Tarantino has a foot fetish. His movies are full of women’s feet.
The trailers call this “The 9th Film by Quentin Tarantino” and I tried to count them up. Assuming we start with Reservoir Dogs, I can get to 9 by counting Kill Bill as 2 movies, and skipping Grindhouse and Four Rooms.
You’re correct, and I believe that when he wants to do #11, Jackie Brown will be taken off the “10 movie” list because it wasn’t his story.
I really enjoyed this movie, except I did have to turn away when Cliff was bashing the one woman’s face against the mantel. See violence like that onscreen is less entertaining when you have seen it in real life. I loved Brad Pitt in it he was Cliff. Leo was great as well, but just not as authentic - I liked the comment above that Pitt just becomes his characters. I loved this more than most of QT’s films.
I gave it a 7/10. I liked the characters, acting and the overall visual look/production design, but I thought it could have done with a better story, script, and - probably - directing, as there were times I felt it a bit amateurish. I also found the violence at the end to be rather gratuitous and juvenile.
Nice summation, MovieMogul. After reading this thread, your take was the one closest to my own.
I finally got a chance to see the movie on a flight yesterday, and while there were things about it that were undeniably terrific - the acting, the sets, the locations, the casting (along with other little touches) - there were other things that left me disappointed: the revisionist history done with a fanboy’s touch is probably what bothered me most (and too derivative, ffs). The scene with Cliff on the boat was one that I didn’t care for due to the set up of her berating and belittling him, making her a harpy.
One funny Easter Egg that I caught was the scene when Tate and Co walked into El Coyote and there was an Adult movie premier down the street - that theater is The New Beverly Cinema, a revival house that nearly closed some years ago before it was bought by Tarantino (I saw The Killing (Kubrick) there a few years ago).
Interesting! Didn’t know that.
Just saw the movie, which is why I’m so late coming to the thread.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I got that it referenced a spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West. It wasn’t until I thought about it later that I realized he was telling us what would happen in the movie. It’s reality with a Hollywood ending.
Now this is the third time he’s done this. IB rewrote Nazis; DU rewrote slavery. OUATIH rewrote the Manson murders. Three evils done over with crowd-pleasing, give it to the basterds, sorry, bastards endings.
Sounds good. Until you think about it. Hitler wasn’t just a bad guy; he was the culmination of fascist philosophy and the scapegoating of others. Calvin Candie wasn’t just a bad guy; he represented a culture of institutional prejudice and racial hatred. Charlie Manson wasn’t just a bad guy; he was the product of a popular culture that trained viewers that violence was the answer to every problem and that the bad guys should be removed violently.
One of these things is not like the other. You cannot argue that Quentin F’ing Tarantino believes that Hollywood culture created the Manson family or that the culture is an entirely pernicious and evil philosophy that must be destroyed as a way of life. Not the guy who spends the first two hours of a movie making loving recreations of elements of Hollywood culture virtually forgotten by everyone younger than him. (It’s true that he blackens that culture in his reimaging of it. No 50s tv show could possibly have the hero choosing the dead option in wanted dead or alive.) Not the guy for whom ultraviolence has been a stylistic obsession for a whole career. Is there any possible reading of this movie that says Tarantino has turned against himself and everything he’s ever done to give viewers the understanding that he has carefully destroyed his entire career?
The “Hollywood ending” has been denounced by critics of all stripes for decades. Anyone who watches more a movie a year can see how abused the cliches are. Even Watchmen, for all its brilliance, put a totally ridiculous countdown clock in the last episode. Spoofing something you love by exaggeration is legitimate; saying with a smile that it is an evil leading to horrific crimes and you plan to perpetuate it with all your creative imagination isn’t.
Can Tarantino do another - what he’s calling his last - movie with another Hollywood ending after this one? I guess the answer will tell us everything we need to know about OUATIH.
Considering the fact that the Mansons were real murderers, Tarantino must be really messed up in the head if he honestly believes that they were killed or injured by Leo and Brad. Either that, or he’s pretending that he made them up so he can have control over their fates.
But, I love Leonardo DiCaprio, so I give it an 8 out of 10.
:dubious::rolleyes:
Ok serious question. Do you have trouble distinguishing fiction films from real life?
