Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (SPOILER THREAD)

Cafe Society
181

You can’t parse the two halves of my sentence separately like that.

What I said was: “… films should not rely on the viewer having specific outside knowledge before the start but if the specifics of the manson murders are very much common knowledge among americans …” so what I’m implicitly saying is films obviously need to rely on a certain level of common knowledge but there is a line: you don’t want too many of your viewers scratching their heads, and it depends where we’re drawing the line here.

Anyway, in my view, the film would have been tighter anyway if we’re given reason to hate the hippies within the movie itself. Most films of famous tyrants still take a little time to remind us they’re a tyrant

182

So an ending that is happy but also extremely boring? I’m thinking of two alternate reality movies of the Columbia disaster.

1.) Technicians notice the wing strike in the launch footage immediately and treat it seriously as they should have. In an Apollo 13 style sequence, the scientists and engineers on the ground figure out what already on-board the shuttle can be used as a temporary patch. There is a space walk scene and a very tense re-entry scene and everybody cheers and hugs when the shuttle lands safely.

2.) Nobody notices the wing strike in the launch footage, there is a perfectly normal mission, the hole in the wing just happens not to do enough damage to destroy the shuttle, there is a routine landing, and in the final scene a couple of ground technicians notice the hole in the wing, one says to the other “Wow, that could have been a disaster!”

You are wanting WOaTiH to be movie number 2.

183

But “too many” of the viewers for this film weren’t scratching their heads in confusion. Your lack of knowledge about the Manson Murders is not a fault of the film. This is an American film, about an American story, and Americans are very familiar with Manson. Especially with 2019 being the 50th anniversary of the murders. I think this was the 3rd on screen depiction of Manson just this year. Why does everything have to be made with the Chinese audience in mind? I don’t watch Chinese films and then complain if I don’t understand something that is common knowledge for them.

184

But why are you phrasing this antagonistically? I was asking the question of to what degree this is common knowledge for an american audience.

185

Guys, Mijin didn’t like a movie. That’s OK.

Not all movies are made for all audiences. For those well-steeped in the cultural traditions expressed in the film, it was hugely rewarding, psychologically complex, and rich in detail. And if you were familiar with the director, you knew you were not getting a standard story structure and were likely to get moments of extreme ugliness, this enriching/detracting from the experience even more.

And if you don’t get the above, OUaTiH is a fuckin’ mess. It’s hard to follow. Nothing really happens. It’s confusing, ‘… wait, Leo’s in the Great Escape?.. what… what was that? Now he’s making a cowboy movie… Bruce Lee? What’s going on here?’. If you’re not expecting the ultra-violence, it’s off-putting as hell. Etc.

And, for this movie, I think it can comfortably fit in both categories: a brilliant masterpiece (my view) or a complete mess (others).

And, Mijin, to your question the Manson murders are known to ‘every’ American who was living in that period, and there was a pop culture fascination with Manson which peaked in the 1970s and has waned since, but has never truly subsided as the murders, along with Altamont and the Kent State killings are cited as the “end” of the 1960s.

186

I partially agree with Mijin here. It kind of is a fault of the film that it chose to focus on an obscure (to some, particularly as time and distance increase to beyond America and we consider the murders happened… 50 years ago) “historical” event (I honestly don’t think the murder, even as it happened, classified as historical in any but the most mundane sense—it’s not like the moon landing or something). The film should be self-contained and not require the audience to “read up” on the actual event before hand.

Because, I mean, I got it. I wasn’t quite sure where the film was going, but I had a wiki-level understanding of the Manson Family and the Tate murders, and I figured the meandering “fading actor” storyline was all going to come together with some kind of intervention and a chance at another shot at Hollywood “redemption” for our “heroes”, but the film really took its time getting there and for me the enjoyment had to come from that: the Manson Family and the expected ending weren’t nearly “present” enough to be compelling. So for the most part, you got a long meandering movie about a failed actor, and if you knew enough you held out hope for an action scene at the end, but then if you didn’t know about the murders, there wasn’t sufficient reason to conclude they were coming (they showed Manson surveillance the house, but it still wasn’t clear enough early on that the Manson Family would be coming to our heroes’ neighborhood).

In short, I think a lack of setup and in-universe foreshadowing is a shortcoming of this film, but the main storyline is done well enough to make it watchable, even without the murder-climax. So they absolutely could have ended the film differently, but then they might as well have cut out everything about Tate and the Manson Family, too.

BT

As a random aside, there is a fine line between not enough setup/exposition for a perhaps obscure quasi-historical film, and way too much. On the flip side of the coin, there’s the 2005 film The Great Raid, which opened with a long, clunky expository narration that felt the need to inform the audience that there was his thing called WWII, and that it involved fighting between the US and Japan, and an attack on Pearl Harbor, and an attack on the Philippines, and …, and … and… and I just cut it off probably midway through the opening narration because I just like “Holy NFBSK! Just how dumb of an audience did they make this for, that they feel the need to give me a first grade history lesson before even the first scene?”

So it’s a fine line. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood did I think “not enough” in terms of setup for a potentially obscure historical event (to some audiences—but I maintain the film overall was good enough to carry my interest personally), while I think some films do way too much, to the point of distraction, taking the time to spoon feed expository and world-building information about a world that a minimally informed audience would already possess.

187

Tarantino is not a serious filmmaker. He’s a pulp stylist. I’m not a fan of his bit in several of his movies I’ve found something to enjoy.

However I think it’s wrong to label as a “fault” that understanding this movie might require background knowledge that some percentage of people might not have.

There is zero obligation in the part of an artist to appeal to any specific number of people. Even if the artist emself is the sole person who can understand a film, that’s not a criticism on its merits.

