Usually I prefer reading fiction but, being between fiction novels now, I've gone back to the books of movie criticism I got earlier this year. I finished Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation and have continued reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies. Tarantino's book was a great companion to the movies he talked about, a charmingly personal tour of '70s cinema. I certainly didn't always agree with him. I can't share his love for Paradise Alley and I was a little surprised he considered Sylvester Stallone's inspiration for the film to be entirely The Dead End Kids. I thought it was at least partially inspired by Night and the City. But his views on Steve McQueen films and on Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse really enhanced my appreciation for them.
Kael's book, largely written in the '50s, is less interesting to me for the insights Kael has into the films she's talking about and more as a specimen of opinion pieces from the era. Of all the books I've read from the '50s, hers is the most directly expressive of conservative opinions and it gives me a clearer impression of how politics were polarised at that time than I've ever had before. This is from her chapter on New Wave British films:
The semidocumentary surface of these films is linked to an ideology which is in its way peculiar to English film critics--the ideology of commitment. If you read Sight and Sound, in which so many films are appraised for the director's degree of commitment to a social point of view (good if left wing, bad if not), you will discover that in this ideology, location shooting, particularly around working-class locations, is, in itself, almost a proof of commitment. In judging works from other countries, the English will overestimate a film like Marty, and they'll suggest that a film that is stylized or that deals with upper-class characters is somehow "evasive"--that it doesn't want to come to terms with the material. This attitude gives the critics an extraordinarily high moral tone.
Imagine what she'd have thought of Jeanne Dielmann getting voted number one on Sight and Sound's greatest films list.
The British films she talks about in the cited chapter include some I admired myself--Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, and Look Back in Anger--and Kael is not entirely negative about them. She seems to have liked Room at the Top best of all. But she makes a good point that realism or focus on working-class characters does not, by themselves, make movies great.
X Sonnet #1746
The mad and restless horses prowl the heath.
The whites of violent eyes demand a light.
Obtrusive fog descends like monster teeth.
Pervasive chill compels the blood to fight.
A giant toe could span a couple trains.
Surrounding forests dropped their leaves of cash.
Cavorting ghosts convened for growing pains.
When life arose, 'twas over barley mash.
Where falling trees arrive at leaves it's late.
The autumn weather's nice for cleaning floors.
But faeries giving birth'll make you wait.
Despite the fact you never cared for bores.
A fleet of ties eclipsed the collar sun.
Across the leggy plain the trousers run.
In addition to reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation lately, I've also been reading Pauline Kael. A few weeks ago, there was a rumour Tarantino's next movie, The Movie Critic, would be about Pauline Kael and that he wanted Meryl Streep to play her (which would've been perfect casting). But Tarantino denied that the movie would be about Kael, though he is on the record many times saying what a profound influence Kael was on him.
One of the things I love about Tarantino is that he clearly respects film critics. Many filmmakers, even some of the filmmakers I love, dismiss the whole profession as a gang of impotent backbiters. But in his book, Tarantino has a lot to say about critics he loved and hated, and he has reasons to back up what he says. He dedicates a whole chapter to critic Kevin Thomas who boosted a number of Tarantino's favourite exploitation films of the '70s. And Tarantino doesn't take it personally when Thomas doesn't like a movie he likes.
As a movie critic, or essayist, Tarantino is certainly insightful but, and I'm sure he'd agree, his eloquence can't match Pauline Kael's.
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre [for a critic]; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.
-from "Trash, Art, and the Movies" by Pauline Kael, 1969
On Monday, I read her review for Ingmar Bergman's Shame. I was surprised to find she thought it a better film than Persona, a film she mostly disliked except for the monologue about the two women naked on the beach (that is a great monologue, and one of the sexiest scenes in the history cinema). She considered most of the '60s for Bergman to be diminished by a "pall of profundity". And though I disagree with her, nonetheless the sentiment in this bit really struck a chord with me:
Shame is a masterpiece, and it is so thoroughly accessible that I'm afraid some members of the audience may consider it too obvious. They have had so many years now of grappling with puzzles that they may consider all that figuring out responding to a work of art; when they devised a theory about what was going on in a film, they took their own ingenuity as proof that the film was art. And now here is Bergman, of all people, making a direct and lucid movie; they may, in self-defense, decide it's banal.
Those words Kael wrote in '68 or '69 are so apt for discourse around art in academia, and the ancillary internet whirlpools of amateur academia, to-day. Especially as critical theories have truly graduated from being merely screeds imposed on works of art to being dogma imposed on life itself.
