Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood

Blending realism and fantasy with convincing creative bombast, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood masterfully cloaks the absurd.

Closely following Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth's (Brad Pitt) declining filmic fortunes, it patiently develops resounding depth where a closed mind might only breed shallows.

It's quite long.

I asked myself, why are we following Booth home for 7 to 10 minutes to watch him feed his dog and eat Kraft Dinner? The sequence establishes him as a loveable everyman, but this characteristic could have been highlighted without taking up so much time.

Similarly, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) goes to the movies. Her visit doesn't seem to have much purpose besides paying visceral tribute to a star who's life was cut brutally short, but it's there, again and again, taking up ample sensuous space, it's kind of cool to see an actress go out to see her own film, but couldn't the scenes have only lasted for a minute or two, in total, or been removed entirely without effecting the plot?

In less gifted hands, these scenes may have seemed trite, and the film might have become unbearable after the 45th minute, but they add so much character to Once Upon a Time without really saying anything at all, like essential gratuitous indulgement, generating agile lucid meaninglessness.

It's quite long, but also quite good.

What first drew me to Proust's Search was the ways in which he seemed to enable every one of his ingenious indulgements no matter what happened to be taking place in the story, and there's a little of that bold genius at work in Once Upon a Time . . . 's sweet nothings, so much of it could have been cut, but the film's so much stronger because it was left in.

The whole Manson subplot could have been cut, and you'd still have a tragic tale of a struggling actor who may have blown it unreeling for 100 minutes or so (he could have met Polanski [Rafal Zawierucha] in a different way), Tarantino's love of genre actors shining through with understated ease, Dalton's trials heartfelt and revealing, DiCaprio exemplifying generic tenacity.

Sort of wish his character had been played by Michael Biehn.

Dalton gives the film its strength as he strives to keep keepin' on, delivering a powerful performance for a pilot no one will remember.

But here I've written, "no one will remember", and it's precisely that kind of snobbery Tarantino critiques, he truly loves television with all its wondrous diversity, whether it's genius or ridiculous or hokey, the ideas networks come up with and for who knows what reason decide to share (see They Live?), whether the stories are haphazardly crafted, or the narratives expertly hewn. 

Where would I be without Cheers, a show where everyone hung out in a bar for 11 seasons praising shenanigans that were generally lighthearted?

Clone High? Parker Lewis? Star Trek? Twin Peaks (The Original Series)?

Once Upon a Time . . . absurdly plays with history but genuinely brings struggling actors to life, forging an imaginative dreamy mélange that's as otherworldly as it is down to earth.

It's the first Tarantino film I've liked since The Basterds, but unfortunately it's still too toxic to recommend.

One of the protagonists murdered his wife and got away with it and this is supposed to be okay, the other lost his license for drunk driving and still gets wasted all the time, hippies are one-dimensionally vilified, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) comes across as a flake and he's the only ethnic character to be found, Dalton stars in a filmic adaption of The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian, and violence often solves the problem.

Perhaps it's just a product of its time, but the film is ultra-violent, and doesn't offer alternative points of view.

He diversifies dimensions that are often one-dimensionally depicted (Westerns) while one-dimensionally depicting others to exaggerate the distinction.

A more balanced approach would have generated higher yields.

Especially in light of MeToo, and the intensifying climate crisis.

Kitschy insubstantial cool yet chilling art, obsessed with things that look pretty, putting a capital P back in patriarchal.

Why spend so much time thinking to wind up thoughtless?

Still better than so many of his films.

The Hateful Eight

*This one's kind of gross. The rules. A different set of rules.

It's difficult to take an exacting intellect capable of exotically yet haphazardly envisioning distinct pulsating shocks and successfully apply it to situations which often import stark congenital gravity.

You have to seem bright without seeming intelligent, unconcerned while meticulously managing the minutia.

In an enlightened stupor.

If you seem too intelligent it's too intelligent; if it's too bland, it's too bland.

You see Tarantino trying to intelligently craft visceral mundane irresistibly kitschy constellations throughout The Hateful Eight but the result is more like a blunt racist ultraviolent unappealing dust bowl.

That's not what you're supposed to do!

It's not that he doesn't have his own thing happenin'.

It's quirky and bizarre enough to make you want to see what's going to happen next, and his confident grizzly backwoods characters hold your attention with outrageously dispassionate abrasive machismo, bullshit, bullshit, more bullshit, mendaciously striking with cold hard-hearted disparity.

