie wood. serving in the story only to reinforce that he shouldn't be messed with.

At the beginning I thought the movie was going to have Rick Dalton taking his movie cowboy persona from the real Cliff but it didn't happen.

the wood murder happened in the 80’s though? be kind of a weird pull imo

Gen X's elevation of this subliterate to cultural godhead will never be forgiven. Puts all boomer crimes in perspective.

http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/elnb.gif

Riiiight! Natalie Wood, of course. That is the case that resembles it the most (it is a bit of a stretch time wise though I agree). But like so much of this movie and QT that scene is an amalgam and I also thought of Chappaquiddick, Dennis Wilson, Brian Jones...

This movie made me very sad as the day went on.

It reminds me most of California Split - another hangout movie that appears aimless and meandering before a profound sense of loss that lingered as melancholy at first sets in - and The Image Book, another death rattle for movies. Godard speaks of the cinema as "a necessary utopia" at the very end, and to me that's what the ending of Once Upon a Time is, a fantasy of a better world, a world where history is rewritten and justice is served. It's escapism at its most humane, not in spite of its violence but because of it. It's a universal, prefrontal primate wish for the "evil people" to be the ones to die brutally painful deaths. I don't think it's juvenile to imagine these things, we all do - they are often involuntary. At its best the cinema offers us a pressure valve to vicariously realize our most impossible dreams and primitive, instinctual desires.

I agree with A.O. Scott that QT's worldview is conservative, and unlike The Image Book, this film does not offer a way forward for the medium. It's an ode, an Irish wake as one writer (or Letterboxd user?) described, but ultimately it is escapism. And I think it's curious that QT chose to make his Hollywood eulogy set in 1969, a year before the greatest decade in American movies began. I suppose there is optimism here in that sense, that just as the sun set on Rick and Cliff in 1969, it rose and set on New Hollywood, and it has set now on 35mm film. And if QT thinks that celluloid is necessary for the medium, then his position is justified. I don't agree, and as grim as Godard's film is, at least its construction offers us so many new ways forward even as it is lamenting the "slow dissolution of one century into the next."

on to the Alfred the Butler origin story TV series, VG

lol

I avoided reading anything about the central hinge of the plot prior to viewing and it felt like a more impactful if less world-altering alternate history than Inglorious I’d guess that the movie is a composite of different things Tarantino’s wanted to use, from tv and spaghetti westerns to the cultural transition of the time and, of course, that central twist that the threads spin backward from.

Manson only briefly appearing and mentioned only when all of the leads are off-camera seemed apt, less a powerfully controlling dark force and prime mover role than so many other fictions have given him, but without removing culpability.

It’s more subtle but while Tate’s destiny is severed from the Manson cult, she’s also removed from being Polanski’s tragedy — he’s ephemeral in the plot, and there’s that nearly throwaway line about how she has a type and she’d end up with one of these guys. So her legacy isn’t linked to Polanski at all by film’s end, divorcing her from all of history’s negative stakes

I can never get past the NY Times paywall anymore ("Yes you can--pay!"), but they've got a piece about the film by one of the people I most wanted to hear from: Ed Sanders.

It's escapism at its most humane, not in spite of its violence but because of it. It's a universal, prefrontal primate wish for the "evil people" to be the ones to die brutally painful deaths.

Poetic as your defense is, you are positing that the primitive desire to see people you hate writhing in their painful death throes is the "most humane" of fantasies. That's not how I would use that word.

Exaggeration got the best of me. You're right, it is not the most humane of fantasies but it is the most humane catharsis of this primate wish. Off the top of my head, Spike Lee offers two similarly naively optimistic fantasy endings in He Got Game and 25th Hour. I was completely blindsided by the ending of La La Land, a movie that doesn't offer much except for its fantasy ending, a montage that actually does show what cinema can do in a much wider and truly humane scope than Once Upon a Time. But weren't many people moved by the similarly over the top and gruesome spectacle at the end of Inglourious Basterds? I saw the ending of Once Upon a Time as similarly exultant, because I don't personally hate the Manson family, I have no connection to them or the Nazis other than a shared cultural trauma. And to reverse reality as QT does in both films, is an act of compassion I think, violent as it may be.

I think our concept of compassion differs somewhat radically, too.

I was unmoved by the gruesome spectacle at the end of IB. As Katherine Hepburn said in The African Queen, "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were placed on earth to rise above.

But weren't many people moved by the similarly over the top and gruesome spectacle at the end of Inglourious Basterds?

I brought this up earlier, because as a "shared cultural trauma" the impact of WWII was, obviously, vastly wider and more impactful in scale. There have been hundreds of "what if?" WWII scenarios explored in art, not least because it truly is a "shared" cultural trauma that affected hundreds of millions of people around the world. Ergo, the fantasy of killing Hitler is one that's been similarly shared by countless people. It's even a trope (killing baby Hitler, etc.). But Manson? He's nowhere near that level. It would be akin to the movie concluding with Cliff and Rick rescuing Meredith Hunter at Altamont.

I wonder if Tarantino has a notebook filled with epochal events he could subvert. "What if Bruce Lee lived to foil the 9/11 hijackers?" "What if the Titanic didn't sink and was subsequently converted into a WWI battleship?" "What if Custer didn't die at Little Bighorn?"

"What if Donald Trump had won the presidency?"

(I'm sure that one is crossed out in his notebook)