I've read reviews by Pauline Kael here and there over the years but this is the first time I've really devoted time to her work. Partly because her work is difficult to come by. Most of her reviews that are online are behind various paywalls, particularly The New Yorker's paywall. I got a month's trial subscription to The New Yorker just to read their archives, which I swiftly regretted when I tried to cancel my subscription. I was put into an endless log-in loop--If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription. Welcome to Manage Subscription, please log-in. If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription . . . I had a New Yorker subscription a few years ago and should have known not to go back to them. That time, what I thought I was signing up for was to pay a few bucks a month for the digital subscription but I was surprised to find I was immediately charged a hundred dollars for a year. But it was my fault, of course, for not paying careful enough attention to the wording on the subscription page. Still, it's funny they have these little fissures in their plumbing to suck up money at the same time the quality of their journalism has nosedived. This time, I was finally able to unsubscribe by waking up early and calling their helpline. At least, the lady on the phone said I was unsubscribed . . .
A good percentage of their archive I looked at was ridiculously useless. Many articles from the '60s are just low resolution scans that are impossible to read. I did enjoy some of the pieces by Kael I was able to read, particularly a complicated take she had on John Boorman's Excalibur. She wrote a four page review which, remarkably, was normal in those days.
There are also just big gaps in the New Yorker archive so I realised the only way to get at most of her reviews was to buy her books, so I bought two. I'm still waiting for one to be delivered next week which I'm hoping has her review of Vertigo. I know she didn't like Vertigo but I'm really curious to read her reasons. It's especially difficult to find negative reviews she wrote for movies that have become highly regarded in the decades since. I guess someone thinks they're protecting her legacy.
Another reason I'd not read much of Kael was the first time I heard of her, I think from my high school film teacher, Martin Johnson, I'd heard she didn't like Stanley Kubrick. So I thought, how much could her opinion on film really be worth? But now that I've read so much of Kael that I respect, I find myself fascinated by her dislike of Kubrick. And Tarantino's--Tarantino is also not a fan of Kubrick. Though I wonder how much of that is due to his love of Pauline Kael and Brian De Palma, whom Kael preferred over Kubrick.
Using my temporary New Yorker subscription, I read a 2003 interview with Tarantino in which he said of A Clockwork Orange,
That first twenty minutes is pretty fucking perfect. The whole non-stop parade of Alex and the druids or whatever they were called: they beat up a bum, they have a gang fight, they go to the milk bar, they rape a girl, they break into the house, and they’re driving and playing the Beethoven, and Malcolm McDowell’s fantastic narration is going on, and it’s about as poppy and visceral and perfect a piece of cinematic moviemaking as I think had ever been done up until that time. It’s like that long opening sentence of Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Subterraneans,’ all right, that great run-on sentence that goes on for almost a page and a half. I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. And it’s just, like, Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You liked the rest of the movie, but you put up with the rest of the movie. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did you’re a fucking liar.
Kubrick may indeed have been dishonest about his intentions with the film. I don't know if I'd put that down to a lack of self-awareness but to a fear of being shut down by institutions or influential individuals, a fear that Tarantino has been remarkable for lacking. I watched A Clockwork Orange again last night and it seems clear to me, not just in the first twenty minutes but in the entire film, that Kubrick is talking about a natural human love for violence and how people who deny that love are truly destructive hypocrites. Who can watch this counselor who visits Alex and not suspect he's more turned on by hurting Alex than by the prospect of helping him?
In Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, she derides the film for making Alex the only charismatic character, and making him very charismatic. I would say this is because Alex is the only honest character. The point Kubrick is making about the dangers of social engineering isn't just in how it might malfunction but in how the instigators of such projects may not be honest about their own motives, probably even to themselves. Which would certainly pertain to social engineers to-day.
Twitter Sonnet #1685
The castle stones exude a winter's cold.
To-night, the kitchen fire's green and blue.
The seven dogs await the call of old.
But quiet spirits hide a deadly clue.
Assembled guests were numbered only three.
The sun had set an hour 'fore the game.
But summoned sure, the trio came to see
What pagan sport their wicked host would name.
A purple person put a pin to work.
Reflexive grins aggrieved the sexy nurse.
Assorted games defeat the broken Turk.
A final world expands her tiny purse.
Comparing crimes could wreck a rotten hulk.
So silence kept the evil iron bulk.
For some reason, starting in high school, and then throughout my twenties, adults started recommending 1972's Deliverance to me all the time. Usually people who weren't particularly interested in movies started recommending it to me. It seemed like they pegged me as having a personality that "needed" to see Deliverance. So, being young and naturally contrary to adult advice, especially advice that seemed in any way patronising, I avoided the film at all costs. But now I'm reading Quentin Tarantino's new book, Cinema Speculation, and he has a whole chapter on Deliverance. And I knew I'd want to see the movie before I read the chapter. So finally, after decades of pressure, I watched it. If you, reader, happen to be any of the people who at one time recommended it to me, maybe you'll be pleased to know I liked it.
