Babylon: A Review - Damien Chazelle's Reach Exceeds His Grasp in Bloated Babylon

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A messy misfire of a movie that is not worth seeing in the theater but if you’re interested check it out when it hits streaming.

“BABYLON WILL BE LIKE SODOM AND GOMORRAH WHEN GOD OVERTHREW THEM. IT WILL NEVER BE INHABITED OR LIVED IN FOR GENERATIONS.” ISAIAH 13:19

I readily admit that I am a fan of director Damien Chazelle.

Chazelle’s first feature, Whiplash, which I recently re-watched, was a powerful announcement of the director’s arrival. La La Land, Chazelle’s second film, was an Oscar-winning blockbuster but also a subtle yet masterful movie that was considerably deeper than many understood. Chazelle’s third feature, the over-looked and undervalued First Man, was a brilliant and profound piece of cinema.

Now the Oscar-winning writer/director Chazelle is back with his newest film, the highly anticipated Babylon, starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.

With my Chazelle fandom as context, I’m sorry to have to report that Babylon, a three-hour and nine-minute, sprawling extravaganza, simply doesn’t work. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either.

Babylon chronicles a bevy of characters in the decadent and debauched old Hollywood of the late 1920’s as they navigate the industry’s transition from silent movies to talkies.

Even that description of the plot gives away the game as the film’s narrative is decidedly derivative. Other current filmmakers have made much better films on similar topics, be it P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights – which dramatized the porn industry’s drug-fueled move from film to digital, or even Quinten Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – which was about Hollywood’s transition from the studio system to the new Hollywood of the 1970’s.

Chazelle makes multiple references to both Boogie Nights and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so much so that it seems to be an homage to those movies (it’s also an homage to Singing in the Rain and its coda seems to pay tribute to Kubrick’s 2001), but that doesn’t make his story any more original or compelling.

For example, just the casting of Pitt and Robbie – who both stared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has an air of homage to it. But when Robbie’s character sits in a movie theater and unleashes a million-watt smile when she hears the audience respond to her performance on-screen – which is an almost identical scene from when she played Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it feels less like homage and more like imitation.

GRIME AND GRIT UNDER THE GLITZ AND GLAMOUR

The first thirty minutes of Babylon are an extended, pre-title card sequence that revolves around a massive party at a Hollywood producer’s home in very rural Bel Air.

This party is meant to highlight the debauchery of both the roaring twenties and Hollywood at its height, but Chazelle, unlike say P.T. Anderson, is incapable of adequately portraying the grime and grit under the glitz and glamour.

The party, which features a bevy of bodily fluids – including a woman pissing on a guy to satiate his perversion and a midget with a fake giant cock ejaculating on a crowd (not to mention the pre-party close-up of an elephant’s asshole which then shits profusely on some poor bastard), and a cavalcade of cocaine use, as well as an ample supply of nudity, feels incongruously sterile.

Chazelle’s use of bodily fluids in the film (later on there’s a tsunami of vomit too) are cheap substitutes for realism, most notably the blood and guts of emotional realism, in a story that is never able to fully form truly human, multi-dimensional characters.

The debauched party scene is so cold, controlled and antiseptic that it comes across as a virginal, pre-pubescent boy’s naïve beliefs about what sex and drugs are like. Chazelle is that virginal, pre-pubescent boy.

Once the party ends and the title card presents itself, the story finally begins. The main characters are Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the biggest silent movie star of the moment, Nellie LaRoy, a Clara Bow-esque “it” girl who gets her big break and makes the most of it, and Manny Torres (Diego Calves), a Mexican film assistant who loves movies and works his way up the Hollywood ladder by dealing with incorrigibles like Conrad and LaRoy.

There are two other semi-lead characters, jazz trumpeter Sydney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and cabaret singer/actress Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). Neither Sydney nor Lady Fay are fleshed out to any satisfactory degree, and their presence in the film feels more like a rather ham-handed attempt to appease the diversity gods rather than to advance the story. It is no fault of the actors, but one can’t help but think that if these two characters were cut, and the runtime of the movie was subsequently trimmed by thirty minutes or so, we’d all be better off.

