Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

[Puce Moment]

I don't think Tate is a symbol at all - I think Tarantino is deliberately showing her as a human in all her mundanity (snoring in bed, unrecognised by cinema staff) to help her shed her posthumous image as a glorified, glamorous victim.

Conversely, her killers are demystified, turning them from malevolent bogeymen if the American imagination and back into what they were: drugged-up, dumb, incompetent sociopaths.

That's a decent breakdown from my point of view. One of the only things I actually really liked in the film was giving Sharon dirty feet. A bit on the nose maybe, and I would rather it wasn't in the context of his foot fetishism, but as a bit of semiotics, I appreciated it a great deal.

[greenman]

Yeah, it's like with Inglorious Basterds killing Hitler early and violently. It doesn't change anything but it gives a fantasy revenge for real life crimes. With OUATIH we're presented with Tate as a symbol for innocence. We know what happened in real life so we're primed to expect unbearable violence and destruction. We suspect Tarantino will change it somehow, but when he does that adds additional tension - Tate's been spared, but will the new targets? We've spent time with these characters and like them, but they could easily die in Tate's place. So when that violence is unleashed, violence that begins realistic but progresses to cartoonish levels with the flame thrower, it serves both as a release of that tension and I think Tarantino saying this is what should have happened. It shouldn't have been those innocent people getting massacred, it should have been these murderers. So I think in that way it's an act of revenge but it's the only revenge a storyteller like Tarantino can take.

It does basically feel like a manifestation of extreme anger against those people and maybe what they represent. I think you could that as with Hitler the cartoonishness is to make that even more extreme, these people not only die horribly but they also loose any dignity they might have.

I think you could definitely read it as a defence of Tarantino's favoured kind of cinema with Leo and Pitt's characters as personification of it ultimately saving the day. That could be said to be a conservative view I spose, the idea that evil will present itself openly to be fought against in such a fashion.

I could see a case that the film was looking to draw some parallel to the modern era by looking back to an era of similar political discontent with the Mason's arguably representing the more reactionary aspects of both conservative and liberal politics today. In that respect I think you could argue Tarantino was deliberately goading parts of the audience with the violence against woman, I doubt out of some misogynistic tendency but to show such considerations of gender as meaningless in the face of such wanton immorality.

[DukeDeMondo]

I'm reluctant to say too much about this just yet for I only left the cinema a few hours ago and I left feeling angry and depressed and sick to my stomach and wanting to rage and rage. Obviously that's not the time to be saying much of anything. What you might say about something that's left you feeling like that a short time after the fact is not necessarily the sort of thing you might say about it after a couple days reflection. Even if the "something" you're talking about is something that is itself capitalising on intense feelings of anger and revulsion.

So with that said, I really, really enjoyed the first two and a bit hours, and really, really hated almost everything that happened after the "Six Months Later" point. So much so that it retroactively curdled for me much of what came before it in Tarantino's filmography. A filmography I rated quite highly.

I haven't really had a problem with the violence in any Tarantino film prior to this one. Maybe The Hateful Eight made me uncomfortable in places, but that discomfort was largely negated once it went all Evil Dead.

In this, I found the male-on-female violence utterly repulsive, which is how it should be, but I don't feel like I was supposed to feel that way. Worldsgreatestsinner is asking, not unreasonably, that we place these fictional events in the context of the historical events that inspired them. That's fair enough. But surely it's fair enough too to put them in the context of the historical moment in which they were created. The question "why is nobody complaining about the violence directed towards the male villain in the same scene?" is pretty easy to answer. For one thing, most of the damage there is done by a dog, and what isn't is done relatively swiftly. There is a world of difference between a not-especially graphic depiction of male-on-male violence that is largely dog-on-male violence and a prolonged, leering, graphic depiction of a middle aged man - a middle aged man who not an hour prior was seen kicking the shit out of Bruce Lee, for fuck sake - killing a young woman by repeatedly smashing her face into stuff, yanking her from one surface to another when the bashing of one was all bashed out of it. To suggest that the depictions of those two events are interchangeable barring the gender of the character under attack is wrong-headed enough, but when you consider also that it's largely played for laughs, that it's arriving in the context of what is essentially a wish fulfilment fantasy, and... I don't know, is it too much? Is it too much to point out that at a time when Hollywood is re-evaluating its depiction of male on female violence, one of the most stomach churningly energetic depictions of such in recent memory has been orchestrated by a close friend of one of #MeToo's most powerful targets...?