I agree with Tarantino, who says the first half of the film is much better than the second half. The energy created by the actors and camera work as the four city guys strut about the labyrinth of a decrepit hillbilly homestead is terrific. The arrogance of the guys--Burt Reynolds, Ronnie Cox, Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty--and the treacherous strangeness of their environment they don't seem quite aware of loads up the movie with tension right away.
When Reynolds arrogantly browbeats his way through a bartering negotiation with one hillbilly, I was astonished by his foolishness, very credible though it was. The four city guys want to canoe down a dangerous river and Lewis (Reynolds) is trying to get two of the hillbillies to drive their cars to their destination. If you ask me, you ought to be as polite as possible to the strangers you're handing your car keys to, especially if said strangers don't have much apparent respect for you or the law.
Lewis' self-confidence is at turns abrasive and admirable. Drew, Cox's character, remarks at one point that Lewis isn't the frontiersman he fancies himself to be and Tarantino explores it further in an interesting discussion about how Lewis is genuine yet at the same time is coping a "pose".
The fish out of water quality of the four guys reminded me of some of the arrogant foreigners I meet who blunder their way through Japan, unaware of just how polite the locals are being. The four discuss lofty topics like the nature of civilisation and environmentalism like gods looking down on this funny little Georgian woodland. They so clearly overplay their hand that it's quite credible when things go to shit. But their charisma, and the vulnerability in their lack of self-awareness, make you root for them, too.
Ironically, the famous shocking scene in the film may have been less shocking for me because of a similar scene in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. I appreciated reading about his perspective, seeing the movie for the first time as a kid in the early '70s and what it meant for the evolution of cinema. It's a good book, by the way.
I still don't know why so many people recommended Deliverance to me.
Robert Blake passed away a few days ago. The 89 year old actor was one of the Little Rascals, he gave an extraordinary performance as a killer in In Cold Blood (clip above), he starred in a popular cop show called Baretta, and he was the Mystery Man in David Lynch's Lost Highway, the role I best remember him for.
When you search for "Lost Highway clip" on YouTube, most of the most popular results are of Blake's character. Lynch made a brilliant choice in casting Blake well against type. His eerie black eyes and tenacious grin create the demoniac man more than the makeup and costume.
Quentin Tarantino dedicated his novelisation of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Blake. Which has led people to draw comparisons between Blake and the character of Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in the film. Both men may have murdered their wives, neither was found guilty of the crime, leaving only a court of public opinion to weigh in. It's a circumstance more familiar in a David Lynch movie or series, particularly Twin Peaks, which is populated by characters who seem to be different people depending on the circumstance and perspective.
Who was Robert Blake? All I can say for sure is he was a great actor and a fascinating man.
I've seen the future, baby, and it's 1994's Natural Born Killers on Disney+. I assume it's on Hulu in the U.S. but, here in Japan, one of the favourite movies of the Columbine shooters is available on to-day's equivalent of the Disney Channel. I didn't see that coming. Or maybe I kind of did. It's all right there in the movie itself, after all; a society so desensitised to violence that they venerate killers. Director Oliver Stone's Big Message, though, about how media perpetuates a cycle of violence, comes off pretty trite if you read Quentin Tarantino's far superior original screenplay for the film, which is more about the difference between real and fictional violence.
Oliver Stone is not a smart man. I remember listening to his commentary for the scene in which tabloid journalist Wayne Gayle (Robert Downey Jr.) interviews serial killer Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson). Stone compared it to Geraldo Rivera's interview with Charles Manson and observed how Manson actually came off as more intelligent in the interview than Rivera. In the original screenplay, Tarantino describes Wayne Gayle as a journalist like Geraldo Rivera so maybe Tarantino had the same thing in mind. But however superior Stone may feel to Rivera, I think the two have a lot in common. He portrays Wayne Gayle as a fool who is eventually caught up in the glamour of Mickey and Mallory. Stone himself, in recent years, has become enamoured of Vladimir Putin, though he did condemn the invasion of Ukraine. It's no surprise to find that, in comparing the Tarantino screenplay and the film Stone shot, that Stone was clearly seduced by Mickey and Mallory, too, just like one of the suckers he was supposedly lampooning.
He gives Mallory (Juliette Lewis) a tragic backstory with abusive parents and, in this context, Mickey becomes the hero who helps her escape by murdering the two. Stone's other most notable contribution is a Native American shaman who is essentially portrayed as saving the souls of the killers.
One of the scenes cut from the film, that existed in Tarantino's screenplay, is a courtroom scene in which Mickey, acting as his own defence attorney, taunts and murders one of his victims on the stand (Ashley Judd). In an interview included with the scene, Stone confirms that the shaman scene was meant to show that Mickey and Mallory were no longer meant to be viewed as killers afterwards.