The first act of the film was my least favorite part, but to its credit it does get incrementally better from there, but unfortunately it never soars.

The third act is much more blatantly symbolic than the previous acts, such as when Manny descends into a near literal hell that becomes more and more disgusting and denigrating with every circle, and that approach resonated with me, which was a contrast to the first half of the film.

ALL LIGHT, NO HEAT

Pitt’s acting mirrors the film’s failings and successes. In the first two-thirds of the movie, Pitt gives a rather shallow, smirky and one-note Pitt-ian performance. He’s Brad Pitt, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, playing a character that is one of the biggest movie stars in the world…get it? But in the third act, Pitt eschews his empty movie star magnetism for a melancholy that actually becomes quite moving.

Margot Robbie is a luminously beautiful women, and she’s certainly ambitious – not unlike her character Nellie LaRoy, but there is something off about her in every performance she gives (I also just saw her in the most recent David O. Russell film Amsterdam and oh dear…but that is a discussion for another day). Whether it’s her over-reliance on a sort of old-timey New Yawk accent or what, I can’t quite figure just yet, but she always appears to be “acting” and everything she does feels mechanical and manufactured.

In Babylon Robbie works her ass off, of that there is no doubt, but it never coalesces into anything captivating. There’s lots of over-the-top yelling and gyrating and manic pixie dream girl mania and hysteria, but never anything that ever feels genuine or grounded.

Diego Calva is a pleasing screen presence, but his character Manny is under-written, as is his love story, and he never really gets his hands wrapped around this whole unwieldy thing to find its sweet spot.

As for the rest of the cast, it’s a mixed bag or worse. For instance, Jean Smart is overall pretty dreadful as a gossip columnist, but she does give a very effective monologue late in the movie that works quite well.

Eric Roberts plays Nellie’s dad and is utterly atrocious.

Lukas Haas plays Conrad’s producer and best friend and it’s an awkward and totally forgettable piece of work.

Tobey Maguire plays a crazy mob boss in a scene that is very, very similar to the “Sister Christian” scene from Boogie Nights, except this time there’s no firecrackers but instead a bodyguard who spits at random intervals. The scene could’ve been great I suppose, but just never comes together, and Maguire’s character is a freaky sideshow lacking gravitas.

The biggest issue with the acting is the same issue with the movie, it’s all light and no heat. There’s lots of yelling but nobody says anything.

It must be said that Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is at times glorious (even when seen through a sub-par projector which unfortunately is the case in most theaters nowadays), and the music and score by Justin Hurwitz (who won an Academy Award for the music in La La Land) are terrific.

It’s somewhat intriguing that Babylon is either a companion piece to La La Land or its outright prequel. Chazelle makes this fact pretty clear by repeatedly using an integral piece of Hurwitz’s music from La La Land as a cornerstone of Babylon.

The ethereal La La Land - the dream of Hollywood, contrasted with the nightmare of Babylon, is an intriguing formula, if only Babylon could hold up its end of the bargain.

A MOVIE ABOUT THE END OF AN ERA, MADE AT THE END OF AN ERA

I concede that making a movie about the impact of technology on the movie business and how Hollywood ruthlessly makes difficult transitions, is insightful in this era where streaming moves the earth beneath Hollywood’s feet and, much to my chagrin, auteur movies - like Babylon, face the real possibility of extinction. I also admit that as a fan of Damien Chazelle and also due to the evolution/devolution of the film business which seriously threatens to end the auteur era which I love so much, there’s a part of me that desperately wants to adore Babylon and declare that making a decidedly decadent movie about Hollywood decadence is in fact clever if not ingenious, but if I’m being honest, I have to say it’s actually pretty trite.

Ultimately, I wanted Babylon to be great and to my disappointment it wasn’t even good, instead it’s a messy misfire of a movie that’s an empty imitation of other more worthy films. I cannot recommend seeing Babylon in the theatre, but if you really want to see it wait until it hits a streaming service, that way the long run time and derivative drama will be more digestible, if not necessarily palatable.

