Quentin Tarantino's Manson murders movie

"it had no idea what to do with ten mins to go and really didnt pull it off"

lol if that doesn't describe the current moment I don't know what does

i'm kinda bummed, the local alamo is now showing this in 70mm after having it in 35 for the first couple weeks when i caught it. i'm interested enough to want to watch it again someday but maybe not just yet. #filmnerdproblems

It’s filmed on 35 and about a 35mm world, blowing it up is just a gimmick

lol if that doesn't describe the current moment I don't know what does

― Conceptualize Wyverns (latebloomer), Thursday, 22 August 2019 18:46 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

my gift 2u

grazzi

Interesting listen, from film editors' perspectives.

https://thisguyedits.libsyn.com/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood-2019

Greil Marcus being so wildly popular on ILX, this should go over well:

5. Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood (Sony Pictures). Los Angeles, 1969 — when, according to this movie, there wasn’t a single good song on the radio. When well into more than halfway through the Rolling Stones’s 1966 “Out of Time” comes on — not playing via the agency of any character, just dropped over a scene — the relief is like a wave that started in Japan coming down on the beach at San Pedro. Then it’s back to the sludge.

I think he overstates that a bit, but, as I posted above, I think he's about 85% right.

"Hush" is a good song

It was certainly intentional not to have BIG SONGS for « cult » scenes a-la Pulp Fiction, except the Stones.
(Same thing with the dialogues maybe). So that it feels less like a juxtaposition of scenes and more of a whole.
And I actually felt like listening to a lot of that era’s music after watching it, which I hadn’t in a while.

it's almost as if qt is more interested in the overlooked detritus of pop culture than the critical favourites??? huh

I love "Out of Time," and it was certainly on the nose--played, I think, as everyone was arriving back from Europe the day before the murders--but I already associate that song with Coming Home. Interference like that always lessens a song's impact for me.

I don't think Marcus is lobbying for critical favourites--I don't think he wants Astral Weeks in there--just better detritus.

i liked it. helped with the scuzzy feel of the movie.

"Hush" is a good song

Billy Stewart's "Summertime" is one of the 90 greatest sound recordings ever made by humans

"Treat Her Right", "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" too... Marcus is just pissed nobody heard a song and had to pull over.

greil is just bummed he doesn't get to write a description of the guitar solo in "gimme shelter" for the 500th time

The Irishman is coming, so he'll just have to be patient.

(xpost) Actually, with one of my two favourite songs--Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Circle Game" cover--Sharon Tate does pull over to the side of the road. But just to pick up a hitchhiker.

I already associate that song with Coming Home. Interference like that always lessens a song's impact for me.

since he broke the dam with Across 110th St in Jackie Brown, nearly every piece of music in every Tarantino film was recorded for, written for, or used in another film.

(even Hateful 8, which features Morricone score, was mainly a new recording of unused score he wrote for The Thing)

XP Haha, had already forgotten that a song was still playing--instead of an ad or dj patter--at that moment.

One thing that has bugged me is that it seems like instead of the music being played on tapes or records at the Playboy Mansion, they would have had a live band like Deep Purple or the Strawberry Alarm Clock or Steppenwolf play. "Rock Me" would have sounded great.

I only like Greil when he's writing cryptic shit about the Band and I only understand every fourth sentence, love that shit but otherwise he's hard for me

Deep Purple *did* play Hush at the Playboy Mansion!

xp

...and Steppenwolf did..."Monster"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqJWNXuob-Q

Wasn't <actually. the mansion tho.

since he broke the dam with Across 110th St in Jackie Brown, nearly every piece of music in every Tarantino film was recorded for, written for, or used in another film

Interesting...I'd have to look into that. Used and used well are two different things, though--I mentioned Coming Home because "Out of Time" is played memorably over the opening credits.

I haven’t seen it, but sure - he used the actual theme songs from Across 110th St and Cat People as late-in-film tone-setters too.

Kill Bill is wall-to-wall sdtk music from other films with a few notable exceptions

My favourite songs post-Pulp Fiction are "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)" and "Tennessee Stud" in Jackie Brown, "Brother Love" and "The Circle Game" in the new one; nothing in the films between made much of an impression on me. Are any of those four associated with (or even used in) other films? I've never seem them if so. And there's certainly nothing in Reservoir Dogs--his greatest film soundtrack-wise--I've ever heard in another film.

since he broke the dam with

Once Upon is his first diegetic radio film since Pulp & Dogs

I understand you drew a line there...What I'd say then--and you can argue or rationalize this a million ways, but it all comes down to personal taste--is that there's a huge gap between how inspired the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack is and how comparatively ordinary Hollywood's is. Both, as you point out, are diegetic. Setting yourself that parameter does not rule out coming up with something as mind-bending as the way "Stuck in the Middle" or "Hooked on a Feeling" are used in Reservoir Dogs.

For me. If you think there's music in Hollywood that has the same kind of impact, that's great. I wish I felt the same way.

“I’ve Got A Name” in Django was pretty moving.

naw the Once song selections (bar Summertime) were unremarkable pop music to me, vs the "what the heck is this" effect of Dogs, we're totally on the same page. but he's doing something different now! Dogs and Pulp (and Jackie? I know she's into her record collection, but iirc the 110th St moment is used as score, not played in-scene) are iirc totally presented as diegetic.