The real villains in Stone's film are Wayne Gayle and the police detective Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore). Both characters, particularly Wayne Gayle, are much more complicated in Tarantino's screenplay, which could be said not to have heroes or villains at all. Which would have been normal for Tarantino in the '90s. Is anyone really a hero in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction? Mickey and Mallory do bear some resemblance to the protagonists of True Romance, a Tony Scott movie with a Tarantino screenplay.
Part of the reason Tarantino's movies are great, usually even better than the exploitation films that inspired him, is that he doesn't feel the need to make a protagonist likable. Real people can do or say things you like one moment and in the next do something you absolutely abhor. Lesser filmmakers can lose the thread too easily if they start to like a character. Stone liked Mickey and Mallory so, in his version, Mallory couldn't use a racial slur, and he couldn't portray any of their victims as human. Wayne Gayle gets it the worst. As good as Robert Downey Jr is, Stone's version reduces him to a slobbering cartoon character. In Tarantino's screenplay, he's very much like Geraldo Rivera. Shallow but not a psychopath. Not unlike Oliver Stone.
The dichotomy Tarantino was considering in writing the screenplay becomes more apparent when you compare it to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Others have noted he essentially transferred Mickey's dissing of Bruce Lee to a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In interviews, Tarantino has talked about the difference he sees in Lee's Martial Arts, which is effectively more of a performance, and the skills of a real killer like Brad Pitt's character--or Mickey in Natural Born Killers. Again, it's about a comparison between real violence and movie violence. The two things are very different animals.
Stone's film does have a great soundtrack, though. At times it functions like a great music video for a mix tape. Leonard Cohen, Patsy Cline, Patti Smith, Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails. Back in high school, when all I listened to was movie soundtracks, the Natural Born Killers soundtrack was one of my gateway drugs to a lot of other music. Though, at that point, I already admired Trent Reznor from the Lost Highway soundtrack.
I read Tarantino's screenplay for Natural Born Killers for the first time this morning. I was intrigued that he had Wayne Gayle's cameraman, Roger, argue that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is Steven Spielberg's best film. Tarantino occasionally puts his own opinions in the mouths of his characters and this felt like one of those times. But when I looked for lists of Tarantino favourite movies, the only Spielberg film I saw was Jaws at number 11. But then I found a Vanity Fair interview in which Tarantino describes the opening action sequence in Temple of Doom as one of the best of all time. So I guess there was indeed a little bit of Tarantino himself in "Roger". I guess it would have been boring to have Roger claim Jaws as Spielberg's best film, Temple of Doom is the more provocative opinion. I don't know if I agree with Roger but I do think Temple of Doom is the best Indiana Jones film.
Two brothers flee from their bank robbery south across Texas, into Mexico and into Hell in 1996's From Dusk till Dawn. What a wonderfully fucked up movie. Screenwriter Quentin Tarantino again shows his unparalleled talent for writing bastards, so much so that the criminal world implied by the film feels at least as scary as the Satanic, supernatural world. And director Robert Rodriguez shows why he's one of the best action directors of the past thirty years.
I was really in the mood to watch this movie in October but couldn't afford to rent it at the time. But I noticed a couple weeks ago it's on HBOMax, which I temporarily subscribed to again to watch Peacemaker, so I finally had my fix. I hadn't seen From Dusk till Dawn since the '90s. Probably on VHS. It's a lot better than I remembered.
A lot of the criticism about this movie has to do with its combination of genres. The first half of the film is a fugitive/hostage film, the second half is a zombie apocalypse film--I say zombies despite the fact that they're vampires because they function more like zombies traditionally do than vampires. A lot of critics say the two parts of the movie don't really coexist harmoniously and that used to be my feeling, too. You get invested in the tension between the two criminals and the people they kidnap. Seth (George Clooney) sees himself as a professional thief while his brother, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), is a slave to his perversion. The family they kidnap is headed by patriarch Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), a pastor who hasn't lost his belief in God but has lost his love for God. It's an interesting distinction.
The underlying tension revolves around Richie, established as a rapist and ultra-violent killer, like Jack the Ripper, potentially assaulting Jacob's daughter, Kate, played by Juliette Lewis. It's kind of interesting seeing her back in an innocent lamb role after Natural Born Killers.
There's an evident internal conflict for Seth. He doesn't like to hurt people needlessly but he also doesn't seem to feel especially bad about the people he does kill. Jacob clearly senses Seth's conflict and you can sense him trying to figure out a way to use it. In the second half of the film, when the group are fighting for their lives against the sudden appearance of vampires, the tension from he first half of the film kind of disappears, not the least because Richie gets killed. That's how I used to feel about it but I feel differently now. I find the vampires much more effective now, especially as I think about their presence in terms of the characters' self-perceptions. Seth is a guy who works completely without a net, morally speaking. He doesn't like to kill but he also has no compunctions about it. Jacob, by believing in God and rejecting Him, lives in a potent state of sin, despite being the film's moral centre. So basically, no-one has any reason to believe they're protected from damnation.
