Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

.i did not realize it was supposed to have actually happened,

It helps if one knows something about the Green Hornet show, which was filmed in '66-'67.

BTW, I believe the whole Green Hornet series is up in watchable quality rips on YouTube, and it's worth checking out if you're into '60s action stuff.

Tarantino loves two things: "cinema" in some abstract way, and sadistic violence. Consequently, the "cinema" that he loves concretely is the metagenre of, you know, very violent movies: classical westerns, samurai films, war pictures, gangster sagas, the world of the grindhouse.

— Joshua Clover (@joshuaclov3r) July 30, 2019

Also: Feet

I don't see the Manson Family as portrayed here as representative of hippies or leftists. I think he sees them as murderers akin to the historical villains of his other films. With their bloodthirstiness and cop-out excuses about TV violence they strike me more as antecedents of the mass shooters of today.

Also, the film's one anti-hippie rant that I remember comes from Rick, a buffoon even when sober, who at that moment is totally drunk and oblivious.

Every single person making any comment about feet in this movie should be barred from all forms of public speech for one month, unless it can be shown that they have previously made a minimum of twenty complaints about directors who habitually show actors using hands, body language or facial expressions to convey character.

with the caveat that I haven't seen this movie & probably won't, Clover's thread feels weird to me from its opening gambit: "x love y. consequently" hold up hold up. why/how "abstract" - is T's use of reference-as-vocabulary "abstract"? Is allusion abstraction? what work is "loves" doing in this thread? etc

yeah seriously who gives a shit that you saw some fucking feet in a movie

But feet aren't one of the half dozen or so body parts that are regularly fetishized in movies and other media, so eww.

I've never seen certain people more satisfied with themselves and happy to repeat the joke than when they figure out a glaringly obvious recurring theme in a famous director's work.

I don't see the Manson Family as portrayed here as representative of hippies or leftists.

point of fact, Manson was not a hippie or leftist, he was a vicious little crook who quickly sussed out that the hippie scene was full of easy marks. he was explicitly racist and race war was at the heart of his agenda/philosophy. he was influenced by dale carnegie which he had read in a prison stint.

this was a great book that really cut through the mythology and was grippingly told.

https://www.amazon.com/Manson-Life-Times-Charles/dp/1451645171/ref=asc_df_1451645171/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312176338241&hvpos=1o3&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17098841435305716303&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019659&hvtargid=aud-643191255296:pla-567197841809&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=60258870897&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312176338241&hvpos=1o3&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17098841435305716303&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9019659&hvtargid=aud-643191255296:pla-567197841809

xxxxxp

just the feet of woman, sic. And if you already don't rate his work the sense he is jerking off on the job makes it even more fucking unpalatable.

Tarantino's ongoing goal as a director seems, to me, to attempt to tell increasingly meandering shaggy dog stories while having moments of tight dialog punctuated by absurdist violence and a thin overarching plot

Mission accomplished on this one. The Bruce Lee fight is pure fantasy and is one of a handful of scenes that strain credulity. I can't remember what I recently read or listened to that made the point that filmmakers are discouraged from breaking the fourth wall in any way in a lot of films of the modern era, but this movie does so in a handful of obvious ways that some reviews are taking too literally.

And if you already don't rate his work the sense he is jerking off on the job makes it even more fucking unpalatable.

Why did you pay to go to the film, then?

Every single person making any comment about feet in this movie should be barred from all forms of public speech for one month, unless it can be shown that they have previously made a minimum of twenty complaints about directors who habitually show actors using hands, body language or facial expressions to convey character.

― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Tuesday, July 30, 2019 12:31 PM (one hour ago)

this is so obtuse. he has a foot thing. it's the equivalent of a male director always having his female stars have their breasts out. it's for his own titillation.

is there a scene inside Musso & Franks?

xp: It could be for everybody's titillation if they'd just open their goddamn minds to some erotic podiatry.

