Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

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already a couple years out of date too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)

It all starts with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJJYVORSP_w&t=92s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJJYVORSP_w&t=92s

Well...I don't know: I thought you just had to adjust the https on a YouTube. Anyway, it's at youtube.com/watch?v=eJJYVORSP_w&t=92s.

looks like first weekend will be between 40-45 million, QT's best opening weekend ever

That old Manson magic. Public can't get enough of it.

Was messaging with a Gen-X friend who's a playwright and who also grew up as a Helter Skelter fan and wroteL "For me, it was like the monsters came alive. Sheesh, us Gen Xers have had those specters haunting us for 50 yrs. Good “what if” tale that tries to exorcise that pain."

And it's true that as 70s kids we grew up with the cynicism of everything having a "dark underbelly" and to me as well the movie has a tone that feels like SoCal Tarantino in a world where Manson never existed.

Right, of course it's on a significantly smaller scale than WWII - but it is a shared cultural trauma nonetheless.

"shared cultural trauma" lol stop it!

How is it not? By no means is it WWII but it’s an American tragedy nonetheless - is “shared pop cultural trauma” any better?

I've talked to a few friends that want to see it based on ads and they don't really seem to know Manson has anything to do with it

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

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Saturday, July 27, 2019 11:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Dismantling the social safety net, speeding the world toward climate apocalypse....liking Quentin Tarantino....six of one, half dozen of the other

Imo Manson has next to nothing to do with this movie. Manson does have everything to do with the last 20 minutes or so, but then again, I'm not sure if the last 20 minutes or so have anything to do with the movie either.

seemed obv to me that the last 20 mins is the alternative fiction jumping off pt to the whole thing & qt worked backwards from there; idk if the movie works w/o it (to the extent it 'works'); agree w jordan that idk why this was made + it is p indulgent; that said, its absolutely the qt movie i've enjoyed the most since the kill bills

The ending was an almost out of body experience for me and my family,

flappy family

☺️

hey uppmiss, I was talkin bout culture only, like pushing the Beatles in yer face nonstop awww boohoo

I liked that Sharon Tate is depicted as a slapstick comedienne rather than a tragic, sacrificial love goddess. But the total film is an extensive and expansive wankfest for Tarantino.

Thought this was personal, idiosyncratic, rich, beautifully designed, and utterly pointless / mildly insulting

So basically on recent par

it's true that as 70s kids we grew up with the cynicism of everything having a "dark underbelly"

See also: growing up any time during the entire 20th century. The 70's don't have no special claims.

(xpost) If you delete mildly insulting, that's a perfect description of my reaction to Phantom Thread.

Phantom Thread had more laughs.