One of the main differences between Rodriguez and Tarantino is that Rodriguez tends to lean more into fantasy. Don't believe for a second Rodriguez doesn't know how absurd the crotch pistol from Desperado is--and it turns up again here, now wielded/worn by Tom Savini. From Dusk till Dawn very nicely blurs the line between the fantasy world of Rodriguez and the more realistic crime world of Tarantino.
The film begins with this gaudy "World of Liquor" shop. It's believably over-the-top, I've seen plenty of places of similar decorative flamboyance in California. But the Titty Twister bar in Mexico seems like something from another world.
Yet it's close enough to World of Liquor that I'm drawn into believing it.
I love how inconsistent the vampire designs are in the film. They're influenced, like every other vampire film since, by Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. But like that film, you can never quite predict the form he vampire's going to take. And it's startling when there's some exaggerated facial feature, like a malevolent parody of the human body.
And Salma Hayek as Santanico is a worthy successor to Dracula's Brides.
If you ever wonder why Hayek is a movie star, watch this movie or Desperado. She really hasn't done anything as amazing since, usually just turning up to help fill out an all star cast. She is a demon goddess in front of Robert Rodriguez's camera, though. When you consider this scene along with Jessica Alba in Sin City and Rose McGowan in Planet Terror, it's clear Rodriguez is genius at this stuff. Three times he's presented actresses in solo dance sequences that have been the high points of their careers. I see now that he directed a a Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande video two years ago. They sure chose wisely.
I love how the film ends, too, with Seth negotiating a percentage of the loot with the local gang lord. The encounter with the supernatural just turns out to be another step in his descent into a bigger Hell, and his conflict comes back just so he can show a moment of kindness to Kate. Of course, that probably is how it would go. Usually in vampire movies, if a vampire shows up, it dominates the lives of the characters. In From Dusk till Dawn, it's just another gruesome permutation of this living perdition. What a terrific film.
A few days ago, I noticed 2007's Death Proof was on Amazon Prime and I couldn't resist watching it again. I think it's been at least six or seven years since the last time I watched and, damn, has it aged well. Quentin Tarantino's most explicit ode to '70s exploitation films, it's really a blend of slasher films, revenge films, and car chase films, pulling some of the best qualities of all three together with Tarantino's singular voice.
Tarantino's movies have always given one the bracing sensation of seeing something the various scolds would insist you neither should see nor want to see. And I don't just mean moral scolds but also the voices that insist stories need to be structured a certain way to please an audience.
And I know a lot of audiences complained about how much dialogue is in this movie. There's no accounting for taste. I see this movie and I think it's glorious how these people sit around and talk with Tarantino's dialogue which is so brilliantly a mixture of the colloquial and poetic. The seemingly aimless quality of it is of course not actually aimless--little plot important things are embedded everywhere, like how Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) never drinks alcohol at the bar (but has a bottle of whiskey later), how Kim (Tracy Thoms) carries a pistol. But a lot of it is just plain character building for the sake of character building. Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) may be the most tightly wound of her group of friends or it may simply be an aspect of her personality exacerbated by their tendency to see her that way. It's easy to sympathise with her exasperation when the other three ladies don't seem to side with her on the issue of the guy who slept with another woman on Abernathy's birthday.
There's also the subtle arranging of morally interpretable chips in the first half. What does it mean that Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) may have beat up Pam (Rose McGowan) in high school? Should it mean something that Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) decided to give Stuntman Mike a lapdance, despite having been so wary of him?
I always found it curious that Tarantino gave so many of his own opinions to the villain. But that's normal for Tarantino--there's no villain in a Tarantino movie that doesn't have a few genuinely charismatic qualities--and very often they're possessed of insight. There are exceptions, like the villains in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, an especially interesting movie to contemplate in connexion with Death Proof.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood can almost be taken as an inversion of Death Proof. The old school Hollywood stuntman becomes the hero instead of the villain, and the gang of violent pretty girls become the villains instead of the heroes. I thought of this when Jungle Julia calls Rose McGowan's character a "dirty hippie", furthering my suspicion that Margaret Qualley's performance as Pussycat in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was influenced by McGowan's recent behaviour.
There are so many lovely little visual ideas in Death Proof too. I love the moment when Jungle Julia is trying to talk to someone on her cell phone and the jukebox next to her can be seen slowly but surely loading a new record. I love the closeups on Kurt Russell chowing down on Mexican food while the harmonica section of Pacific Gas And Electric's "Staggolee" plays on the soundtrack.
I can say all that and I still haven't mentioned the wonderful Zoe Bell, who translates her real life charm perfectly into a fictionalised version of herself, or the phenomenal car chase that occupies the last half hour of the film. It's hard to believe one film can have so much.