It's all leaves a pretty fucking rank taste in the mouth, like. Pretty rank, alright.

Also, I didn't have any real problem with the takedown of the other female character in that scene, despite the lingering on what the BBFC might describe as "injury detail," so it's not just that violence committed against female characters offended me in and of itself. It's the palpable glee Tarantino takes in Brad Pitt smashing a young girl's face into a mantelpiece over and over in graphic detail that caused my guts to heave.

I have wondered, as I've come round a bit, if it was so graphic because Tarantino was trying to say something about the kind of fantasies OUATIH exploits. Something about how these sorts of revenge fantasies often betray a barbarism and a propensity for violence every bit as ferocious and sickening as those at work in the perpetrators of the original crime. I mean, that's an observation that has been made by a thousand filmmakers better and worse than Tarantino, but that has never stopped him before. It doesn't feel convincing, though, both because the tone of the thing does not invite revulsion or that kind of self-examination, even if revulsion and self-examination are what result, and because of its superficial similarity to the most famous scene from Ingolrious Basterds, a scene that certainly didn't invite anything like that (superficial similarity because once you get under the surface, the two don't have all that much in common, not least because the power dynamics in IB were nowhere near as skewed or as fucked as they are in this).

A "fantasy" that asks you to applaud - or laugh - as a middle aged stuntman repeatedly smashes a young woman's face off whatever surfaces he can find in an act of retribution that only the audience recognise as such is just fucked. Absolutely fucked. Almost a decade ago a very similar scene in The Killer Inside Me invited huge amounts of criticism, but The Killer Inside Me didn't ask you to cheer alongside, or to laugh. This asks you to do both. Yes in this instance the target of the violence was threatening violence herself, and yes there is weighing on what happens onscreen the full of what happened offscreen, but that doesn't make it any less vile. It's absolutely repugnant. Morally bankrupt, hypocritical shit.

Anyway. I'm reluctant to say too much, he says.

TL;DR: The first two hours were good.

[Dr Rock]

I'd like to see a film where a middle age stuntman smashes Myra Hindley's face into a mantelpiece over and over in graphic detail. Then he kicks Rose West up the cunt.

[greenman]

The first two hours did certainly feel like a rather different Tarantino to that we'd seen previously, less in the way of quotable dialog and more in the way of somewhat more subtly drawn characters(although Shosanna and Zola might fit that as well) and atmosphere. I did almost think it might end that way and the Manson killings would be averted in an entirely undramatic way with Pitt and Leo unknowingly altering events to prevent them taking place in the course of their own stories.

Not sure I agree with the idea the violence against the women was specifically focused on to a much higher degree, we did see the killing of the male Masonite in pretty graphic fashion dwelt on as well plus of course we saw Pitt beating up the other guy earlier.

Again I suspect the films argument would be that "looking beyond" the nature of the female characters is wrong headed apologism and that the audience is capable of making a moral judgement and of knowing the difference between fiction and reality. The scene with the child actor earlier in the film does seem to be looking to establish this, showing the difference between her self confident and empowered nature and the scene she films with Leo.

Not generally having the taste for that kind of violence yes some of it did make me feel rather uncomfortable and I think you could definitely argue Tarantino is not the most subtle of social/political commentators but you could at least say he's sticking to his guns, I don't think theres anything fundamentally different from his other work here in that respect. Even before this film I think it was pretty clear that his view of feminism in cinema would be that women get to play every kind of role even if that means being an evil antagonist who dies horrifically, perhaps focusing on that because he views it as underrepresented?

[rue the polywhirl]

A "fantasy" that asks you to applaud - or laugh - as a middle aged stuntman repeatedly smashes a young woman's face off whatever surfaces he can find in an act of retribution that only the audience recognise as such is just fucked. Absolutely fucked.