188

This move was an homage to the Hollywood of the late 1960’s. Tarantino painstakingly recreated the look, feel, and sound of the time. Much of its appeal, then, comes from its nostalgia.

It’s not weird, then, for the move to presume that the viewer already understands the Manson murders, since it also assumes that they remember (or, at least, appreciate) that entire era.

A person who is not at least passingly familiar with old Hollywood just isn’t Tarantino’s target audience. That may be a discredit to him, but it’s consistently been a facet of his movies to allude to an earlier moviemaking era. This move was just the most explicit in making that reference.

189

That’s not a climax, that’s a conclusion.

190

The exact details of the whole history of the Family and the murders? Not very high. The main characters? Extremely high. Charles Manson is very likely the very most famous cult leader in American history. And he was mentioned by name in the movie. When Booth takes pickle girl home, she wants him to meet Charlie, but he isn’t there. (Also, the name “Sharon Tate” should have been setting off massive alarms.)

191

I think Leo’s predicament could have been better summarized with 5 minutes less exposition. No, I can’t tell which 5 minutes could have been cut.
I didn’t like the portrayal of Bruce Lee either. It’s been hypothesized that Cliff’s fight is loosely based on Gene LaBell sparring with Bruce backstage:
https://maworldreport.com/index.php/2019/07/31/the-stuntman-who-really-did-beat-bruce-lee/

I like how Tarantino lovingly recreated a real place and era rather than lovingly recreating other filmmakers’ works, which makes this film more enjoyable to me than, say, Kill Bill; also because it doesn’t require a complete suspension of disbelief.
Tarantino’s best film, IMO, is still Jackie Brown.

192

Regarding this discussion, do people go to movies without knowing anything about the filmmaker or the plot? I know I went to it knowing that it was a Quentin Tarentino film and had some idea that the Tate–LaBianca murders were involved. I usually read some reviews and articles that describe upcoming movies to see which I want to see.

Only in the case of a movie where I want to avoid spoilers will I refrain from reading up in advance.

193

I disagree with almost all of the above.

I believe Tarantino is a serious filmmaker, certainly more so than most, it’s just that the films he devotes himself to making aren’t meant to be too seriously. He’s happy to play fast and loose with history, and he’s happy to spray fake blood all over the place in the crudest possible way, but it’s typically in service of emulating a certain style, a style popularized in many cases by much less serious, and much less deliberate filmmakers than himself.

For instance, he still shoots on actual film, not because “film is more fun” or “film is easier than digital,” but for the look of it and because of his own peculiar, dare I say artistic, tastes. So much of what he does requires careful deliberation and planning, just to deliver the illusion of an authentic “crude” experience. The painstaking illusion of something thrown together on a low budget is very much evidence of a “serious filmmaker” in my view, particularly as the budget for his films indicates he has other options.

So I think he is serious… about making enjoyable films. If, however, a large portion of his audience isn’t able to enjoy a film for unintended reasons (that he doesn’t properly build his alternate reality) then I’d say Tarantino has failed in a sense that is unique to Tarantino. Some directors may not care if you are unable to be drawn into the world he has created. But I think Tarantino’s films usually go for the opposite. They may not explain everything (which is fine, particularly if the explanation doesn’t really matter or ambiguity is part of the theme) but in this case a significant part of the narrative tension leading up to the climax seemed to depend on a knowledge of actual historical events not sufficiently established or foreshadowed in this. Unless you knew right off the bat to jump to “long-haired hippies=villains”, this film didn’t really have a villain, other than some nebulous Hollywood system, to look forward to defeating. There was buildup, but only if you knew that we were dealing with the Manson family and they were on a collision course to murder the apparently random young actress shown going about her life in Hollywood, seemingly unconnected to the story other than that she happens to be a neighbor to our protagonist.

194

Yes, me.
Heck, some of my best cinema experiences have been where I have been dragged along to see something and don’t even know the genre of the movie.

Although in the case of Once…Hollywood I knew about the filmmaker (and liked many of his past films) just not the plot.

Well the name “charlie” might confirm Charles Manson to someone already guessing that way. It’s deliberately vague; I would agree that story-wise these soft references should work well for people going in that are familiar with these murders and sharon tate.

I still think making the hippies kick the metaphorical dog at some point would have made the film more complete regardless.

I don’t think that necessarily follows.
For example, consider the Irishman; I’d consider that to also be a loving recreation of (several) eras.
And it includes real people, that I had not heard of previously. While knowing about these people going in might aid enjoyment in some ways, it’s not necessary at all. The film shows us enough to understand the plot and character motivations. It works as a self-contained package.

195

However, there’s much dispute whether The Irishman is remotely accurate:

196

Can we please not ruin this nice thread by talking about… “the Scorsese picture”? It just casts a pall on everything, and anyway it’s already got its own thread.

197

As I said I enjoy the movie, but there are two, IMHO, very legitimate criticisms of the film:

  1. As mentioned, it did require an above average knowledge of the Manson killing to fully understand what happened. I think most Americans probably know of Manson and his crazy hippie family and probably know that they killed an actress and some other people in the 1960s. That’s probably the extent of it.

I know the story, realized that DeCaprio lived next to Sharon Tate and that he would be involved in the story around the killings. So I waited with anticipation. I could see how if you didn’t know the details you might be confused as to the happenings.

  1. It was just too long. A half an hour could have been cut from the film and not detracted from anything. It dragged at times.
198

This was a key point I made in my review of the film in the “seen recently” thread. The Hateful Eight also suffered from way too much filler.

199

Ten Oscar nominations, including picture, director, screenplay, Leo D and Brad Pitt.

200

Everyone likes freedom, nobody likes to see it being made.