It's the simplicity that makes 2019's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino's boldest and most complex work. Honestly, I don't know where to begin except to say it's a damned good film. Tarantino does something new, one could say it's a further advance beyond the restraints of postmodernism, but arguably Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino's own version of Mulholland Drive. But where Mulholland Drive is a self contained narrative of dream and dreamer, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood exists in symbiosis with its audience. Tarantino is making a very direct argument about who we are, sitting in the theatre, watching the movie. It's too big a statement to pass judgement on now, really, but I think he's right. I hope he's right.
In one scene, Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, stares at pictures of herself in a movie lobby, a moment that recalls Jean-Paul Belmondo staring at pictures of Humphrey Bogart in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless. Godard is an acknowledged influence on Tarantino--he named his A Band Apart production company after another of Godard's films. A scene elsewhere in Once Upon a Time, where segments of film are abruptly cut out of a dialogue scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and another man, is straight out of Godard's Vivre sa vie. But the moment in the movie lobby is a more interesting full circle moment--Belmondo's character had stared at Bogart in admiration and contemplation of the mirror Bogart represented for his reality while Sharon Tate is literally staring at herself--or not literally, as Margot Robbie is sort of the professional version of Belmondo's character, staring at the real actress.
Or shall we say gazing? Did you know Quentin Tarantino likes feet? There're more lingering shots of female feet in this film than all of Tarantino's previous films put together and I don't think it's an accident or even simply his way of telling his detractors to fuck off. He's deliberately challenging the concept of the "male gaze". It's part of a more general point he's making about how responsible people are for their own behaviour.
To say you don't buy into the concept of the male gaze is not to say that you don't believe women are ever objectified or portrayed in a manner reflective of the filmmakers' misogyny. Claims that women were objectified long predate the concept of the male gaze when it was coined in the 70s by Laura Mulvey. Even her essay that is credited with introducing the term didn't use it in the ways it is to-day typically used in conversation or criticism, interchangeably meaning either objectification of women or the reflection of male attraction in composition. What new element did "male gaze" bring to the table that "objectification" couldn't cover? It placed an intrinsic guilt in men (implicitly discounting the existence of homosexual motive)--objectification is something done to the actor. The "gaze" is a more passive state, suggesting, in the term's broadly understood meaning, that women being objectified is the inevitable consequence of their being photographed for or by men. Much as one can say Charles Manson was responsible for all the actions of the Manson Family.
Manson's presence in the film, portrayed by Damon Herriman, who bears an eerie resemblance to the him, is minimal. There's no attention given to the religious nature of his teachings or his professed belief in an impending race war--possibly Tarantino, who's certainly pored over details surrounding Manson more than I have, has reason for doubting the authenticity of these stories about the nature of the Family's relationship or structure. The important thing for Tarantino is how tenaciously the Family maintained beliefs that diverged from reality. For such a group, a motive for murder could be like the one he gives to Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison) who justifies the crime of killing filmmakers and actors by saying that films and television inspired murder. So killing artists is a sensible way to prevent a great many more murders, like the ones being perpetrated in Vietnam. Is this an idea Atkins or the Family really subscribed to? I don't know. The idea of art conditioning or brain washing subjects was certainly one subscribed to in critical theory at the time. Notably it's something that Tarantino has faced in interview after interview throughout his career--doesn't he think the violence in his films influences people to commit violence? He usually offers only a very blunt response in the negative. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gives it pretty eloquently.
If you do firmly believe that art is directly responsible for murder, then of course you can justify to yourself the killing of artists. The belief in the morally corrupting nature of art is itself a moral self-corruption. Much like the beliefs of the Manson Family where the more they seemed right to themselves, the further they diverged from real, workable ideas of human civilisation.
As Oscar Wilde wrote in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray; "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope." For Sharon Tate or Rick Dalton, DiCaprio's character who's, in some ways, a doppelgänger of the actress, movies are wonderful things in and of themselves. When Atkins calls Dalton's series, Bounty Law, "fascist", in one sense she's right--it's about a man assuming the position of judge, jury, and executioner. But it's also only a fantasy and the person actually dealing out death and judgement is Atkins herself.
Dalton and his stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), aren't portrayed as flawless people. There's a rumour that Cliff has killed his wife and we see a flashback of a woman, presumably Cliff's wife, unleashing a tirade on the quiet and possibly simmering stuntman. But we're never really told if he actually killed her. But that's kind of the point--Cliff is the film's hero, Tarantino leaves it to us what we choose to believe about him, whether we value him based on the actions we witness or the ones we hear about.