It's just, you keep seeing what happens next and it isn't that great, some of it's kind of cool, but there's an extended back-in-time sequence that serves little purpose but to depict a lively happy frontier family being slaughtered, there's torture and rape, the main female character's face is regularly covered in blood because her captor keeps punching her in the mouth, and the races are irrepressibly at odds as the hatred viciously intensifies.

I suppose if you want to indulge in gratuitous gratuity, sleaze for sleaze's sake, that's okay, I guess, I don't know why you would want to do that but it's done all the time, I don't want to be too politically correct here, The Hateful Eight firmly giving the finger to pc everything and it should be examined on its own terms judiciously.

Like, scatological synergies.

Claustrophobic acrimony.

Renegade nausea.

Hemorrhoid puke stink.

One of the first things I thought when I saw the trailer for The Revenant was, "this is what Quentin Tarantino could be doing, he could be making films like this."

But then I thought, it's annoying when people are like, you should be doing this, so I was like, I'm not going to be like that.

Inglourious Basterds is an incredible film that I love watching again and again. It succeeds on so many levels and even has valuable life lessons to learn worked into its frames.

I'm not getting that from Django or The Hateful Eight and think Tarantino should move away from exploiting race relations.

He could give the serious yet comedic unconsciously pliable western one more try, but like I think I've said before, it's extremely difficult to do.

In danger of being eclipsed by Robert Rodriguez.

Troublemaker studios.

Heuristic halcyon.

Django Unchained

Easy to write about this film it is not.

I heard Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) quoting Nietzsche during an episode of The Big Bang Theory the other night, and his point considered morality to be a barrier which prevents truly 'great' persons from attaining their full potential, since it requires that they conform to the standards adopted by common people. I tend not to see it that way myself. It seems to me that morality is often denied common people, depending on their financial circumstances, and, due to the significant economic advantages attained by the überwealthy, and the accompanying capitalistic social reverence, that morality is reserved for plutocrats and oligarchs, at least in terms of settling legal disputes (I don't know which thinker to attribute this idea to so I'm going with Leonard [Johnny Galecki]). There's a lot more to it than that, but this can obviously be frustrating and it's within this disenfranchised brutal frustrating ethical frame that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained cataclysmically reacts, his undeniable parageneric ingenuity once again limitlessly unleashed, although not as consistently as it has been in the past.

The same incomparable skill for creating iconic heroes and villains is at work, and since nothing is held back, both sides accumulate plenty of critical ammunition, accentuated by his requisite offbeat sensational ludicrous treacherous altruistic asymmetrical logical arsenal, although some of the (crackpot) theories, phrenology for instance, could have possibly been left out altogether.

Giving a voice to such ugly historical phenomenons and making that voice extremely detestable causes the theories themselves to come across as reprehensibly as they should, and it's not like racist lunatics don't still blindly believe in them; and applying restraints to the exhibition of ideas is anti-democratic, although such ideas themselves are extremely anti-democratic and are still being virtuosically displayed.

It's a bit unsettling.

The resultant graphic constant death also unsettles while begging a comparison to several prominent cartoons which regularly use such devices.

Organized fighting and sports are obviously going to be violent and provide a necessary supervised outlet for such tendencies.

It's the constant graphic choreographed extended hopeless brutality that sets Django Unchained (and Archer and South Park) apart from these realities, offering a sadistic carnal sick ostentatious fantasy, for those who regularly act according to social conventions, yet often feel as if or are deprived of moral compensation.

I love Quentin Tarantino's films but it's tough to watch enslaved grown men fight to the death, then see another torn apart by dogs, and another almost undergo castration.

The film's lighthearted comedic dimension complicates things further.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is an exceptional film. It's a tribute to film, a film fanatic's crowning achievement, a celluloidic lapis lazuli heuristically annihilating the Third Reich. Strong performances all around, Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa) trying to steal the show ala Frank Booth unsuccessfully due to Brad Pitt's (Lt. Aldo Raine) non-Jeffrey Beaumontesque counterpoint. Aren't these names simply outstanding: Lt. Aldo Raine, Col. Hans Landa, Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), Marcel (Jacky Ido). Set up and executed like a post-modern fairy tale, Basterds unreels like a quaintly distinct incandescent extremity, bluntly interdicting fictional necessities in a multicultural absurdist panorama. Every introduced character is compelling; every scene an odd mixture of frank subtlety; the pipe, how about that pipe!; and I really don't know what else to say. Don't want to go into too much detail and ruin it (especially considering that I'm reviewing it six weeks later) and know that I won't have enough time to analyze it until at least mid-December. So I'll just say that, those things, and hope you like it, or don't.