Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

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."

maybe she said it in tarantino's upcoming revisionist bruce lee biopic

Dragon 2 - The More Bruce Lee-er Story

In my head it’s always “hush” morphing into the doors’ “touch me”

the Doors were one of the most glaring omissions from the soundtrack, but I understand why they weren't included

The Rhino "Where The Action Is" Nuggets box is a good companion to the film/soundtrack.

otm

i loved this. i welled up at the scene where rick's telling the girl about his book. when she told rick that was the best acting she’d ever seen I DIED. VG i love your post about rick and his career. that’s most acting careers in a nutshell. swinging between self-loathing and vanity, never quite smashing it, doing your best work as a baddie on a TV show that never sees a repeat.

i saw the 35mm version with Pete B erstwhile of this bailiwick and it was projected a little out of focus, which is a shame. after the movie though they had a big stack of posters on really nice stock. (one small detail: on the poster the ellipses in the title appear in different places depending on whether you're reading the tombstone at the bottom or the big title at the top i.e. once upon a time... in hollywood vs once upon a time in... hollywood. no, it’s not important. but the sloppiness almost feels… diegetic?)

the manson family baddies went to the wrong house, right? they were supposed to go to 'tim's old house' where sharon tate lived? right? but instead they go next door and encounter... the guy who'd just beat the fuck out of their friend at the ranch. completely coincidentally. or did i miss something there?

something else.. when rick's first talking to timothy oliphant there's a jump cut and suddenly they're both wearing their hats. was that really in the movie or just a projection issue?

you can put me in the anti-headbashing - flamethrower gets you the over-the-topness you need from that scene. but mainly that’s because i’m a big wuss.

i think it’s ok that nobody's characters changed. nobody ‘arcs’. i liked that. for a movie as obsessed with TV as this one is it feels appropriate. and it fits with the fantasy ending. crazy shit happens and everything goes back to the way it was - tune in next week. apart from cliff and rick’s relationship, i guess. though that change happens in spite of the events of the movie, rather than because of them.

“Lee is the only speaking character in the film whose hairstyle and wardrobe aren't painstakingly accurate to the period” - hmm big disagree here, i think most of the hair wasn’t right, particularly tate’s. if you look at pictures of people from the late 60s the hair is just DIFFERENT. nobody styles it that way any more. it’s like we’ve forgotten how. i mean, in the movie it was good enough, it didn’t bother me, but 15 years from now we’ll look back at this and be like jeez that hair is so late teens.

“DeCaprio has to work a lot harder to sell us a not-very-good actor worrying about his acting, acting badly, acting better, and not acting; it's a fidgety performance, but he's ridiculous, pathetic, and sympathetic in just the right proportions” - agree w/this 100% tho

speaking of people still alive: Squeaky Fromme “was released on parole from Federal Medical Center Carswell on August 14, 2009,[20][21] and moved to Marcy, New York,[22][23] where she and her boyfriend Robert Valdner, who pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge in 1988, live in a house decorated with skulls.[24]” o_O

you can put me in the anti-headbashing COLUMN i meant to say..

the manson family baddies went to the wrong house, right? they were supposed to go to 'tim's old house' where sharon tate lived? right? but instead they go next door and encounter... the guy who'd just beat the fuck out of their friend at the ranch. completely coincidentally. or did i miss something there?

You did, yep - after they take the car back down out of the cul-de-sac and park, one of the backseat girls messianically tells the others about some ideas she's been formulating while tripping. She argues that they have been shaped and twisted by Hollywood, that its imagery of wealth and violence has corrupted society. Rather than kill the people at Terry's house - whose identities I don't think that even Charlie knows, let alone the four killers? - she suggests that it would be a better, more meaningful strike to go and kill the guy they grew up watching kill on TV.

(I found the headbashing over the top on first viewing, and was looking forward to taking it less squeamishly on second round, once it wasn't coming as such a shock. Nope: just as brutal the second time. Also thought that maybe it was meant to play as exaggerated through Cliff's acid-tinged perception, first time, and dropped that on review. His brutality is amplified by the acid for sure, though.)

that's a good point about the hairstyles in general, Lee's is not the only one that's not really period-correct

Bruce looks especially anachronistic because the scene on the Green Hornet set is early 1967 at the latest and he didn't wear his hair that long until 1973

All of the hairstyles, bar maybe the tyre-stabber, look like (wigs or) modern movie versions of '60s hair. (Conditioner is better now!) That's fine: the signage restored for backgrounds is done to represent glamour and artifice, too, not to signal absolute realism. I lolled delightedly both times at Leo's six-months-later wig.

Green Hornet Lee

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/de/6b/63/de6b6379604c276286cb1e8a43d7ad7e.jpg

the rat-flavored dog food is real and no one can tell me different

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-manson-family-member-dianne-lake-reviews-quentin-tarantinos-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood?ref=author

and encounter... the guy who'd just beat the fuck out of their friend at the ranch. completely coincidentally. or did i miss something there?

Actually maybe you took a bathroom break around here? The night they go to Terry Melcher’s house is six months after the day Cliff goes to the Spahn ranch, which is part of why they don’t recognise him.

(whereas he can still identify each of them, with a specific feature he’s logged, because unlike these would-be murder-spree doofi , Cliff is a dangerous killer with his wits about him)

Disappointing. The dialogue didnt exactly sparkle, the comedic moments fell flat and the ending was dumb. Brad Pitt and Leo Di Cap were great in it though.

yeah no i get that it's six months later. and yes the violence-against-tv-violence thing makes sense directed against rick. that and the fact that he just enacted every jock-rage stereotype in the book. ("amount of taxes i pay!!") they're on their own revenge kick! that's what finally fires them up. yes. duh.

re: the jump cut with the hats, i found this interview with the editor:

We have the moment where Jim Stacy introduces himself to Rick Dalton which is a weird example. That was a scene that played out in one take and we wanted to collapse it and Quentin said, “This is my homage to the Brian De Palma movies of the late ’60s — using the jump cuts in this way.” So I said “OK.” He’s pretty firm that there are no rules. Even though plenty of people would look at that and say, “What are you doing? You can’t do that.”

https://www.provideocoalition.com/aotc-raskin-hollywood/

My assembly for this movie was not short. It was about four hours and forty-one minutes long. So there’s two hours worth of movie that didn’t make the final cut of the movie.

and sorry to harp on this because it's not that important but it IS a massive coincidence that cliff, the guy who showed up at the ranch six months ago, who tex ALMOST managed to get back in time to beat the shit out of (and agreed at how thrilling it was to watch tex gallop back - his body and that horse together i could have just watched for hours probably) - just happened to be the dude in rick dalton's kitchen when the manson family decide spur of the moment to go in.