Bit sexist and ageist of you to highlight his manniness and his middle-ageyness. The facts are that the retribution to the Mansonites is very even-handed and fair and because the last scene is so very vigourous and pushes buttons means that it is good and the insane, over-the-top, cartoon violence is definitely less sexist by being completely all-inclusive.

[MiddleRabbit]

I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, having gone in with fairly low expectations. 

As for the violent end...

At the time, when Casino came out, I remember talking about it with a mate and him saying hat he thought that the violent scenes in that, especially the head in the vice and Pesci and his pal getting beaten mostly to death and buried alive, was Scorsese's way of pointing out to Tarantino that violence wasn't funny in the way he'd portrayed it up to that point at least.

I don't know if that's true or not but it does illustrate that Tarantino's depiction of violence has often been a bit cartoonish.  In fact, his films are generally a bit closer to cartoons and comics than serious, lifelike representations of whatever it is he's showing.  As far as I'm concerned anyway.

The end of OUATIH reminded me of that conversation because, initially, it did seem very much played for laughs - not least the tripping element, "Are you real?", Pitt's demeanour prior to it all kicking off in general.  Throwing the dog food, and the dog savaging the bloke's goolies were, following the conversation, were funny and, without anything really changing in terms of mood, when Pitt started on the woman who stabbed him, the laughter was still happening.

But, at some point during his taking for a tour around the room and smashing her face in against convenient fixtures and fittings, it stopped being funny because it was so brutal.

Which made me think, at the time, of that conversation with my mate and to wonder if he'd really been into something and here was Tarantino asking us to think about violence in films and the point at which it stops being funny and starts being serious.

Then, cutting to DiCaprio's immolation of the other woman, it was back to cartoonish violence again.

Probably that's just me - and my old mate's - interpretation and Tarantino had no intention of anything like that, but maybe not too.

I thought Sharon Tate's visit to the cinema to see how her movie was going down was there to show her vulnerability, despite the view that DiCaprio's character had of her life, which was that she had it made.  Tate didn't think she had it made and wanted to be loved.  She was pretty shallow, bordering on basic I suppose, but who wasn't?

I've long been confused by Tarantino's dialogue though.  It seems to be hailed as naturalistic, what with the pop culture references and digressions but it's never struck me as being remotely realistic.   For one thing, everybody in the Tarantino universe appears capable of shutting the fuck up and listening to long, rambling monologues without interrupting.  For another, it's massively stylised and the rhythm of Tarantino's writing seems to never change from film to film, from character to character.  I suppose you could argue that's his voice or something.  Maybe the manner of his dialogue - which often sounds like a fifteen year old, foul mouthed primary school teacher who thinks they've just discovered the meaning of life on the back of a cereal box - which adds to the disconnect from reality, in addition to everything else he does in his films. 

But yeah, I liked it and it made me think about violence on screen whether that was the intention or not.

[popcorn]

I've long been confused by Tarantino's dialogue though.  It seems to be hailed as naturalistic, what with the pop culture references and digressions but it's never struck me as being remotely realistic.   For one thing, everybody in the Tarantino universe appears capable of shutting the fuck up and listening to long, rambling monologues without interrupting.  For another, it's massively stylised and the rhythm of Tarantino's writing seems to never change from film to film, from character to character.

I remember the first time I saw Pulp Fiction as a teenager, how I responded to that early conversation with Jools and Vincent about the burgers. I just thought it was so funny and hip. And when I saw it again on TV the other day, I still think it's funny and hip, but it's impossible not to see it as Tarantino dialogue. That's not a criticism, just a change in perception.

Just like the shot of the female taxi driver's bare foot on the gas pedal. In 1994 that would have just been a quirky bit of characterisation. But now it's "ho ho, that's our Quentin".

[greenman]

I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, having gone in with fairly low expectations. 

As for the violent end...

At the time, when Casino came out, I remember talking about it with a mate and him saying hat he thought that the violent scenes in that, especially the head in the vice and Pesci and his pal getting beaten mostly to death and buried alive, was Scorsese's way of pointing out to Tarantino that violence wasn't funny in the way he'd portrayed it up to that point at least.

