The Quentin Tarantino Thread

[nacho]

So... The Hateful Eight. We watched all three (!) hours of it last night and hated it. The worst movie he's ever done. And people going on and on about Morriconi? His music was overshadowed with modern day songs. It was weird. A terrible, awful, horrible movie.

And...utterly fascinating. We couldn't stop watching. What Tarantino did was put on a stage play. The pacing, dialogue, and characters all felt like a play you'd go to see in the 50s. We compared it repeatedly to 12 Angry Men.

Very strange...

[nacho]

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was terrific! Mainly because he returned to the "fairytale" aspect that made Inglorious Basterds so amazing. Unlike that movie, this fairy tale was a little bit more subtle throughout (despite the name, and the use of the name in the credits). A much more personalized sort of fairy tale instead of the much broader fairy tale of Jewish vengeance.

As with IG, I found that this fairytale ending left me full of hope and love. The sort of thing we need from modern movies (and Tarantino). This is actually a feelgood movie!

Now, RC needs to weigh in on the Manson angle, because I thought the casting (across the board) was magnificent here.

[RottingCorpse]

I, too, loved this movie. I still think IG is QT's magnum opus, but this is really great too. Much more in line thematically and visually with his early work, but showing maturity and restraint.

Performances are great. How much Pitt has aged to look like Robert Redford is uncanny, and cool. I'd totally watch a Butch and Sundance remake with him in the Redford role. DiCaprio is unbelievably good here as well. It may be his best performance ever, and he's had a lot of good ones.

RE: Manson... I may have been burdened by my deep knowledge of Manson lore here. I went in telling myself to shut off that side of my brain. I had heard rumors of an IG style history rewrite at the end. In the context of what QT was saying about the death of old Hollywood (in his fantasy of it never dying), the alternate history made sense. Though I'll go the other way here and say I found it more off-putting than his torching Hitler in IG. Maybe it was the intimate gruesome violence of it all. I do like that the Manson stuff was just sort of peripheral to the Rick Dalton / Cliff Booth story.

And make no mistake OUATIH is a fairy tale romanticized version of that era of Hollywood. Yes, the Manson murders brought in paranoia, but the seedy underbelly had been there since the inception of the studio system. Hollywood has been a corrupt criminal enterprise from the beginning; California was still basically it's own fiefdom when the studios were founded. The owners of them were people who thought they were above the law and could do what they want with whom they want. If Sharon Tate hadn't have been murdered by Manson (rumored to be Hollywood's pimp du jour before he wen off the deep end) something else would have happened eventually.

But I'm sort of cynical about that whole era after spending so much time in the Manson gutters.

OUATIH is  a feel good movie, maybe the only QT movie that truly does lave you feeling warm.

[nacho]

The intimate gruesome violence, though, was very Manson, no? If history had run its course here, then it would have been intimate gruesome violence happening at the top of the hill. So it's fitting that the fantasy re-write sees that same violence turned on the Family. And, in fact, done with the same sort of cool, collected calm that we all imagine ythe Family to have been capable of. Which underscores your point, yes? We are Manson. It was always there.

In terms of that maturity -- I love that he kept the fairy tale aspect in check. I went through most of the movie pretty much convinced that QT was making a movie about the inconsequential guys who lived next door to a national tragedy and just cruised on by without realizing it or caring.

[RottingCorpse]

Again, I think it's just my deep knowledge (and investment too I guess) in the Manson mythos that my brain had a hard time *not* going, "It didn't happen like that."

But yes, the violence is certainly the point. We would have been appealed by being shown how it actually happened, but we cheer because the Manson family is getting a comeuppance they never really got in the real world. It cheering about the murderer in the electric chair for murdering our loved ones, except on a weird mass cultural level. It's the same way we cheer when Shoshanna wipes out the nazis at the end of IG. The fantasy of the Manson murders felt more like a veiled denial to me than the Nazi fantasy. It had a "this is how it *should* have gone" vibe. Again, I've spent a lot of time in Mansonland so it's hard for me to shut the expert part of my brain off.