Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

"unbeknownst to the audience i've eaten the stew here before and this isn't their usual recipe."

oh nah, Jackson keeps saying he knows things are wrong before he even gets into the building! the back & forth with the Mexican non-chef in the stables almost comes to guns drawn

the whole movie is just a showcase for ham though. each reveal is more an excuse for Jackson or Russell or Goggins or Leigh to crank it a few more notches over the top, rather than an intricate puzzle piece

(obv anyone is welcome to hate it on those grounds! but it feels to me like after the multiple hamfests in Basterds & Django he decided to just get story out of the way & hang up a canvas backdrop for ppl to chew scenery in front of. now it’s out of his system & he could do a leisurely all-real-location* hang sesh with Once Upon.)

finally saw it.

thoughts going in: jesus the last thing anyone needs is another fkn manson thing

thoughts coming out: I have never enjoyed anything Tarantino has done more than I enjoyed this

more later but basically I am a VG truther now is how I break it down to an extent

*Cliff’s trailer is almost certainly a set, Spain’s bedroom could be, and the Western sets are of course sets irl. But not much else?

hrmmm well it's been a while since i've seen H8 but i'll defer to you... i just remember being annoyed by the stew thing at the time. the "great cast hamming" thing i would buy, but it'd help if the dialogue were more interesting or if anybody created any really memorable characters. as soon as it was over i forgot so much of that movie....

The diCap / child actor BS though, that was some weak sauce

counterpoint: sure it was

somehow rick's sober and dressed well and looking great after a night where he's torched a woman with a flamethrower and dead drunk.

This seemed like deliberate movie logic, part of the fantasy, when we find that we’re actually in a shaggy Burt Reynolds-like action comedy instead of a serial-killer movie.

(Not unlike Uma Thurman on a plane with her giant sword in the final shot of part one of Kill Bill.)

That sorta thing makes sense in Kill Bill, which is a total cartoon from beginning to end.

Was holding back groans through the climax of this. Not only recycling his Inglorious Basterds trick, it’s tonally completely out of place, dumb in not a good way (flamethrower was the cherry), and it cemented the weird Conservative bent that flows through the whole thing.

I liked things about this, but honestly don’t get the full on love it’s getting.

This seemed like deliberate movie logic, part of the fantasy

i agree with you! and said so! i liked this aspect of it!

i think a lot of the full-on love, at least from where i'm sitting, is how generous it feels. it just lets you unspool time with these characters in this place. you could watch a documentary about hollywood c-listers in the late 60s, or read a biography of one of them, but neither would really get you inside the place like this does.

i'm not quite getting the 'conservative' thing?

IT'S THE REAL DON STEEL SHOW, STILL SUCKIN' "EM IN

the movie feels conservative because Rick and Cliff are anti-hippie and because Tarantino's 1969 Hollywood doesn't seem to belong to the same California as the Watts riots, the RFK assassination, Gov. Reagan vs. People's Park, etc. ... that's a legit way to portray Hollywood's perception of itself, but it also reinforces the reactionary theme of two aging white guys struggling with change

Doc otm about H8ful, film is poorly conceived from start to finish, the actors cant save it cuz they have almost nothing to work with. It fails as a western, as a locked room potboiler, as a play-on-film.

But it does succeed at taking a great cast, a great setting and 70 mm and making it boring.

Lol exactly

did either of you watch it on 70mm

Cant imagine how that would improve the experience. Does the totally boring set that 90% of the movie takes place on look 10x better?

I enjoyed the Netflix serial for a rewatch but I’d say the 70mm projection looked at least seven times better

nbd if anyone disagrees but it’s pointless to specifically disparage an element you didn’t actually see amongst legit personal criticisms or dislikes

I wasn't able to catch one of the 70mm screenings, but I honestly don't see how it could have made it that much better. I mean, it *looked* fine when I saw it. But this movie is not "2001."

Hey guys!

This was v good

Right? You were OTM upthread about expectations after the last few but this was good.

:D :D

Saw it again with my sis on Friday, who hadn't seen it yet -- another highly positive vote. And my dad's wanting to see it as well! (Kinda wished we had the chance to see it with him, since, after all, he was alive that year and we weren't even gleams.)

I’ve seen this four times already.

Took my dad to see it, and he loved it. The Batman contest Ad reminded him of a couple of funny childhood incidents related to the 60s show, both involving my cranky-ass grandpa. These would have occurred around 1966-67, at the height of the show’s popularity.

