ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD: masterpiece

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

In Quentin Tarantino’s spectacularly successful Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, two fictional characters, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) and the actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) navigate a changing Hollywood in 1969. The next evolution of Hollywood is filled only with promise for Sharon, but presents an unseen threat to Rick and Cliff.

Rick is an actor, a former star of TV Westerns who has aged into guest appearances on the shows of a new crop of TV stars. Cliff is Rick’s longtime stuntman, who now works as Rick’s driver, gofer and drinking buddy. Cliff lives in a San Fernando Valley trailer; Rick lives on exclusive Cielo Drive, next door to Sharon and her husband Roman Polanski, but he’s slipped too far down the showbiz ladder to know them.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is about a lot of things, expertly braided together. It’s about a specific time and place. It’s about a woman, filled with innocence and zest, who is justifiably hopeful. It’s about two guys – one tortured and the other decidedly not – facing age and irrelevance. It’s about the guys’ relationship, at once interdependent and asymmetric. And it’s a love letter to vintage Hollywood, the Hollywood that six-year-old Quentin Tarantino lived near to, but was not a part of.

The story follows the three characters through a series of vignettes, right up to the most startling ending in recent cinema. This is a Quentin Tarantino masterpiece, right up there with his best, Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction.

The movie’s title begins with “Once Upon a Time…“, so you are on notice that this isn’t actual history.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is set in the locations most evocative of the 1969 Hollywood: movie studio sets, legendary showbiz hangout Musso & Frank, the Playboy Mansion, the ill-fated Cielo Drive and Spahn Ranch – famous for both its use as a movie set and as the home base of the Manson Family.

There’s a dazzling montage of neon signs being lit up at sunset. Not many contemporary directors still know how to film galloping horse riders, but Tarantino brings us some great shots from Spahn Ranch, where so many Westerns were shot.

Of course, Tarantino’s soundtrack takes us right into 1969 with superbly curated period radio hits like the Deep Purple version of Hush and the Jose Feliciano cover of California Dreamin’. A February scene is perfectly set to Neil Diamond’s Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show, with its hot August nights lyrics presaging the Manson murders to come in LA’s stifling August 1969. (Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show got me wondering how Tarantino restrained himself from using it in some – or all – of his previous films; it’s every bit as Tarantinoesque as Misirlou or Stuck in the Middle with You.) A snippet of a full-bearded Robert Goulet singing MacArthur Park even turns up on somebody’s TV.

In 1969, American culture and the nation itself were in turbulence. Hollywood showbiz was also being rocked – major movie studios were slipping both financially and creatively, floundering to react to the primacy of television and the public’s changing taste (and growing disinterest in Westerns). The studios were about to reach out in desperation to auteur directors like Polanski. Rick and Cliff are behind the curve – but they haven’t noticed that their world is dying.

As hedonists, Rick and Cliff have embraced the drugs and free sex of the counterculture. But they still drive gas guzzlers – a luxury sedan for Rick and a muscle car for Cliff – and refer to “dirty hippies”.

How does the Manson Family play into all this? There was a time when people actually believed that drug-infused peace and love would cure all that ailed us as a society. By 1969, the Summer of Love had already turned dark in San Francisco; but the Manson killings made the unmistakable point that the counterculture, for all its promise, didn’t have an answer to murderous psychopaths any more than did the mainstream.

We very briefly glimpse Manson himself (in an encounter that is pretty close to historically accurate). Tarantino knows that the best way to depict Manson’s evil is to reflect it in the cult he created.

DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, drinking way, way too much, is still treated like a star around town, and he’s grown complacent – until the truth about his career staleness finally hits home. DiCaprio shines in the scene where Rick, cast as a one-dimensional villain in a disposable TV Western, shows his acting chops with an explosive performance; Rick, having internalized that his career may be over, lets it all go in the scene. The character of Rick has the movie’s greatest arc, but he’s less interesting overall than Cliff or Sharon.

Margot Robbie in ONCE UPON TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD,

Sharon Tate is the soul of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Robbie is absolutely transcendent,. She doesn’t need a lot of lines to make her character unforgettable. Sharon gets a ticket to watch herself in a Dean Martin movie, and it’s impossible to imagine a moment with more goofy innocence.

Cliff Booth is one of Tarantino’s greatest characters. Cliff is secure in his abilities, without any need for recognition or self-promotion. Unambitious, he is absolutely content to be Rick’s second banana. That being said, he’s not going to take any shit from anyone.

Brad Pitt in ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD

In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Brad Pitt shows us what a movie star is and why he is one. I haven’t been a Pitt enthusiast, although I’ve liked him in Fight Club, The Assassination of Jesse James, Moneyball and Inglorious Basterds. Pitts’ Cliff Booth is off the charts, and it’s tough to imagine any other actor in the role. Other male stars can match the physicality, but not the unique combination of confidence and humility.

Right up there with Pitt and Robbie is Margaret Qualley, who plays a fictional Manson girl named Pussycat. She is kooky in the cute way and kooky in the scary way. Qualley fills her with manic energy, brimming with wit and sensuality.