©2023

Tarantino's Pact With the Weinstein Devil

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 36 seconds

Quentin Tarantino admits many Hollywood stars knew about Harvey Weinstein’s depravity, but like most people, their ambition kept them quiet

Quentin Tarantino said the quiet part out loud the other day when on Joe Rogan’s podcast he admitted that he “knew” of his longtime film distributor Harvey Weinstein’s aggressive sexual depravity.

Tarantino, who went on the Joe Rogan Experience to promote the novelization he wrote of his film ‘Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’, made clear that in regards to Weinstein, he “didn’t know about the rapes or anything like that” but stated, “I knew he was –  you know – I chalked it up to the boss chasing the secretary around the desk. As if that’s okay. But I mean, that’s how I kind of looked at it. He was making unwanted advances.”

“Unwanted advances” is certainly a way of putting it, as Harvey made lots and lots of “unwanted advances” on women. So many in fact that he’s been sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape, and is still facing other charges. 

Tarantino tried to explain to Rogan how in hindsight, “…I wish I had talked to him…I wish I had sat him down and gone, ‘Harvey you can’t do this. You’re gonna f**k up everything.’”

I suppose that could be classified as a form of regret – misguided regret, but regret nonetheless. Maybe what Tarantino really regrets is losing Weinstein the golden goose: the guy who made movies big hits and Oscar nominations happen, rather than regret for not protecting women from Weinstein the predator.

Tarantino didn’t warn Weinstein that his illicit behavior was “going to f**k everything up” because Tarantino didn’t want to f**k up his fantastically prosperous relationship with the notoriously bombastic bully whom the director calls a “father figure”.

Weinstein didn’t just make Tarantino rich, he made him relevant, and in Hollywood that is the greatest gift of all. And the reason Harvey was immune from consequences for his actions for so long is because he made lots of other people rich, famous and relevant as well.

Tarantino said as much when he admitted that he wasn’t alone in keeping his mouth shut in order to keep the money and awards train running. The director told Rogan that the Hollywood heavy-hitters who say they didn’t know about Weinstein’s predatory behavior are full of it.

“Everybody who was in his orbit knew about it, there’s nobody who said they didn’t know who didn’t know… that includes all the big actors he palled around with… they all knew.”

There were a lot of people in Harvey Weinstein’s large orbit who owed the producer a great deal and who are implicated by Tarantino’s claim ­– Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese, Oprah Winfrey, Lena Dunham and even Bill and Hillary Clinton to name a few.

These people, and many others, may have never seen first-hand Harvey do anything aggressive with women, but it’s impossible to believe they hadn’t heard about Harvey’s notorious behavior. Hell, I’m an absolute nobody and I’d heard about Weinstein’s disgusting reputation.

Weinstein’s depravity, like that of fellow scumbags Brett Ratner and Bryan Singer, wasn’t so much an open secret in Hollywood as a running joke. But since these three deplorables made lots of people money, people laughed instead of spoke up.

As easy as it would be to get indignantly outraged at the inaction of Tarantino, who despite his writing and directorial genius is an easy target, the reality is that, unfortunately, most people would keep their mouths shut, too, if put in a similar position.

The devil’s bargain Tarantino and so many others made with Weinstein is the same bargain many ‘regular’ people make for even less-substantial reasons.

The two most common side-effects of desperation and ambition are hypocrisy and a recurring blind eye turned toward what could stifle your ambition and agitate your desperation. As Orwell once wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” and the reality is that being able to see the truth and actually admit it to yourself in real time is extremely difficult when your livelihood or emotional well-being depends on you not seeing it.

This is why Bill Clinton supporters didn’t believe Juanita Broaddrick, but believe all of the women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault. And why Trump supporters dismiss claims against him but believe Tara Reade, and in turn why anti-Trumpers dismiss Ms. Reade’s claims against Joe Biden. 

This isn’t to say that all sexual assault and rape claims are equal. We shouldn’t ‘believe all women’, as women are just as capable and likely to lie as men. Nor should we ignore due process to satiate our thirst for revenge.