The first story: A local theater (this was in Watertown, MA) was running the old Batman serials from the 30s to cash in on the current Batman tv craze. To promote this, they set up a hotline number with a “special message” from Batman and Robin (this was when pre-recorded messages were still pretty novel).

It just so happened that my dad’s home phone number was one digit off from the hotline’s, so the house started receiving misdialed calls from children expecting to hear from Batman. After a few days of this my grandpa was pretty fed up.

The next time a young boy called asking to speak with Batman, my grandpa replied “THIS IS BATMAN TALKING TO ROBIN...THIS IS BATMAN TALKING TO ROBIN...HANG UP AND DON’T CALL AGAIN!!!”

My dad jokes that whoever that poor kid was, he’s probably a serial killer now.

The second story: my dad and his brothers were watching the Batman tv show with my grandpa. In this particular episode the villain was Mr. Freeze. In one scene Batman evades Mr. Freeze’s clutches by pretending to be frozen, subsequently revealing that he was protected by special thermal underwear.

At this point my grandpa stood up and proclaimed “THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS BULLSHIT! and left the room. Afterwards he refused to watch the show ever again.

this was sort of a mixture of the Coens' "Hail Caesar!" and "Inherent Vice", maybe some of Altman's "Long Goodbye" as well. Mixture of old-school Hollywood fantasy/homage with rambling/shaggy-dog pacing, with Tarantino's particular penchant for gruesome violence tacked on at the end. If there's any conservatism here, I don't think it's of the explicitly right-wing political variety - it's a conservatism borne of wanting to preserve a comforting fantasyland, to maintain its continuity across generations. I think focusing on how much the Manson murderers are a stand-in for hippies/the new generation in general is fundamentally wrong, because it excludes the fact that Tate, Polanksi & co. are the flipside of that new generation: they're young, more beautiful, cooler, they smoke weed, they party at the Playboy mansion with hippies and ultimately they hold the keys to the kingdom that Cliff and Rick want so badly to stay a part of. The reason I bring up "Hail Caesar!" is because this similarly presents an old school Hollywood studio "solution" to the problem (ie, Manson): some scrappy underdog trad white guys save the day and the kids and the olds find common ground at the end, the central disruption presented by Manson is avoided in favor of a preservation of the status quo.

I think that context is important but also in the background - the more important, and more moving, story is the one that's just generally about these guys being old and confused and driven by a near-crippling need for validation, and following them around for a few days in a lovingly recreated facsimile of a very specific era.

Also the dog:Cliff::Cliff:Rick, obviously.

(in Hail Caesar the problem is unruly "talent" + communism, both resolved by an old school studio arm-twister whose job is to preserve the status quo)

It's funny you bring up the Coens, because like Tarantino (or PTA) they're so careful and controlled they're like the antithesis of shaggy *filmmakers* even when their stories go that direction. Unlike Altman, yeah, who is as shaggy a storyteller as it gets.

Are there any good interviews with Tarantino? Is he a particularly thoughtful guy? Everything I've read has largely been blustery or fan-boy-y, but does he ever offer any deep thoughts about his films? Just curious. I'd love to read not about the references he's making or whatever but his creative decision making process as a writer and director.

idk sometimes he drops references to interesting stuff that informed his process ("Where Eagles Dare" for IB, for ex.) but generally I would say he's insufferable to listen to/read.

I think the most interesting thing I ever read him saying about making anything was talking about the function of various languages in the European theater in WWII, which is obviously a key part of IB

Busting in here to advise folks to go see Charlie Says before you throw any more money at this.

Sub-Headline in an LA Times email I just saw --

Both Netflix's "Mindhunter" and Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" downplay — or erase — Charles Manson's white supremacist ideology.

We learn next to nothing about Manson in OUATIH

Which was a relief.

That is absolutely not true re MINDHUNTER.

some good points about Hollywood nostalgia and Manson here:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/19/once-upon-a-time-in-tarantinos-hollywood/

https://letterboxd.com/bennash/film/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood/

You're doing a great job of making me never want to watch any movie you recommend.

I mean, I didn't even particularly like OUATIH? But your posts are beyond tedious.

yeah can't you just like, leave

ok

see u for Tarantootsies' last movie!

Let's kickstart Morbs a ticket to OUATIH, drink of his choice and medium popcorn

a vow is a vow

you held onto your last one for 18 minutes

don't listen to them morbs!

please Hammer, don't hurt 'em

"tarantootsies" is p good imo

imagine how u ppl would lose your minds if he ever included actors' hands in frame

"tarantootsies" is shorter than "grotesquely trivializing a mass murder"

that is... not what happens

but you'll never know, will you?