Should Tarantino have avoided showing the beauty of the Manson Family members, lingering on shots of their pretty feet or the way one of them (Margaret Qualley) sticks her butt in the air while leaning on the car door to chat with Cliff? To do so would be to deny the reality of how important sexuality was in the cult framework--to shoot the members in ways that would suggest they aren't attractive would be to deny the operative nature of that sexuality. It is, in fact, the opposite stance of the male gaze--the idea that beauty operates on the beholder rather than placing all culpability on the beholder. To some people, this is plain sense--a group of young hippies living together, of course sex is part of it. That's human. On the other hand, when Cliff figures out the girl is underage, he has the power to say no when she offers to suck his cock. That's a lesson a lot of men would do well to learn.
Above all, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, like the Sergio Leone movies from which it takes its title, does not present reality but the elevating quality of myth, confirming us in our best opinions of ourselves without denying the ugliness--or beauty--of reality. The important things are scenes like the one where Tate is pleased by how the work she's accomplished on film pleases her audience, or the simple, honest and lovely chemistry between Cliff and and Rick. The movie offers a fantasy that stands in unabashed opposition to reality, having a perfectly reasonable trust in the audience to know the difference and appreciate the fantasy for what it is.
A couple months ago, NetFlix quietly released an "Extended" version of The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino's terrific 2015 Western. Except it wasn't just a longer version of the film, it was the film recut as a four episode miniseries by Tarantino and his editor:
So about a year after it’s released, maybe a little less, me and my editor, Fred Raskin, we got together and then we worked real hard. We edited the film down into 50 minute bits, and we very easily got four episodes out of it. We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently. Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this “chapters unfolding” quality.
So I watched it like a television series, over the course of a week. Ultimately I think I prefer the film version but the miniseries has several fascinating aspects unique to it, the best probably being in the final episode where a scene from the first is shown again from the perspective of different characters. This might have been too much for a film that was already long but sits perfectly fine in a miniseries format. There's a great moment where you realise one character's line has more significance than it seemed to at first. The running gag about the cabin's door needing to be kicked down also takes on a subtly different, sinister quality as the camera switches to focusing on the faces of Michael Madsen and Tim Roth.
A lot of the approximately 25 minutes of new footage is less conspicuously dispersed throughout the film, mostly appearing in dialogue scenes. Samuel L. Jackson's showdown with the Confederate general played by Bruce Dern seems to twist the knife a little more and the dialogue on the stagecoach at the beginning occurs, I think, in a different order. Almost the entirety of the first episode consists of the stagecoach scene, almost fifty minutes, and you get more of a sense of being on a long journey through hard weather with these people.
Once again, I thought about how Walton Goggins' character, Chris Mannix, is at the heart of the story's most interesting statement on human nature. We watch him going from being a staunch and earnest supporter of Dern's bitter Confederate general to unhesitatingly allying himself with the former Union Major, and a black man, Jackson's Major Warren. And its completely credible, even with Mannix's vehement use of racial epithets. Naturally for a soldier, there would be no real philosophical beliefs behind his racism anymore than the jeers of football fans against fans of an opposing team. He's a strange mixture of naivete and cunning--he's loyal to the established authority but he's also better at figuring things out than the other characters; he realises the truth about Warren's Lincoln Letter through a very simple process of reasoning and he similarly sees through Daisy's ruse at the end.
It's a story all about naturally occurring contradictions so, in a way, it makes sense that such a long film takes place in such a short space of time, that a television series should be shot in ultra widescreen. I do recommend watching it on the largest screen possible. I was kind of hoping for more footage in Minnie's Haberdashery before Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh arrive, in particular I wanted more time with Zoe Bell's character but sadly I don't think there's any additional footage in that segment. I'd love to see Tarantino shoot a Western starring Bell.
There's a melancholy in 1997's Jackie Brown not found in its director's previous two crime films. Jackie Brown has been described as a film about older people--certainly it remains Quentin Tarantino's most mature work--but it's not simply that. It's specifically about a criminal getting older, its final shot beautifully capturing the sadness in the growing awareness in its protagonist that her victories are becoming harder won as the hazards of her long misfit life are adding up to something she finally can't escape. There's an elegiac beauty in this film that makes it both fundamentally different from Tarantino's first two films but also a fitting finale for the three if taken as a trilogy.
One thing it absolutely has in common with the first two films is its ability to communicate with imagery. It's a brilliance achieved by Tarantino and his long time editor Sally Menke whose untimely death before Django Unchained is partly why I suspect the latest two of Tarantino's films lack something of the tight narrative flow found in his earlier films. It'd been many years since I'd last watched Jackie Brown before last night. One of the impressions that'd stayed with me were the scenes between Robert DeNiro's character, Louis, and Bridget Fonda's character, Melanie, because of how vividly Tarantino communicates Louis' motives through framing.
De Niro plays a very inexpressive character and we're forced to watch closely to see the subtle energy between Louis and Melanie in this film that is largely about reading hard to read people. Tarantino helps us along with Bridget Fonda's legs.