We also shouldn’t celebrate the emotionalist-fueled, vapid and vacuous hysteria that is the #MeToo movement, which infantilizes women, removes from them even the slightest bit of agency, and weaponizes female regret at the expense of diminishing the suffering of actual rape victims.

What we should do is remind people, be they Hollywood stars tainted by their silence regarding Weinstein, or Trump supporters ignoring his sexual conduct or Biden voters brushing aside claims against him, that their loyalties lie not with the truth, but with their personal or political ambitions, and therefore they have no moral clarity and are to be distrusted.

In conclusion, once upon a time in Hollywood, an uncommon talent at writing and directing revealed his cowardice by keeping silent about a powerful producer’s sexual depravity, thus revealing himself to be a painfully common, and very flawed, human being… just like the rest of us. Sounds like an interesting movie idea. I wonder who’ll direct?

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

Harvey Weinstein has ruled Hollywood for the last three decades, harassing colleagues not only over sex, but also art; assaulting not only women, but also movies. His long and thuggish reign is finally over.

The first blockbuster that Harvey Weinstein produced was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In that movie there is a male rapist named Zed, who gets his comeuppance at the hands of one of his victims, crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Once Wallace escapes Zed’s clutches, with the help of Butch (Bruce Willis), he promises to extract revenge on Zed by getting “medieval on his ass”.

“Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead,” Butch tells his girlfriend Fabienne,  after he returns with Zed’s chopper as a trophy.

Zed is Harvey Weinstein…grotesque and vile…and about to get payback for his depravity.

Unlike Zed, Weinstein isn’t dead…but his iron grip on Hollywood certainly is. With Weinstein’s conviction today on one count of sexual assault and another on rape in the third degree, he is either going to prison or into exile, with any chance of a return to the film business he so dominated for the last thirty years, long gone.

As the Weinstein era officially comes to an end it is worth looking back on the good, the bad and the very ugly of it all.

It is sort of amusing that Harvey’s most notable accomplishment is that he was the unwitting father of the #MeToo movement. It was when his degenerate, lascivious and predatory behavior over the course of his remarkable career finally became public in 2017, that #MeToo was born.

Weinstein’s also culpable for instigating the relentless campaigning for Academy Awards, a nasty sport that began in the 90’s and continues to this day. His most striking victory at the Oscars came in 1998 when he willed Shakespeare in Love over the Best Picture finish line ahead of the odds-on favorite, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

In terms of cinema, Weinstein’s greatest legacy was that he was directly responsible for the glorious independent cinema movement of the 1990’s. The movie that started it all was, ironically, Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 Palme d’Or winning hit Sex, Lies and Videotape, produced by Weinstein.

Weinstein not only made the career of Oscar winner Soderbergh, but also 90’s cinema darlings and current Hollywood cornerstones Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow among many, many others.

Harvey’s business blue print was simple, he would take art house movies and market them aggressively. His brand was that of independent cinema with big bucks behind it…and it worked exceedingly well, especially in the 90’s.

Despite his success at elevating independent movies, Weinstein was also notorious for being a brutish bully and egotistical control freak when it came to the film’s he produced and distributed.

Weinstein was a pig in the china shop of cinema, and would often demand directors make enormous cuts to their films in order to get them to his preferred running time. He didn’t just do this with nobodies…he even strong armed cinematic masters like Martin Scorsese, whom he demanded cut 40 minutes off of Gangs of New York. Scorsese, like nearly everyone else in Weinstein world, acquiesced, and the movie and the art of cinema, suffered for it.

Like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn an Robert Evans before him, Weinstein was the archetypal over-stuffed movie mogul. But with Weinstein’s conviction, his time in Hollywood is thankfully over, and it seems the movie mogul era itself is waning in Hollywood.

Yes, there will still be perverts and predators among Hollywood’s most powerful, that is unavoidable, but at least women will no longer be silent about it. And in terms of artistic freedom and directors being forced by power hungry Hollywood big shots to take a hatchet to their films, those days too are receding very quickly.

The obsolescence of Weinstein world-view is highlighted by the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, who have a very different business model than the coarse and crass Weinstein approach.