I don't know if that's true or not but it does illustrate that Tarantino's depiction of violence has often been a bit cartoonish.  In fact, his films are generally a bit closer to cartoons and comics than serious, lifelike representations of whatever it is he's showing.  As far as I'm concerned anyway.

I could see some argument with early Marty of say Taxi Driver or Raging Bull were films themselves are arguably about our relationship to violence but Goodfellas and Casino are films that sell themselves on violence. It might be masked behind a "crime doesn't pay" message but I think that's still clearly a lot of the attraction of them.

[MiddleRabbit]

I could see some argument with early Marty of say Taxi Driver or Raging Bull were films themselves are arguably about our relationship to violence but Goodfellas and Casino are films that sell themselves on violence. It might be masked behind a "crime doesn't pay" message but I think that's still clearly a lot of the attraction of them.

I dig it.  Although Tarantino violence, as far as I can remember, often tends towards the Looney Tunes sense of the ridiculous.  Scorsese's incidents of violence, as far as I remember, have always felt brutal in a way that Tarantino's often haven't.  The ear removal in Reservoir Dogs, with the camera moving away so the audience can do the Monkey's Paw thing and imagine something worse than could be shown graphically - or at least without looking stupid, as worked unintentionally for the best in, say, Jaws - was a big deal at the time in terms of a comment on psychotic brutality for the sake of it.

OUATIH, to me, flirted with the line between comic, ridiculous violence and, I suppose. The banality of domestic assault - sort of, as it happened in someone's house.  It was set up to be funny, continued to be funny, then it stopped being funny, then it was funny again with the flame thrower.

In a way, it's almost the sort of thing you'd expect from a ten year old who'd been exposed to a lot of action films, getting the flame thrower out of the shed and the dog and the dog food tin.  The face mashing against the furniture wasn't like that though.  Flame throwers, dropping anvils on coyotes and things like that are so daft as to be laughed at.  The face bashing, if it came from a ten year old's story/imagination might be seen as a bit more disturbing to an adult.

Scorsese's depiction of violence, with Casino and, later Gangs Of New York wasn't remotely funny.  It was fucking horrible - because of the relative banality of it, maybe.  I worked at the pictures during University and for a bit afterwards (90-about 96) and in Casino screenings, people didn't look at the horrible stuff in the main.  There were hands in front of eyes everywhere you looked.  Reservoir Dogs didn't get many laughs but Pulp Fiction did and there wasn't any cowering that I saw.

Only anecdotal of course, but I did wonder whether some people went into Casino expecting to be entertained by violence as they had been in Pulp Fiction and found it an entirely different kettle of fish which was, possibly, intentional on Scorsese's part..

I'm inclined to think that Tarantino isn't intentionally telling us anything deep about violence, although I might be dead wrong, but the invasion scene made me wonder.

[greenman]

I don't think he can really lay claim to vastly higher moral ground though as Goodfellas and Casino also have IMHO a voyeuristic take on violence, just hidden behind the distance of these being "bad people who get what they deserve". I mean you could argue that Tarantino is somewhat more honest in making his violence more obviously focused on entertainment.

In this case I'd agree the film as a whole shifted between more of a sense of realism(although one heavily focused on pulpy Americana) and a elevated cartoonish tone he's known for. Again to me the most obvious message is really that he believes that his pulpy influences do carry some worth hence he has two people involved in the creation of such films kill the evil doers and do it in a fashion we associate with such films. You see the same message pushed earlier in Leo filming a pulpy western but caring massive about how well he does it and ultimately giving a very strong performance.

Maybe not popular on CaB to try and read any political depth into his films but again I do think in the current environment he must have known he was going to get a reaction from that finale, especially with his own links to Weinstein and some criticism he's faced. My guess is for him this was a bit of a fuck you to the modern idea of "positive representation", basically calling out the idea that a character like Rey is any kind of advancement in cinema and instead highlighting again an area in which women are underrepresented, as evil doers who get their just desserts. I mean I don't think thats an unreasonable point to make given that over the top evil male performances are one of the stables of pulp cinema, actors like say Oldman, Hopkins, etc owe arguably their most iconic roles to this.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing being directly about the Mason family rather than having some vaguely similar depiction of them would be that he can fall back to the reality of the womens natures. The film basically becomes "call me out for violence against woman will you? well I'll give you the most evil real life women I can think of and force you to defend violence against them showing how you've lost touch with morality in favour of your pet issues" from him.