Julia Butters plays a precocious child actor in the pilot Rick is shooting; she’s the best possible counterpoint to Rick’s flabby professional complacency. Michael Moh is very funny in a send-up of Bruce Lee. Damien Lewis has a priceless moment as Steve McQueen.

For his supporting players, Tarantino pulls out an abundant cornucopia of acting talent and Tarantino sentimental favorites: Al Pacino, Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell, Emile Hirsch, Brenda Vaccaro, Clu Gulager, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Luke Perry, Timothy Olyphant, Zoë Bell , Clifton Collins Jr. (Perry Smith in Capote), Lena Durham and Scoot McNairy.

Tarantino’s exquisite filmmaking skills blend together the verisimilitude of time and place, the vivid performances and a rock ’em, sock ’em story to make Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood an instant classic.

Note: Deep into the closing credits, there’s an Easter egg.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT: talk talk bang bang

Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins in THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins in THE HATEFUL EIGHT

By now, everyone should understand what you’re going to get in a Quentin Tarantino movie:  1) lots of very harsh and extremely stylized movie violence; 2) lots of witty dialogue before and after the violence; and 3) references to other movies that Tarantino loves.  A classic example of Tarantino cinema, The Hateful Eight delivers on every count.

If you aren’t entertained by gratuitous violence, then don’t go to this movie.  The splatter quotient is high.

The Hateful Eight starts out like the great epic Westerns of the 50s and 60s, complete with dazzling vistas and a score by Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).  But soon we are inside a single room with a bunch of scoundrels (some more lovable than others) and entangled in a Spaghetti Western plot – constructed to set up the action set pieces.  And the violence is so over-the-top that much of it is both shocking and funny.

Those scoundrels are the spine of The Hateful Eight.  It’s always been easy to conclude that Samuel L. Jackson was put on this earth to deliver Tarantino dialogue.  Now it’s clear that Walton Goggins serves the same existential purpose.  Goggins shot to cult fame by playing the loquacious, crafty and manipulative hillbilly crimelord Boyd Crowder in TV’s Justified.  Goggins has the rare ability to project a complete absence of personal bravery, a quick-witted resourcefulness and be very, very funny while he’s doing it.  The very best aspect of The Hateful Eight is that it evolves into a Samuel L. Jackson/Walton Goggins buddy movie.

And then there’s Jennifer Jason Leigh, always one of our most interesting actresses.  In The Hateful Eight, she plays an extreme sociopath who can absorb an alarming amount of physical punishment.  Her character is a malevolent and seemingly irrepressible force of nature, and Leigh’s performance is another reason to see this movie.

Jennifer Jason Leigh in THE HATEFUL EIGHT
Jennifer Jason Leigh in THE HATEFUL EIGHT

 

I saw the regular 2 hours and 48 minute version of The Hateful Eight, projected on the digital system that most theaters now use.  There is also a “Roadshow” version , which was shot on and is projected from 70 mm film.  The Roadshow version also has a musical overture, an intermission and few minutes of extra action.  It all adds up to three hours and 6 minutes.  While this three hours and 6 minutes version is playing on 12 screens in the Bay Area, only two of them are the 70 mm projection.

I found the The Hateful Eight to be a hoot-and-a-half, but then I love Tarantino and have a high tolerance for movie violence.  The Wife stuck it out like a good sport (“Tell me again why I wanted to see this?), but then she’s a Walton Goggins fan from Justified.   If you liked Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, you’ll probably like this one, too.

Django Unchained: Holy Tarantino!

In Quentin Tarantino’s pulpy Django Unchained, a bounty hunter(Christolph Waltz, the Jew-hunting Nazi colonel in Inglorious Basterds)  and a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) hunt down slave holders and slave merchants and dispatch them in increasingly creative and cinematic fashion.  The plot gives them each a credible motivation to do so, but this movie is really just a revenge fantasy aimed at American slavery.

Let’s not short the revenge film genre, which includes many top drawer movies – Winchester 73, The Searchers, Carrie, Gladiator, even The Virgin Spring and Zero Dark Thirty.  (If it’s a really good revenge film, people tend not to identify it as a revenge film.)  But Tarantino is never squeamish about the enjoyability of genre films, and Django Unchained is gloriously pedal-to-the-metal exploitation.

Waltz and Foxx are very good.  The most fun performance is by Tarantino fave Samuel L. Jackson as the malevolent house slave who uses his wiles to advance the causes of his dim masters and of slavery.

Django Unchained – from its title on – is a love letter to the spaghetti Western genre.  We have a title song that could have come from the Italian Ringo movies, lots of Ennio Morricone-like music and even the first movie Django himself (Franco Nero).  The titles are blazing red, and some of the locations (as in the Italian movies shot in Spain) are hilariously inappropriate (California oak grasslands for Mississippi, some rocky California desert for East Texas and a random sequence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, apparently just because Tarantino wanted to show some bison).  For spaghetti Western aficionados like myself, it’s a lot of fun.

There’s a lot of violence, including an especially gory final shootout that would have unsettled Sam Peckinpah.  One thing for sure – it’s a lot of movie for your money.