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March 28, 2024, 10:23:44 PM

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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Started by Wet Blanket, March 20, 2019, 02:35:01 PM

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Wet Blanket

Trailer's out for Tarantino's latest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scf8nIJCvs4


Tend to be a bit ambivalent about Tarantino. He's really run the comic-book violence, mock-grindhouse thing into the ground now. I thought during the first half of Hateful 8 that he might finally have matured enough to make a straightforward western but the second half descended into the usual cartoon bloodbath. This looks like it might be more in the vein of Pulp Fiction. Hopefully less daft than his most recent efforts

Noodle Lizard

Oh this looks like a right old load of tacky nonsense.  The title an' all.  I'll be there, mind.  I did like The Hateful Eight, for all its flaws.

Puce Moment

I was really hoping this would be a much more moody, dark piece than the trailer is indicating. Tonally it looks very similar to his most recent films, whereas I was hoping for something more like Jackie Brown and Boogie Nights.

St_Eddie

I'm looking forward to this.  Should be good fun, I reckon.  However...

Quote from: Puce Moment on March 20, 2019, 03:18:59 PM
I was really hoping this would be a much more moody, dark piece than the trailer is indicating. Tonally it looks very similar to his most recent films, whereas I was hoping for something more like Jackie Brown and Boogie Nights.

...I do agree with this.  Well, at least in terms of Jackie Brown.  I'd say that the trailer for this isn't exactly a million miles away from Boogie Nights.

Sin Agog

I was recently listening to the series of Manson episodes on the You Must Remember This pod, and I'm a little befuddled how that trailer scans with the real story.  The Manson clan inveigled their way onto the ranch of an old Western actor/stuntman for a good, long haul, so I thought Leo might be playing him at first, but he was in his 70s at least.  Seems like a good thing if it's only glancingly telling the Manson story, as dry biography is hardly in QT's wheelhouse, and Helter Skelter ('76) already exists.

Wet Blanket

I do feel he's on very dodgy ground involving the actual Sharon Tate murder. I know you don't go to a QT film in search of good taste, but that's such a horrible crime, it feels wrong to me if it's going to be addressed in his usual pop-song splatterfest quip-along fashion

Johnny Textface

Always excited for new Quentino. He's one of a few filmmakers who's films really feel like cultural events.

9th film. Does that mean Kill Bill is one film or is Death Proof not a film?

phantom_power

Quote from: Sin Agog on March 20, 2019, 03:29:18 PM
I was recently listening to the series of Manson episodes on the You Must Remember This pod, and I'm a little befuddled how that trailer scans with the real story.  The Manson clan inveigled their way onto the ranch of an old Western actor/stuntman for a good, long haul, so I thought Leo might be playing him at first, but he was in his 70s at least.  Seems like a good thing if it's only glancingly telling the Manson story, as dry biography is hardly in QT's wheelhouse, and Helter Skelter ('76) already exists.

I have heard the Manson stuff is only on the periphery of the story

St_Eddie

Quote from: Johnny Textface on March 20, 2019, 04:23:01 PM
Does that mean Kill Bill is one film or is Death Proof not a film?

The former.  Tarantino only split Kill Bill into two parts because it was felt that audiences wouldn't be willing to sit through a four hour long movie.  Some countries have since received the full cut on DVD I believe, or at the very least, it's something which Tarantino has stated he intends to do.

Quote from: phantom_power on March 20, 2019, 05:59:15 PM
I have heard the Manson stuff is only on the periphery of the story

It is.  A lot of media outlets have been wrongly reporting this film as 'Tarantino's Charles Manson movie' but it's really not.

Thomas

I watched The Hateful Eight recently, and I was surprised to really enjoy it. Like many, I'd tired a little of the whole Tarantino-violence thing, but I thought there was a hint of something behind the violence in that film. Not sure what, but something. Might have been some sort of intellectual, reflective commentary; might have been some dust.

I've also been watching Westworld, and I've begun on the ol' Clint Eastwoods, so I'd like to revisit Django Unchained soon. Overlong, but I enjoyed it immensely as a stylish, cartoonish, blaxploitation-tation flick by an indulgent white manchild. Few too many occurences of a particular word, of course.1

Don't know if I'd bother going to see this in the cinema, though. I'll catch it on Netflix in five years.

[1]
The word g'day.


Quote from: St_Eddie on March 20, 2019, 06:46:28 PM
The former.  Tarantino only split Kill Bill into two parts because it was felt that audiences wouldn't be willing to sit through a four hour long movie.  Some countries have since received the full cut on DVD I believe, or at the very least, it's something which Tarantino has stated he intends to do.

Marketed as Double Bill, I hope.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Was Jackie Brown a massive box office failure or something? It seemed like he was making an attempt at artistic maturity with it, but then he naffed off for several years and everything since his return has made Pulp Fiction look like My Dinner with Andre or something.