[MiddleRabbit]

I don't think he can really lay claim to vastly higher moral ground though as Goodfellas and Casino also have IMHO a voyeuristic take on violence, just hidden behind the distance of these being "bad people who get what they deserve". I mean you could argue that Tarantino is somewhat more honest in making his violence more obviously focused on entertainment.

I don't know, I didn't think, 'Oh, it's bad people getting what they deserve' because the people inflicting the violence weren't any better.  It was certainly voyeuristic, but I felt a bit like the 'Oh yeah, violence in movies is cool'/'How many killings?' crowd were sort of being taught a lesson, like when people caught kids smoking and made them smoke a full pack to put them off by Scorsese.

As I say, maybe not, but Tarantino was such an enormously big deal in the early-mid 90s at least, whereas Scorsese was the old hand and therefore not news so much.  The old boy teaches the young whippersnapper a lesson.

[phantom_power]

I would have more of a problem with the violence against women if that was the sole reason they were there, to get beaten and killed. I think though that most women in Tarantino films have their own personality and agency and so them receiving the violence is no different to any male character. Has he ever used the old "woman getting raped or killed is motivation for the hero to act and that is her sole purpose in the film" trope?

[popcorn]

Has he ever used the old "woman getting raped or killed is motivation for the hero to act and that is her sole purpose in the film" trope?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, because I'm not sure if the hero and the woman are the same person in your sentence. But it's the sole motivation of Kill Bill, isn't it? Poor old Uma.

[Mister Six]

Aye, and the "woman gets raped/assaulted, which toughens her up and motivates her to get revenge" trope is a nasty one, although complicated by the Bride already being a trained assassin, and her revenge being motivated by the desire to avenge her dead fiancé and child (so an inversion of the male murder revenge trope, come to think of it) not by the tapes that occur while she is unconscious.

Maybe not popular on CaB to try and read any political depth into his films but again I do think in the current environment he must have known he was going to get a reaction from that finale, especially with his own links to Weinstein and some criticism he's faced. My guess is for him this was a bit of a fuck you to the modern idea of "positive representation", basically calling out the idea that a character like Rey is any kind of advancement in cinema and instead highlighting again an area in which women are underrepresented, as evil doers who get their just desserts.

I don't think it's quite that focused on the representation issue, but I do think there's an impish "fuck you" attitude to the depiction of violence against women - a provocation to the woke call-out bloggers who'll slam him for everything anyway, by presenting something transgressive on its face (violence against women by men) that is totally justified within the context of the story.

[greenman]

I don't think it's quite that focused on the representation issue, but I do think there's an impish "fuck you" attitude to the depiction of violence against women - a provocation to the woke call-out bloggers who'll slam him for everything anyway, by presenting something transgressive on its face (violence against women by men) that is totally justified within the context of the story.

He does in this situation though have the extra defence. that he hasn't written the characters that way for the purpose of inflicting righteous violence upon them.

Really though the main focus of the film isn't on the Masonites or Tate I'd say its clearly the lionisation of pulp cinema via a pulp actor and his stuntman being validated. We see Dalton discovering the worth of his career to others and taking more respect in it and then by his being thrust into a situation in which cartoonish violence akin to his pulp films ends up saving the day. I mean that even moreso is surely a healthy dose of self justification from Tarantino given where his cinematic preferences lie.

[phantom_power]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, because I'm not sure if the hero and the woman are the same person in your sentence. But it's the sole motivation of Kill Bill, isn't it? Poor old Uma.

I mean a male hero has a girlfriend/wife who's sole purpose is to be raped and/or killed to give the hero motivation.

