Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

xpost the analogy is constructed in a way that it becomes impossible to criticize the *way* the film uses this element, because... it's something in all of the director's films? that (a) seals each director from the rest of film so they can only be compared to themselves, despite the analogy's suggestion of a comparison to someone else (b) is patently silly. surely it would have been possible for someone to say "hitchcock's use of the hitchcock cameo in this film was distracting and inept" or "this time around spielberg's use of the ooh-ahh light on characters' faces came at a moment that for me felt tonally inappropriate" etc etc

'shit was cash' ... huh, well I'm sold.

You're right, that makes sense.

IYO, has QT ever used wild, cartoonish violence to appropriate effect?
xp

Worked better in Kill Bill because the entire film was cartoonish, and not going for a deeper meaning.

as i thought i made clear, i liked the ending of IB to name one example

Fair enough, that wasn't entirely clear to me from your posts- sorry to be pedantic

i mean the "it's a thing he's specializes in" argument is a nonstarter for me. like... so what? so there's no space to say "i thought it was the wrong move for this film" or "i thought it took the focus off the stuff that i really loved in the film" or "i enjoyed seeing this filmmaker grow and change and develop some new themes, so then it felt startlingly regressive, defensive and yes trollish for him to suddenly revert to lavish violence shots in a way that felt totally inorganic to the film" ?

the IB ending is very different imho. yes both involve historical bad people dying violently and there may be some satisfaction in that depending how much you are personally convinced by "what's even the question, these are bad people, they deserve whatever violence is done to them" arguments. (i find these less convincing at age 37 in 2019 than i perhaps did at other points, but this is just me personally.) but:

1. violence against women has different connotations, in a patriarchal misogynistic society, than violence against men. a character established as having murdered his wife beating a woman to death with his bare hands is very close to real violence that people in the audience might experience or have reasonable fear of, and thus changes the emotions that the scene calls forth for some audiences. again this is in a world where the filmmaker has been called out for relishing the suffering of women - this too changes the context. the film doesn't exist in a vacuum.

2. the crimes of hitler are more historic and far more severe than the crimes of the drugged out monsters manson manipulated. they are monsters and i'm okay with them being stopped by force but it's not reasonable to suggest that if you don't feel the same about them as you do about *adolf hitler* then there's something unfair or inconsistent in your reaction.

3. most importantly,

ah shit lost the best part of my post

The part right before the murders?

I just can't privilege Susan & Patricia's gender over their real life crimes. I am not a violent person, I have never been in a real fight or seriously physically hurt anyone, and I think the death penalty is barbaric and should be allowed and vigilante justice is not justice at all - but yeah, like boobie said, I have never enjoyed watching people die more than in this film. of course they're not Hitler, and I think QT relishes suffering in men & women pretty equally in his work. But Dr. C, I respect your position. The movie doesn't foreground Cliff's past at all, really brushes right past it (probably knowingly?), and I'd certainly be more amenable to complaints about the ending if we saw Cliff beat up an innocent woman or actually kill his wife. But it is there, it is mentioned, so fair game.

Anyway I really don't want to be nasty. I am no one's "stan." Not even Billy...

lol *OUTLAWED fuck the death penalty

3. short version: the killers in IB are jewish men and women killing hitler and countless other high-ranking nazis, something of great moral purpose for them, to the point that they are more than willing to die for it, it is a major existential choice. the killers in OUaTiH are two inebriated guys confused by what's happening, fending off a home invasion with no larger significance known to them, and which ends with their relationship with each other and their outlook on life basically no different than before. i submit that this is very different! and maybe explains why i had a cathartic fuck-yeah emotional response to the earlier film, while this one felt indulgent, cruel, and gratuitous even tho yes, the historical people being portrayed are very bad. ymmv.

Best criticism of the ending I've read here or elsewhere. Thank you.

idk maybe it depends on yr investment in the murders pre-movie as to how you take that final showdown?

because i have to say my reaction was FUCK YES. THANK YOU to the whole scene, like, at the level of a relieved catharsis. i mean it was horrific & the overkill was insane BUT SO WERE THE MURDERS IN THE FIRST PLACE. So, i dunno, fuck them. i know what they represented and i am not about to confuse them w regular ppl, fiction or otherwise.

maybe that makes me a monster but for me there’s no better handling of the manson family & it’s as much as they fictiotiously deserve.

