Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

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?

morbs, good news I spoke with the board we are willing to upgrade to to a large popcorn and as an incentive mike & ikes if you make it past 2 hours

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

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, August 21, 2019 2:20 PM bookmarkflaglink

He hasn't made a film about the Subway Series yet

Morbs has already posted itt more than anyone else, the servers might melt if he actually saw the film

holy shit when did i last have a blast like this

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

― Οὖτις, Monday, 19 August 2019 16:56 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

rick::steve mcqueen::cliff::dog

xp I dunno, deems. Watching some action movie like MI5? A Marvel Universe superhero movie? Mad Max: Fury Road? Probably something like that.

the correct answer was, in fact, fury road, aimless

now do i detect a pointedness to that

just making sure enthusiasm was correctly tamped down then?

strange.

i think Tarantino's revisionism is somewhat angry in bemoaning what was lost, i think it's a fairly easy copout to say he's just treating it lightly.

Morbz doesn't accept that you should have to read something first before you are allowed to offer a misreading

just making sure enthusiasm was correctly tamped down then?

more a matter of your giving those with whom you share your enthusiasm a few landmarks from which they might get their bearings

Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie Manson man:

How did you end up playing Manson in two unrelated projects?

Bizarrely, it was a coincidence. Two productions happened to have a Charles Manson character in them, and I had an opportunity to audition for both. That’s pretty much it. If you’re going for a character like Charles Manson, you can only cast people of a certain height, so that narrows the pool because the guy was incredibly short. A lot shorter than me, but I’m only five-foot-seven, so I scraped into the pool. [Editor’s note: Though he was listed as five-foot-two, Manson himself claimed to be five foot six and three-quarter inches tall. But to be fair, he was also a notorious liar.]

Mindhunter actually came about six months before Once Upon a Time in Hollywood even though they ended up shooting within two weeks of each other. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came about not through any connection at all to Mindhunter but because of two actors in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Nicholas Hammond is a friend because he lives in Australia, and Timothy Olyphant is a friend from the Justified days. Together they brought up my name when they’d heard that Manson hadn’t been cast yet and suggested me to Quentin.

Did you tell them at the Once Upon a Time audition you’d already gone out for Manson in Mindhunter?

I didn’t think that would be a great idea because at that point I already had Mindhunter. I thought that even going for the same character again was a completely fruitless exercise, but I also didn’t want to not do an audition for Quentin Tarantino. So I was like, Well, I’ll do the audition, and if in the highly unlikely event that I get the role, then I have to say, “Hey, I’m already doing this.” He’s almost certainly going to say, “Oh well, thanks but no thanks, we’ll get someone else.” But luckily for me, it didn’t bother him.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/charles-manson-damon-herriman-mindhunter-tarantino.html

aka the dude with the magical healing penis from Laid

he was so great as Dewey Crowe on Justified, classic recurring character

Oh shit, that's where I recognized him! He was really funny on "Justified."

With this film of all films the gap between us & uk releases felt insane given the amount of online chatter there was about it. I’m not even that much of a spoilerphobe but it felt like I had a month of skimming past dozens of stupid arguments about every individual scene of this film, so I was kind of sick of it way before I even had a chance to see it (these arguments being largely from ppl on twitter that I don’t even follow, thanks twitter)

If I didn’t have a free ticket I’d probably have waited another week or so before bothering to see it, but I saw it on tues and pretty much... ¿loved it? I had a similar experience to when I watched the latest jarmusch, where I was so into what the filmmakers were doing in the main that my enjoyment didn’t even really dip when there were things that I think were probably quite bad.

The “middle hour where nothing happens” as it’s known itt is where it’s at for me, I could have hung out there a bit longer even. Pitt was the worst thing about IB and (after Robbie) the best thing here, fantastic easygoing toxic dude energy (speaking of Justified!)

Tate in the cinema, Cliff at the ranch, Rick on set all amazing tbh

I obviously had some idea of what was coming at the end but I did NOT expect the nastiness and ultraviolence (lotta killin). I laughed my arse off at the whole sequence tho, Pitt’s finger gun, belittling the mansonites, the slapstick gore, the horribly maimed woman shrieking and running blindly (in contrast, I fucking hate this gag in Fargo)...

There was that awful webcomic going around that was like “the villains of this film are women who disrespect the Hollywood old guard”, referring to the Nazi space cadet dipshits who butchered a pregnant woman irl, & I feel like QT has benefited from this kind of pious gibberish going around because it obscures the valid reasons ppl may criticise scenes like this. The counter becomes as easy as ITS THE FUCKING MANSON FAMILY - that will get you so far because, in fairness, ITS THE FUCKING MANSON FAMILY, but I don’t think Tarantino is morally off the hook (per Fred, does he even want to be?). The “Natalie” ref was hard to miss (smh thread for taking so long to get there btw) and yeah it is a glib way to refer to that story and all the other stories it stands in for. Mileage is gonna vary on stuff like that, I thought it pretty obvious that the scene was there for a pointed reason but I won’t say anyone’s wrong for thinking the way it’s presented undercuts it. The retrovenge murder scene is puerile and bro-y - tex gets it right in the nards! - but for me that’s a hearty way to go about a tricky exorcism.

Oh also every Tarantino foot shot has been entirely knowing since at least “wiggle your big toe” in KB1 and possibly earlier, so simply noticing it each time is not an hilarious takedown