Johnny Textface

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on March 20, 2019, 06:54:24 PM
Was Jackie Brown a massive box office failure or something? It seemed like he was making an attempt at artistic maturity with it, but then he naffed off for several years and everything since his return has made Pulp Fiction look like My Dinner with Andre or something.

I heard that the budget was pretty low for JB so they definitely made a decent profit. I think he may have tired of the dialogue stuff and wanted to go action instead.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Johnny Textface on March 20, 2019, 08:15:29 PM
I heard that the budget was pretty low for JB so they definitely made a decent profit. I think he may have tired of the dialogue stuff and wanted to go action instead.

Do you mean the relatively low-key dialogue stuff as featured in Jackie Brown? If we know one thing about ol' Quent, it's that his films are absolutely packed with dialogue.

JB was a departure for him and he did a good job, but it was probably an experiment as far as he was concerned: adapting someone else's work and turning in a solid crime drama featuring fairly realistic characters and dialogue. Once he'd proved to himself that he could do that, he went back to what he enjoys doing best - making QUENTIN TARANTINO films.

The forgettable Death Proof aside - what a throwaway piece of self-parody that was - I've enjoyed all of his films to varying degrees, and I always look forward to seeing what he comes up with next. 

Johnny Textface

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on March 20, 2019, 08:29:47 PM
Do you mean the relatively low-key dialogue stuff as featured in Jackie Brown? If we know one thing about ol' Quent, it's that his films are absolutely packed with dialogue. 

JB is pretty talky - but he followed it a few years later with KB - so I was speculating whether he just fancied a go at action instead of slow paced talky stuff. KB isn't that talky is it?  I've not watched them since they came out.

I've watched JB loads though as it's probably my favourite of his, love the 'hanging out with the characters' vibe of it.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Johnny Textface on March 20, 2019, 08:59:05 PM
JB is pretty talky - but he followed it a few years later with KB - so I was speculating whether he just fancied a go at action instead of slow paced talky stuff. KB isn't that talky is it?  I've not watched them since they came out.

I've watched JB loads though as it's probably my favourite of his, love the 'hanging out with the characters' vibe of it.

KB isn't as talky as most of his other films, but it does contain quite a lot of typical Tarantino dialogue.

I agree that JB is an enjoyable little film, it feels like the work of a mature adult as opposed to a self-indulgent magpie film nerd with verbal diarrhoea (the latter description isn't a criticism as such, QT's films are very entertaining for the most part).

mothman

I often think of what Mark Kermode said about JB at the time: that it was QT's attempt to move beyond his standard schtick and make something deeper and more adult (I'm paraphrasing here, I ferget his actual words), and when it didn't work he went back to his comfort zone. Of course, that's an assessment made at about the time Death Proof came out, so MK is applying a hefty dose of hindsight to the process - when JB came out there wasn't really a QT oeuvre to judge it against (unless you count the QT-written-but-not-directed films like True Romance or Natural Born Killers, which while having a QT sensibility could hardly be said to be archetypal QT films), just Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. And as others here have said, while JB may not have had the impact PF had, it wasn't a disaster.

DukeDeMondo

#16
Yeah, what Mothman said. Folk talk about Jackie Brown like it's his fucking Pinkerton or something like this.

To be perfectly honest, I've always been a wee bit suspicious of people claiming Jackie Brown to be their favourite Tarantino picture. That's not directed at anyone on here. Just a general sort of feeling I get from folk that say that sort of thing. Betrays a certain sort of a supercilious sort of an attitude in some instances, I feel. Like Jackie Brown is the best one because it feels like a legitimate, proper, grown up picture, there's a restraint and a discipline to it, and if only he had carried on making proper grown up pictures with restraint and discipline to them, instead of all this other fucking nonsense, we might have ended up with things that were Actually Worthwhile. Credible, even. Halfways fucking Lutheran sort of stance, really, when you get underneath it all. This valorising of restraint. This suspicion of anything that might be considered any way self indulgent.

Well, to fuck with restraint and discipline, I want my filmmakers to indulge themselves however they will, take off wherever their humours might take them. Jackie Brown is great but so is Django shooting the fucking cocks off folk left and right and The Hateful Eight erupting into whatever kind of Wild West Evil Dead it took the notion of turning into two thirds of the way through.

The only film of his that I really dislike is Kill Bill Vol. 2, which bored me to fucking tears. I was excited going in. Oh, he's got all the hacking and slashing out of the way, now, you know, all these folk breaking their necks on the bannisters and the snow all falling about them and, know, bits of eyes and chunks of gut tossed hither and thon, he's not interested in any of that this time, it's all about the chat. It's all about that crazy Tarantino chat, that's what the whole thing's going to be about.