*fictitiously

oh that's interesting. yeah, i had no prior interest in the case so i'm sure that affected my emotional connection... i would have been totally happy with pitt just knocking them out with dog food cans and then explaining to the cops "they're all living out at this ranch... something weird going on out there... damn crazy hippies" and then leo meeting his neighbors. cause - for me - the kind and generous thing in the film was bringing tate to life not as a victim but as a young, charming actress with nothing but potential --- and then finding an imaginary way for her to retain that at the end. getting symbolic revenge torture on the real-world killers just wasn't adding to that, for me. especially given the real-world equivalents for these anti-hippie, violent hollywood cowboys. so even tho the manson family should be stopped by whoever happens to be there, having it be robert wagner and a low-rent john wayne (basically) takes a lot away.... imo!!

plus ending in a quiet, unsatisfying, downbeat kinda way would be the perfect nod to where hollywood was actually going for a while after 1969...

Doc, you really need to check out the You Must Remember This Manson season. It's up on Spotify as a separate playlist under the title You Must Remember Manson. Covers all the players from different angles over 12 episodes.

I couldn't stand the violence either, Tarantino film or not.

xp

I've been re-listening to this. Still great the second time through.

just started listening to that series in the shower. plug: I did so at the insistence of my friends who host the Losers podcast, reviewing/comparing old movies, using the device of didn't-win-the-Oscar-for-whatever-random-category to select movies that otherwise weren't on their radars. It's fun! A very different sort of enterprise than Longworth's, of course, but always nice to scratch the "people being movie nerds" itch with something that's not three white comedy nerds on the mic.

having absorbed the insane violence done to their victims, it feels like less of an imbalance

getting bludgeoned or blowtorched to death isnt one for one the *same* as stabbing someone 16, 28, or 51 times ( those are some of the actual numbers) but Tarantino set the table for out-of-control violence for *that* reason, not because of gender or “for kicks, man”. There are emotional, historical reasons for the violence he shows . And it’s is the whole reason for Cliff being on acid & Dalton being completely hammered)

disclaimer: i haven't seen this yet and i have no idea how i'll feel about the end. maybe I'll hate it!

but absent some specifics around the differences between men's and women's suffering in Tarantino's stuff this particular calling-out seems ehhh.

like, is there a qualitative difference between female suffering in uh Kill Bill I guess and male suffering in idk reservoir dogs? django? pulp fiction?

also not sure i'd call the violence in his pictures "cartoonish" - in general he seems to borrow visual approaches from e.g. 70s exploitation while rendering the violence depicted intimate and excruciating. violence and cruelty in his stuff is genuinely hard to watch because it's precisely not cartoonish as in idk Hobbs & Shaw? like if anything his movies take violence more seriously than most multiplex fare?

US box office down 51% the first weekend, 42% the second. Not enough supernerd repeat business.

you fully or just semi hard?

Clearly the fact that the movie is following just about every other box office trend of the past several years is a sign of ... what?

Some interesting discussion in here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/01/modern-box-office-mystery-what-read-into-numbers-once-upon-time-hollywood/

I killed Tarantella with my big fucking hernia

https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-box-office-bet-pays-off.html

My movie stats nerd friend says this was the first summer movie of this summer to break $100 Mil that wasn't based on previously existing properties (comics, sequels etc.).

it's based on Inglourious Basterds

The Tarantino brand itself is a property, with a certain following.

absolutely

they make that argument in the article Alfred linked to!

Woody Allen is an existing IP, his wife is based on several existing IPs

QT is definitely an IP, but I was just surprised that there hasn't been some other film, be it an original star vehicle or genre title (a romcom, new sci-fi or action thing etc.) this summer that's done as well.

I shouldn't be surprised tho.

The 'studios' are phasing those out. Disney is just recycling old shit, period.

Saw this today. To begin with I felt that I hadn't been quite as overwhelmed as I might have hoped, and I thought it was a really conservative ending. I don't think it should be forgotten that Cliff is a murderer, and him and Rick are definitely boorish and steeped in the misogyny of the day. The first part of the film takes place right after Nixons inauguration, and these two definitely voted for him. There's another version of this cathartic Hollywood revenge drama, that ends with a family of enraged young women massacring some standins for Robert Wagner, John Wayne, every other man who has stood in the way of equality.