What is the issue with his foot fetish

xxxp lol not seen it and never will cos he bores me to death. just responding to other people's comments on how much gratuitous female foot fetish porn he has done this time.

it's the equivalent of a male director always having his female stars have their breasts out.

he's not Russ Meyer. It's the equivalent of a male director having a single boob shot in a majority of films, which is hardly some novel or unusual transgression.

er single boob shot per film in a majority of his films

ie Tarantino averages one female foot shot per film, with a few exceptions noted upthread (Reservoir Dogs, Hateful Eight, and Django)

are you people still HERE?

xxxp lol not seen it and never will cos he bores me to death. just responding to other people's comments on how much gratuitous female foot fetish porn he has done this time.

also i don't think that is inherently problematic for a film to reflect a director's sexuality, as such i'm pretty confused why he gets so much hate for this especially when it's always been such a minute FOOTnote in his films

i first noticed it in kill bill vol. 1, and despite what people on twitter think, it's not a very interesting thing to notice

xposts!

Morbs: yes, and outside

he has a foot thing.

that's nice, dear

it's for his own titillation.

a) when Tate puts her feet up in the theatre, it's an indicator of how she's dropping the presentation of her dressed-up day out. She wasn't recognised outside, though she really wanted to be; in the darkness afterward she relaxes into celebrating herself, shoes off and feet up as though she's at home.

Cliff is the most casual character in the film before Pussycat re-suceeds at hitching. Tate is making an image. Rick is starting to unravel because his image has collapsed and he doesn't know how to make a new one. Lee is hypersensitive to how hard he has to work be taken seriously at all, then again to be acknowledged on top of that. Janet is hypervigilant to keeping her set running smoothly and safely for hundreds of workers. Schwarz is constantly "on." Wanamaker wears a blowdried coif and a cape to go to work in dust. Throughout, Cliff projects an ease and a lack of face, from his carriage to his clothes to the carelessness with which he serves Brandy.
When Pussycat puts her feet on his dash, squishing the pads against the windscreen, he's reframed as an example of uptight society, not a barely-engaged outsider from it. His car is kinda shitty, maybe, but he has a car. His denim is weathered, but it's a style. The scene sets up the new protagonist-type role he's going to take in the following third of the film. Pussycat flexes her toes for sheer celebratory pleasure; Cliff has until now been the film's character most comfortable in his body, but now we see that by contrast he's wary, tense, and conscious.

Bridget Fonda wiggling her toes at DeNiro in Jackie Brown is sexual: this is not a flaw. Characters in film lean over to display cleavage, and they flex biceps and hold, and they touch each other's faces, and they let legs show through long slits in dresses or from behind curtains. Humans have bodies in real life too. DeNiro's character has not had female contact in years, and probably has no particular interest in feet. Fonda's character is able to spark his libido out in the open before Odell leaves, and in a way that puts him on the back foot, by flirting at him with her feet. If another director would have had her drop an ice cube down her bikini, or had Joe Mangianello bend at the waist to tie his shoe in a gas station, that doesn't make QT incorrect to have Fonda bend her tarsals.

b) stop the fucking presses, Quentin Tarantino puts his personal interests into his movies? holy shit what a revelation, let's go back and excise every one of his obsessions from every script he's ever written so that they immediately become 90% more interesting

To me, the foot thing is just a funny and peculiar maker's mark that we can have fun with too.

holy canoli I'm starting to think ilx has a foot fetish

I like Orson Welles' remarks about Luis Bunuel:

He's a rich feeding ground for that sort of critic, because it's all true about him. You can take off and say he likes feet and all that. Jesus, it's all true. He's that kind of intellectual, and that kind of Catholic. He is a deeply Christian man who hates God as only a Christian can, and, of course, he's very Spanish. I see him as the most supremely religious director in the history of the movies. A superb kind of person he must be. Everyone loves him.

Booming post sic

xp

please don't sully Bunuel by bringing him to a thread dedicated to an overindulged hollywood hack.