KB1 has RZA score but is mostly nicked from other scores, KB2 deliberately accepted a Robert Rodriguez score for $1 as the only thing to distinguish it as a separate film* but is likewise mostly stock. then he continued primarily lifting existing scores, with the odd existing song, until Once. His previous diegetic radio music was all vintage material being played in-fiction as nostalgia - K-Billy's Sounds Of The Seventies in Dogs, Urge Overkill covering '70s Neil Diamond in Pulp, 1950s-1971 songs in the 1971 Vanishing Point car in Death Proof.

Once is his first radio-era period piece, and while he's almost exclusively (caveat White Stripes in H8ful) used music from his childhood before, this time he's limited himself via research to songs played on the IRL radio station on actual 1969 tapes (although there's one cheat I found last time this came up itt).

This is a fun thing about him as an auteur: despite such a short filmography, there are easily readable phases he goes through, and we can see him refine tropes and then dump them once he's used them effectively. The pop-culture overload of Dogs/Romance/Killers gets dropped for the maturity of Jackie Brown. The revenge film run gets more overblown through Bill -> Proof -> Basterds -> Django, he compresses to a chamber piece in H8ful, then drops it but reworks the Basterds element to much greater effect in Once. He plays with westerns for a while, figures he's put his spin on it, but needs to shake the influence off by channeling his TV western viewing directly into Once (and apparently is showing longer Bounty Law excerpts in the pre-show at New Bev screenings - plus he says he has ten full episode scripts).

The sampling old scores (plus a few minutes of new stuff by a friend) phase wore out by H8ful, so he asked Morricone for a full score. Instead Morricone said "I like the screenplay but look I've only got time to write a theme, how about you pick from the orchestral The Thing music that Carpenter ignored?," then ended up delivering two pieces a total of 25 minutes long as the "theme" iirc from the DGA podcast.

Once's radio music is w/e to me as songs (as I said upthread when Veg wrote her great blog of a different opinion) but absolutely works as texture of what was in these characters' lives on those three days.

(And everyone's different! Rick doesn't really gaf about music that we can tell, Tate and her entourage banter about the poppiness of Paul Revere, go-with-the-flow Cliff is soundtracked by what happens to flow out of the radio, and the creepy crawlers are enraged by the late-night listening of Cielo Drive residents -- possibly a tiny nod toward their home listening being Charlie's own songs played on an acoustic guitar while he looks into their eyes. Music too real and pure to have been accepted by sell-outs like Doris Day's son.)

I've had a few drinks lads

also I went to see Basterds for the second time last night, in honour of its placing in the ILE 2009 poll, and the Bowie / Moroder comes in much earlier than I recalled. characters have already discussed an assassination attempt on Goebbels & associates, but this sudden, dramatic intrusion of achronology presages the film's overturning of history.

Are any of those four associated with (or even used in) other films?

per IMDB: Delfonics' Didn't I in two 1991 films, Bacon/Fiorentino/Malcatraz vehicle Queens Logic and Robert Townsend/Keenan Wayans joint The Five Heartbeats; Tennessee Stud in Demme's Melvin & Howard, 1980.

Learn something new every day--had no idea "Tennessee Stud" was in Melvin and Howard, one of my favourite films from that era (musically, too, for "Fortunate Son" and "Satisfaction"). I'm not sure if I ever saw it again after Jackie Brown came out, but that's 22 years, so I have to believe I did somewhere along the way. Must have missed it. (Its use in Jackie Brown, with Ordell sitting in his car outside Jackie's house as Max pays her a visit, is terrifying.)

but this sudden, dramatic intrusion of achronology presages the film's overturning of history.

Yeah, that's something I loved about it. I'm trying to think of another film that does that, a period film set in the (relatively) distant past scored by a distinctly futuristic/"modern"/contemporary pop song (that wasn't written for the film).

The "Tennessee Stud" from Melvin and Howard is the Eddy Arnold version. Johnny Cash's version from Jackie Brown was recorded years later as part of The American Recordings w/Rick Rubin.

“I’ve Got A Name” in Django was pretty moving.

― ... (Eazy), Friday, August 23, 2019 10:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^loved this

I'm trying to think of another film that does that, a period film set in the (relatively) distant past scored by a distinctly futuristic/"modern"/contemporary pop song (that wasn't written for the film).

Not a film but this was like Peaky Blinders' whole thing for awhile

Obvious example (which, after staying away from it forever, finally watched last year and liked a lot): Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

New Order, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Gang of Four...it's completely nuts, in a good way.

That’s a pretty good one.

A knights tale

Cough cough Moulin Rouge

I hadn't read the Billboard interview with Mark Lindsay until just now and didn't realize he lived at the Cielo Drive house with Terry Melcher and met Manson there ... that adds a spooky vibe to the Paul Revere & the Raiders songs in the soundtrack

I'm trying to think of another film that does that, a period film set in the (relatively) distant past scored by a distinctly futuristic/"modern"/contemporary pop song (that wasn't written for the film).

Something kind of related to this is the 70s-upped versions of Classical pieces in Lisztomania.

related in the sense that it's the opposite and also very bad

Those are all good examples, though aren't the soundtracks to a Knight's Tale and Mary Antoneitte, stuff like that, wall to wall modern songs? That's the gimmick, right? I love the Bowie song in Basterds because it sticks out.

there's a small amount of music-of-the-period in marie antoinette (harpsichords and such)

related in the sense that it's the opposite and also very bad

Well, related in that it's a period film with period music, but in both instances presented with a Glam/Prog sensibility fashionable from the time it was made.

Something else too is the mountain music versions of "White Light/White Heat" & "Fire and Brimstone" in Lawless.