I think Kill Bill doesn't really conform to the "woman gets raped to toughen her up" because she is already pretty tough to start with and the reason she is shot is because she lives in that world

[Mister Six]

Yeah, and as I said, her motivation is (in part) that her bloke got killed. It's an inversion of the trope.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Bradley Pidth seemed remarkably composed and compos mentis to be doing all that ultraviolence after smoking his LSD cigarette. Realistically he would have just sat down and looked at the interesting patterns growing on the carpet.

[phantom_power]

Isn't the acid part of the reason he goes so apeshit on them? He is not quite sure it is all real and he is not completely in control

[Mister Six]

I thought it was just a bit of teasing to increase the tension, and make the burst of ultraviolence funnier and more surprising. He's basically a superhero.

[phantom_power]

Bit of both I think

[kitsofan34]

Quentin Tarantino has a foot fetish. That much is clear. Why does he feel the need to, no pun intended, shoe horn his fetish into his films? And why does it seem to be getting worse/more egregious with every film?

[Monsieur Verdoux]

I think at this point it's a self-aware and mildly ironic concession to a certain kind of auterism

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

I think at this point it's a self-aware and mildly ironic concession to a certain kind of auterism

Exactly that. It's become a jokey calling card, like Hitchcock with his cameos (but not like QT with his cameos, thank God).

[sponk]

I thought it was just a bit of teasing to increase the tension, and make the burst of ultraviolence funnier and more surprising. He's basically a superhero.

Spoilers ahead, don't know how to hide them.


Yeah I thought the whole film was built up like that. I didn't  want to watch the film at all as I was dreading how QT would handle the butchering of a pregnant woman, and Pitt's character being off his head on acid, I thought, would have left him completely unable to take down Tex and his crew. Realistic or not I'm glad he did. I loved the ending.

[Alberon]

Saw this the other night. The individual scenes were enjoyable, but I don't know if it holds together as anything in total at all. As to the ending, I think the title says it all 'Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood'

You spend the first three quarters of the film watching an actor on the long slide down. He's just doing guest shots as the heavy years after having his own show. He's alcoholic, maybe has the early stages of some serious lung complaint. His friend is just about finished as a stuntman and is reasonably happy with just being a driver/odd jobs man, but that can't last as Dalton slips down the pole.

Then in the final part it all turns good. Tate and friends are saved, Dalton gets his foot in the door with them so maybe revitalising his career and Booth will get to be the hero and probably live off that for years. It's a fairy tale ending in a Hollywood film style. As to the violence of the ending. I really don't know what to make of that.

The Hateful Eight got an extended miniseries when it got to Netflix. I don't know if OUATIH will as it seems long enough already, but you never know.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Did anyone stay for the mid credits scene? I didn't know there was one, but nobody seemed to be moving in the cinema so we stayed put. It wasn't anything decent, just a fake advert for Red Apple cigarettes.

[TrenterPercenter]

I enjoyed it more than I thought didn't know anything really about it other than the latest Tarantino flick.  Thought Di Caprio was brilliant (again) and was able to show off some more of his impressive acting skills, Pitt acting by numbers but effective and likeable (even though he killed his wife?).

However I think for the people talking about the female violence and Tarantino this seem quite an obvious trolling i'm afraid.

The dog waits for it's food, the blood and guts, the cheap processed and visceral mush that is served up in your bowl but not after the tension of waiting.  Just like we were all waiting to watch Sharon Tate get murdered.  If you are anti-female violence, yet you came to watch a movie about a women being brutally murdered*, you were waiting for it, in the end you were feed something different, not the real food but a processed cheap visceral mush served on your screen.  And you lapped it up.

Seemed quite obvious to me. I'm not saying it is right or that I agree with him doing this (in fact it is just his ego making the film about him again) but it was there quite clearly in my mind.


*There was a speech in the car about people in Hollywood making all the children watch their films about murder,  that they should be murdered themselves - again purely egotism on Tarantinos part but fits with my interpretation.

[thugler]

That was bad, apart from a few scenes. Tarantino is still a child really, still can't make anything serious or grounded.
The ending was fucking stupid revenge fantasy nonsense that didn't belong in this film.

The length was not justified so much superfluous guff in there.

Oh and i notice someone was supposed to be playing manson, were they even in it?