Well that was partly true, there was a lot of chat, but the chat they chatted was absolute fucking garbage. I've watched the first instalment a few times. I've never felt any compulsion to return to the second since leaving the cinema.

But. Other than that, I've enjoyed most everything he's put out. I'm with St Eddie on Death Proof, even, I'd go so far as to say. Or, well, I liked it at the time. Put it like that. First time I saw it, it was by way of a bootleg copy of the whole Grindhouse thing all put together in the right sort of order with the trailers in between and I enjoyed it enormously. I've never seen the stand alone version, which I believe is a bit longer. I've no real desire to see it either. But in context, rattling in halfway through that grimy CAM-job Grindhouse I'd got hold of at the time, it worked well enough, I thought. Probably better than Planet Terror worked, although I enjoyed that too. Has anyone seen that since it was released? It was fun enough, some good Jeff Fahey stuff in, but is worth a fuck now? I don't know.

The worst you can say about Death Proof, really, is that it directly inspired those many, many, many tedious riffs on "Grindhouse" movies that appeared one after the other for ages after, things made by people who didn't even know what "Grindhouse" meant and that we all had to suffer through all patient like because maybe an especially wild title had hooked us in and there was nothing we could do about it then until the fucking thing was finished.

St_Eddie

#17
Quote from: DukeDeMondo on March 21, 2019, 12:49:31 AM
To be perfectly honest, I've always been a wee bit suspicious of people claiming Jackie Brown to be their favourite Tarantino picture. That's not directed at anyone on here. Just a general sort of feeling I get from folk that say that sort of thing. Betrays a certain sort of a supercilious sort of an attitude in some instances, I feel. Like Jackie Brown is the best one because it feels like a legitimate, proper, grown up picture, there's a restraint and a discipline to it, and if only he had carried on making proper grown up pictures with restraint and discipline to them, instead of all this other fucking nonsense, we might have ended up with things that were Actually Worthwhile. Credible, even. Halfways fucking Lutheran sort of stance, really, when you get underneath it all. This valorising of restraint. This suspicion of anything that might be considered any way self indulgent.

Why would proclaiming Jackie Brown as one's favourite Tarantino film imply a distaste for his other works?  Fair enough if that's what someone directly states but otherwise why would you project that onto them?

Jackie Brown probably is my favourite film of Tarantino's but I like all of them.  Jackie Brown is the one that I return to the most often though, in part because yes, there is a little more depth and nuance there but that's not a slight against his other films.  It just means that there's a little more meat on the bones, for one to chew on, upon repeat viewings.

Sometimes I want to really study a character's motivations and personal interactions.  Then again, other times I just want to watch a woman go nuts and chop the limbs off dozens of Yakuza.  Neither is inherently superior than the other, in terms of viewing experience.  It's just down to personal preference and more importantly, what mood you're in on any given day, when choosing a movie to watch.  I just tend gravitate towards the deeper experience more often than not.  That's not to say that I can't, or don't, appreciate a more visceral level of entertainment as well.

It's best not to project your own reasons onto those who state why they generally prefer one film over another.  Perhaps just take people at their word instead.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on March 21, 2019, 12:49:31 AM
The worst you can say about Death Proof, really, is that it directly inspired those many, many, many tedious riffs on "Grindhouse" movies...
That's not remotely the worst I could say about Death Proof.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: St_Eddie on March 21, 2019, 12:58:32 AM
Why would proclaiming Jackie Brown as one's favourite Tarantino film imply a distaste for his other works?  Jackie Brown probably is my favourite film of his but I like all of them.  Jackie Brown is the one I return to the most often though, in part because yes, there is a little more depth and nuance there.  That's not a slight against his other films.

Well, just like I said. There exists this idea that Jackie Brown is a legitimate, grown up, thoughtful film, and is therefore of greater value than, say, something as self-indulgent as Django. And I don't think it is of greater value. And I don't think there's anything wrong with self-indulgence.

But as I said also it wasn't directed at anyone here. Plenty people legitimately prefer Jackie Brown to his other films, and it isn't because they believe the excess and the indulgence of the others is beneath them in some way. But there are people who do think that. This kind of chat exists. I think you can hear it coming out of Kermode every so often, for one thing. That he fucked his potential because his films got wilder and baggier and more ridiculous rather than tightening up like Jackie Brown sort of suggested might happen. But there's no less inherent worth in something wild and baggy and ridiculous as there is in anything else.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: St_Eddie on March 21, 2019, 12:58:32 AM
It's best not to project your own reasons onto those who state why they generally prefer one film over another.  Perhaps just take people at their word instead.