Complain all you want, Tarantino will not be defeated.

he still sez he's quitting after the next film

and the world / will be a better place

morbs you’re going to see to it though right

lol see it*

not even if it's a Star Trek

take 57 of the kill bill foot scene:

QT: i think we nearly got it that time

Going back to the Lee scene for a sec, I feel it serves dual purposes not yet discussed (or at least under-discussed).

A. It illustrates part of why Booth is seen as damaged goods and a troublemaker. While on the clock he literally gets into a fight with one of the stars of the show, which unto itself is/was a reason for getting fired and/or blacklisted. Booth pretty much only has a career afterwards because Dalton is still getting work and making it a package deal, but as we see, even that isn't a sure thing anymore.

B. It lets the audience in that Booth is the kind of guy who can and will go toe-to-toe with someone like Bruce Lee. Later on, in his encounters w/the tire slashing guy and ultimately the would-be killers, the audience's sense of suspense is slightly removed and replaced with anticipation of just how severely he's gonna fuck 'em up.

someone lmk when you all stop talking about feet

but also: great post, sic!!

Self-XP

I noticed on another forum someone alluding to a similar thing happening re: Dalton & the two flamethrower scenes early on, kind of a 'Chekov's Flamethrower' thing.

also, to your point about Cliff being the 'superhero' of the movie: the jump sound effects when he's fixing the TV antenna early on (which is also a callback to Kill Bill)

if we had a best original critical dialogue of the week feature, sic would have a strong contender with that post

agree with all, Pitt’s fictional character defeating fictionalized Bruce Lee isn’t an intentional slight on the real Lee, it’s a nod toward the audience that this is a character in a movie and that we’re to believe he’s going to do extraordinary things

Yeah, that scene was such a goof I don't see why anyone would take issue with it. Bruce Lee's reputation (like that of Muhammed Ali, for that matter) is downright legendary, so getting his ass kicked by a fictional stunt man? BFD.

Now, why anyone should care that Brad Pitt's character can do that and other things, I don't know, but he's pretty entertaining doing them.

Random thoughts:

- Loved the recreation of 1969 LA, as someone who spends a lot of time immersed in the era as a result of various interests and research projects. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much had I not been able to geek out over the little details ("hey, there's that club I saw mentioned in the Free Press archives!")

- If you dug the bursts of KHJ, check out www.reelradio.com — hours of old airchecks from KHJ and other markets.

- I wouldn't have cared for the ending all that much either way, but the almost cartoon-like dispatching of the Family didn't sit that well after seeing Charlie Says. Obviously, they did a horrible crime, but considering the abuse the Manson women themselves suffered (both from Charlie and their backgrounds), it felt a bit gross, not much like the satisfaction of killing off a bunch of Nazis.

- I thought the use of a flamethrower was interesting, reminded me of a lot of Vietnam imagery. Considering Rick (and the film) represents the old generation that the counterculture displaces, perhaps no coincidence it's from one of his World World II movies — a clear "good guys vs bad guys" conflict, as opposed to the war those hippies types Rick hates are protesting.

Cliff doesn't even defeat Lee - Bruce takes one (1) fall in the sizing-up section of a constrained spar, before Lee is taking Cliff seriously.

(The moment felt unsatisfying to me because of the cheat of the off-screen throw, and cartoonish dent & foley, but the scene is showing there's much more to Cliff than his mien and ambition indicate. It's not saying that Lee was less than his demonstrated skill & incredible ability IRL.)

A little detail I liked about Cliff is all the scars you can see all over his body throughout the movie.

the thing people are complaining about is not so much that he beats bruce lee but that the film depicts bruce lee as an asshole

there's also the whole racial connotations which don't really need to be explained.

At least he didn't have Bruce Lee using the n word.

but that the film depicts bruce lee as an asshole

it does not do this in any way

Eh, sure it does. At least a little.