Apparently he also thinks that Hitler and the Nazi leadership were killed in a Paris movie theater. Sheesh.
Shameless Plug: Here’s my interview with QT as he was doing his Oscar campaign tour last month:
(I don’t appear until 2:40)
Hated it.
I went into the movie completely blind, knowing nothing about the story or setting – for all I knew, it would show as much of the real Hollywood as Doc Hollywood did.
At a certain point I guessed that it may have been based on the Manson family, but the differences were enough that I chose not to draw any conclusions.
Coming at it from this perspective, the ending was unpleasant enough that I needed to go watch another, happier movie as a palate cleanser.
Had I known all the backstory ahead of time, would I have enjoyed it?
Well, the ending might have felt more earned or logical than it did, but I still cannot enjoy this degree of sadism. Let alone find it funny. I can appreciate in some contexts over the top violence played for laughs, but watching people’s faces get bloodily smashed in, or skin torn off, is far too graphic for me, and the others that I was watching with (I was watching a private screening, with about 20 people who also did not know the backstory).
Anyway, movies should not rely on the audience having read the programme before entering the theatre.
Really? You knew the film was directed by Quentin Tarantino, and were surprised that it was violent? That’s like watching a Fred Astaire movie and being shocked that there was dancing.
It’s not about whether it’s violent, it’s the style of the violence.
Django unchained I was cool with, as the scenes with the dogs and the mandingo fight are clearly meant to be shocking – they’re played as the bad guy “kicking the dog”, and we’re supposed to side with the people who want the violence to end. And anyway it tends to pull away at the most horrific bits.
And the end fight with all the ketchup flying around seems more like Star Trek VI (the gravity generators are down!) than reality.
Meanwhile in this film, the audience is supposed to be relishing the violence, finding it amusing even. And that’s fine as an objective…the problem it doesn’t work here, in my opinion, is:
-
In the movie the hippies have not done enough yet for me to be wishing for their comeuppance. They have not yet kicked the dog. They did have legitimate reason to be pissed at Cliff, and there was suggestion that some of them were apprehensive about actually killing him. They’re not completely unsympathetic.
Of course Cliff’s justified in using lethal force to protect his own life. But that’s not the same as someone being down and starting to have gruesome fun with them. -
Seeing people get their faces mutilated in various ways is far beyond what I could watch and find amusing. I don’t care if they really are the bad guy; it could have been freaking hitler and I still would have found it deeply unpleasant.
YMMV
I saw this only a few days ago (but thought I might have vaguely remembered the end spoiled.) I very much laughed out loud at and enjoyed the violence that happened in the end. I was born in 1972, so didn’t experience the story as it took place, but my mother kept an interest in it (and had a copy of the book Helter Skelter) so I’ve always been familiar to some degree with the events. The characters very much deserved the deaths that they got, and in a better world than this that is what would have happened to the real people. I loved the whole movie.
Like I said, YMMV, but nobody laughed at the screening I went to, so I am not the single outlier on this.
As for deserving it, the characters conspired to kill – we didn’t see yet if they could actually go through with it. This is a common set up in film and TV; it’s not uncommon for the protagonist to want to kill for revenge in this way and then have a change of heart. They don’t then get a slow gruesome death. What else had the hippies done?
Yeah, but these are the people who killed Sharon Tate. Not in the film’s universe, sure, but does that exonerate them? If not for a slight tweak of history, these people would have killed the person who the film spent a great deal of its running time portraying as the epitome of beauty and goodness. Is their grotesque fate not a form of, um, preventive retroactive justice?
Didn’t Tarantino, in fact, have the heroes mutilate Hitler’s face in Inglorious Basterds? It’s kind of his thing. Also, it’s realistic - in hand-to-hand combat, you should always go for the face (and the balls, of course). Brad Pitt’s character was hardly one to follow Marquess of Queensberry Rules.
Spoiler alert–in the real world, they went through with it.
Wait, these “hippies” were the ones who were going to kill Sharon Tate and we actually do know that *these
- hippies in fact did “go through with it”.
Did you miss that this was an oblique alt-history of the Manson murders, this time the murders being inadvertently thwarted because, in this fairy tale (hence, “Once Upon a Time…”), the damsel in distress wasn’t ever in distress because her aging neighbors were having bad career days?