I'm not really getting this. I think it's legitimate enough to assume that someone's opinion of something, a film, say, might be suffused by the stuff that they believe about film in general, their personal tastes and preferences, prejudices, so on and so forth. I think it would be bizarre if that wasn't the case.

St_Eddie

#21
Quote from: DukeDeMondo on March 21, 2019, 01:10:22 AM
Well, just like I said. There exists this idea that Jackie Brown is a legitimate, grown up, thoughtful film, and is therefore of greater value than, say, something as self-indulgent as Django. And I don't think it is of greater value. And I don't think there's anything wrong with self-indulgence.

But as I said also it wasn't directed at anyone here. Plenty people legitimately prefer Jackie Brown to his other films, and it isn't because they believe the excess and the indulgence of the others is beneath them in some way. But there are people who do think that. This kind of chat exists. I think you can hear it coming out of Kermode every so often, for one thing. That he fucked his potential because his films got wilder and baggier and more ridiculous rather than tightening up like Jackie Brown sort of suggested might happen.

The thing is, if that's how someone feels, then what's wrong with that?  If someone like Mark Kermode vastly prefers Jackie Brown to Tarantino's other works and feels that much of his work is all style and little substance, then that's how he feels.  Not everyone has to think the same way that you do and enjoy the same things that you do.  Most of the time, I strongly disagree with Kermode's opinions on film but I regularly listen to his reviews all the same because I care to hear what he thinks, regardless of whether I personally agree or not.  I certainly don't get annoyed by a difference of opinion when it comes to film.

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on March 21, 2019, 01:10:22 AM
...there's no less inherent worth in something wild and baggy and ridiculous as there is in anything else.

Not to you or I but there might be to someone else.  You can't control what others enjoy or don't enjoy, nor should you care to.  If someone tells you that you're wrong for enjoying "wild, baggy and ridiculous" movies, then that's a problem.  Nobody has the right to tell you that.  However, equally, you don't have the right to tell someone else that they should see the worth in such movies and enjoy them.  People can't control what they like and don't like.  They simply do.

Where I have a problem is when someone says "Tarantino is a bad director", as my Sister's ex-boyfriend once did.  That's objectively wrong.  You can dislike or hate his films subjectively but as a director, in terms of his craft, Tarantino is in no way, shape or form a "bad director".  That's what it all boils down to (as usual); subjective vs objective.  Subjectively, one can feel anyway they like about any given film, or filmmaker, and it's 100% valid.  However, if one makes a statement of objectivity, then they damn well better be able to back that up.  If someone says "Kill Bill is a badly made film and anyone who likes it is wrong for doing so", then yeah, that's an issue.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: St_Eddie on March 21, 2019, 01:22:44 AM
Not to you or I but there might be to someone else.  You can't control what others enjoy or don't enjoy, nor should you care to.

I have no desire to control what others enjoy or don't. I just find the reasons why they do or they don't enjoy those things to be interesting. As I'm sure you do too. You're here, after all.

St_Eddie

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on March 21, 2019, 01:30:44 AM
I have no desire to control what others enjoy or don't. I just find the reasons why they do or they don't enjoy those things to be interesting. As I'm sure you do too. You're here, after all.

That's my point though.  Is it your place to speculate the reasons as to why someone else doesn't enjoy something?  Shouldn't it be down to the person themselves to tell you why they don't enjoy it?  It's rather presumptuous to think that you can project onto others the reason as to why they like or don't like something.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Let's agree to disagree.

... except on the subject of Death Proof, which was total guff.

St_Eddie

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on March 21, 2019, 01:42:27 AM
Let's agree to disagree.

I don't consider this to be an argument and I hope that DukeDeMondo feels the same way.  It's just an interesting debate, as far as I'm concerned.

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on March 21, 2019, 01:42:27 AM... except on the subject of Death Proof, which was total guff.

These on the other hand are fighting words!

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Okay, it wasn't total guff.

It was, however, a massive steaming pile of utter fucking shite.

mr. logic

Reservoir Dogs is his best film. It's weird because as huge as it was, it seems almost forgotten now, despite being perfect.

Butchers Blind

The guy playing Bruce Lee was good.

Avril Lavigne

Quote from: mr. logic on March 21, 2019, 02:07:57 AM
Reservoir Dogs is his best film. It's weird because as huge as it was, it seems almost forgotten now, despite being perfect.

A lot of people I know think it's overrated, which I can't help thinking is just because they first saw it long after it had influenced a million other '90s-2000s movies they had already seen. I remember one friend of mine watching it for the first time a couple of years ago and saying he didn't think it was very good and you could "obviously tell it was his first film". Needless to say the next day I wrote an essay detailing all the reasons he was wrong and why Dogs is a masterpiece, and sent it to him in a PM on Facebook. I am still awaiting a reply. As a sidenote, his favourite film is Natural Born Killers.