The amateur critic might write this off as "male gaze" and call it a day. But it's a specific male's gaze, the camera's attention to Melanie's body in this case establishing Louis' attention to it, and it explains the one or two moments where he seems flustered, his difficulty with the bong hit, his quick willingness to drink from a glass that had brushed against Melanie's toe. Suddenly the motives of this hard to read man are crystal clear and they become clearer after the two have sex.
Then Tarantino frames Melanie like a muppet, just head and shoulders over a table, talking shit about Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) and suddenly, now that she's out of his system, Louis' priority shifts to his loyalty to his old friend. We may understand how Louis feels but he and Melanie pay a price for relying on their guts so much.
Pam Grier's character, Jackie Brown, has probably lasted as long as she has because of her self control. In the ingenious scene where Ordell comes to her apartment to kill her she shows not the slightest hint of anxiety. Later on, Max (Robert Forster) will caution her to remember that clever cops like Ray (Michael Keaton) will never let you know if they've figured out your game. The same could as well be said of Jackie who betrays no awareness of Ordell's intentions until that perfectly timed DePalma split screen.
But as she tells Max later, she's more frightened of losing her job than she is of Ordell. She's aware now that time is running out on her precarious existence. She's a bit like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers; a mythic heroic American archetype, in this case a virtuous thief, that really only functions properly under very specific circumstances and is probably more a hazard to herself and others in most circumstances. But just like the Western hero, she's an inspiring figure, so much so that when Max first lays eyes on her he wants to give up his career. But in the end, is it any wonder he's also a little bit afraid of her when he's seen how smoothly she manipulates people?
Both Pam Grier and Robert Forster deserve all the accolades they've received for this film and more; both of them are uniquely crucial for creating these two people who have been around so long and have accumulated so much wisdom that their strategising is no longer contaminated by insecurities or rash compulsions. For the most part.
It's amazing to think that Tarantino followed this extraordinary character piece with--albeit certainly brilliant--revenge action films. I'm looking forward to seeing if he achieves something like this again with his upcoming film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Though I don't think it'll be successful at the box office and may well sink his career--but not because of the 2003 Howard Stern interview that's been going around lately where he defended Roman Polanski. For my part, I certainly strongly disagreed with Tarantino's expressed sentiments, even if he was, as he's claimed, playing it up for shock value to suit The Howard Stern Show. A thirteen year old girl is not capable of giving consent. Which leads to the question, how can Tarantino have expressed that opinion after making films so deeply insightful about human nature?
It's not unlike a question Molly Ringwald asked recently in The New Yorker about John Hughes--how could Hughes write so insightfully about teenagers and also indulge in humour that clashes with modern morality? Taking for a moment the assumption that modern morality is right and one should never joke about the things Hughes joked about, the answer is that before there was John Hughes there was no John Hughes. Certainly one could trace influences in his work--American Graffiti, certainly, among other films--but part of the burden of saying things that have never been said before, the real risk taking that makes a good artist, is that you have no blueprint. Something that seems totally wrong can end up extraordinarily right and vice versa. Partly I'd say this is why Tarantino was willing to follow a ridiculous line of thought, the other part is that I think he was influenced by a lot of talk going around at the time in the industry about Polanski where people seemed eager to think of some way the man could be exonerated. His victim had forgiven him--and even as recently as a couple days ago she seemed to be commiserating with Polanski as she criticised the AMPAS for expelling him. But I believed in 2003 as I believe now--if a man commits rape, he has to go to jail, no matter what the victim or anyone else said afterwards. If nothing else, that would set up a horrible precedent that could very easily be exploited.
But here's the thing a lot of people miss when talking about Tarantino's interview; this wasn't some backroom recording that was leaked. This was something that was broadcast nationally on The Howard Stern Show, at that time a terrestrial radio show whose ratings, even if they had declined in the aftermath of Stern's divorce, were colossal, so much so that when Stern later had 30 million listeners on satellite radio it was considered a drop. At the very least, millions of people heard Tarantino make those comments, made up their own minds about it, and still went to see his movies. There's a new generation of adults but most of those millions of people aren't dead. So that's why I don't think the interview will significantly hurt Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Instead I think it'll suffer because film is no longer in an era that supports movies like that, particularly ones with sizeable budgets. A big, splashy, revenge superhero film? Sure. But there's a reason Hateful 8 didn't do as well as Django Unchained--audiences are more willing to jump in with a character whose integrity and motives are easily apprehensible, someone we can root for when they turn someone into a bloody pulp, believing the fantasy that there are situations where that's not, at least, a morally complicated thing to do. The compromised Western hero or the true film noir anti-hero is a harder pill to swallow because it forces us to think about how complicated people truly are. On the other hand, there did seem to be an audience for that on television up until a couple years ago. So I guess, to quote Michael Madsen in Kill Bill, we'll just see.