But when i thought about it, I thought it was exactly important that the guys who do the revenging are conservatives. It's not as much revenge as it's atonement. I think the politics of Tarantino's films have been simplified a lot, like the way the nazi in Inglorious Basterds is really outthinking them all, and can only be defeated through brute force and suicide bombings, or how the only thing keeping the final Hateful men together is their shared love of hurting a woman. The end of OUaTiH is not righteous anger setting history right. This is people who are part of the problem doing just a little thing to set things right again. Just like Tarantino is really part of the problem, and has a lot to atone for, and seems to know he has a lot to atone for, but also in these last five films keep trying to create spaces for other people to defeat their traumas. And I thought the end was beautiful. Rick has really saved his neighbors lives, they do in one way owe him anything, but on the other hand they owe him nothing, and he seems to know that. He gets a reward, but he doesn't demand it, he seems really grateful. There's no entitlement. I liked that.

I liked the little touch about Tate being aware Dalton was her neighbor, and how she'd tease Polanski about having him come over and beat him up.

Cliff doesn't strike me as an avid voter.

who did the manson family vote for

Saw it this afternoon. I guessed the 'twist' about halfway through but really couldn't guess the exact resolution.

Having seen Leone's Once Upon films over the past three days just because (America got a one-off screening yesterday at the local Alamo so I figured why not see the other two beforehand), I was reminded how West was very much its own metaWestern by intent. (Nothing more to add beyond that, more just that was an interesting reminder about how that's always been going on anyway since before I was alive.)

I find myself thinking of the very end of Hollywood quite a bit here. It's a 'perfect' moment because there's this weird sense of private-in-public space, how there's no immediate TV coverage or anything, no press hanging around, it's just neighbors chatting -- almost like everything is suspended in air, and tomorrow things will somehow change radically but just in a different direction.

I've only seen about half of Tarantino's films and never more than once. I hardly think it perfect, but this might actually be the one I'd see again. And I'm honestly surprised by that, pleasantly.

Secret MVP for Margaret Qualley who between this and Fosse/Verdon's had a pretty great year.

The soundtrack seems like something that Ace Records should have put out on CD this past decade with Alec Paleo doing the liner notes. (VG's blog post on the subject = great, as are her thoughts throughout this thread.)

xpost Cesar Chavez

I killed Tarantella with my big fucking hernia

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Monday, August 12, 2019 7:46 AM (fourteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I got and appreciate this.

Bill Simmons’s new podcast has a good long conversation about this movie, including equating Margaret Quallry’s character with Pitt’s in Thelma and Louise.

https://people.com/movies/quentin-tarantino-defends-bruce-lee-once-upon-a-time-after-backlash/

smdh

Would totally watch a Bruce Lee v. Dracula movie. Or even a Brad Pitt v. Dracula movie.

I guess we got the latter already.

who are you s-ing your h at there

“The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up,” Tarantino said at a press conference for the movie in Russia. “I heard him say things like that, to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Muhammad Ali,’ well yeah, he did. Not only did he say that, but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read … She absolutely said it.”

Narrator: She did not say it.

Robert Clouse worked with Lee on Enter the Dragon and later published a biography of him. Here's an excerpt:

Another time Yeung, aka (Bolo) went to see Bruce at Golden Harvest Studios. Bruce was screening a Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) documentary. Ali was world heavyweight champion at the time and Bruce saw him as the greatest fighter of them all. The documentary showed Ali in several of his fights. Bruce set up a wide full-length mirror to reflect Ali’s image from the screen. Bruce was looking into the mirror, moving along with Ali.

Bruce’s right hand followed Ali’s right hand, Ali’s left foot followed Bruce’s left foot. Bruce was fighting in Ali’s shoes. “Everybody says I must fight Ali some day.” Bruce said, “I’m studying every move he makes. I’m getting to know how he thinks and moves.” Bruce knew he could never win a fight against Ali. “Look at my hand,” he said. “That’s a little Chinese hand. He’d kill me."