These streaming services have very deep pockets and an insatiable hunger for new material, but unlike Weinstein, they offer artistic autonomy, not arrogant authoritarianism.

For instance, Netflix wanted to work with Martin Scorsese so they financed his last film The Irishman. That movie ran three hours and thirty minutes, and in the hands of Harvey Weinstein would have been, like Gangs of New York, butchered beyond recognition. Netflix, on the other hand, didn’t lay a glove on it, and let Scorsese do exactly what Scorsese does best…make the movie he wants to make…and the art of cinema was better for it.

The bottom line regarding Harvey Weinstein’s conviction is this…good riddance to bad rubbish. The women of Hollywood and the art of cinema are much safer today without Harvey Weinstein and his filthy hands pawing all over them.

Zed is dead, baby. Zed is dead. And we are all better off because of it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 8 - Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

This week on Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, we take a deep dive into Quentin Tarantino's 9th film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  We go in-depth into the film, its impact on cinema, its influences, its mysteries and why this is such a complex and layered movie.  

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 8 - ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

Or check us out on iTunes…and please leave a review or comment.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA - ITUNES

Thanks for listening!

©2020

Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit is an Average Film That Would Never Get 6 Oscar Noms if it Wasn't About the Holocaust

NAZI COMEDY JOJO RABBIT SNAGS SIX ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS USING HOLLYWOOD’S TRIED AND TRUE FORMULA

Long after it’s become a cliché of its own, exploiting the Holocaust for easy nominations is still a thing – and Jojo Rabbit is prime evidence.

Jojo Rabbit, directed by Taika Waititi, is a comedy-drama about Jojo, a young German boy in the Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend is a whimsical Adolph Hitler. Jojo, the titular character, comes to question his Nazi beliefs when he discovers a secret his beloved mother is hiding.

Jojo Rabbit is a mild misfire of a movie that never quite threads the delicate needle of comedy and drama that its bold premise requires. It isn’t an awful movie, but it isn’t a great one either, as is reflected in its 80% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and the fact that it has only brought in $32 million at the box office.

With the film’s subdued critical and financial results you would think it had no chance for Oscar nominations…you’d be wrong. Jojo Rabbit has reeled in six Oscar nominations including Best Picture. So how did the mediocre Jojo Rabbit become such Oscar bait? Easy…it used the super cynical Oscar formula.

The super cynical Oscar formula goes like this…if you want to guarantee an Oscar nomination then your movie must be about one of four broad topics…here they are in hierarchical order…

1. Holocaust/Nazis

2. Slavery/Civil Rights/Race

3. AIDS epidemic/LGBTQ themes

4. Hollywood

Since 2009 when the Best Picture category expanded from 5 nominees up to 10, only once has the Best Picture category been devoid of at least one film that hits upon these subjects. Some notable beneficiaries of the formula over the last decade are such mediocrities as BlacKkKlansman(2018), Call Me By Your Name(2017), Hidden Figures(2016), Selma(2014), Dallas Buyers Club(2013), The Help(2011), The Kids Are Alright(2010), as well as Best Picture winners Green Book(2018), Moonlight(2016) and The Artist(2011).

Even the best directors in the business have used the super cynical Oscar formula to advance their career. Steven Spielberg spent two decades making blockbusters that got him no Oscar love, but after a failed attempt to use the formula for Oscar gold on The Color Purple (1985), he finally took home the Best Director and Best Picture prize with Schindler’s List (1993).

Quentin Tarantino’s last four films, Inglourious Basterds(2009), Django Unchained(2012), The Hateful Eight(2015) and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood(2019), have all utilized the formula, and three of them got Best Picture nominations for their efforts. Tarantino has yet to win the coveted Best Director or Best Picture Oscar, but maybe he’ll be victorious this year with his homage to Hollywood.

The question is…why does the super cynical Oscar formula work?

Well, in terms of Holocaust/Nazi and Slavery/Race movies, the answer is simple. The Manichean nature of the narrative is easy to understand…there are good guys and there are very bad guys…it is all very black and white, pardon the pun.

Another reason these subjects are cinematically employed is because the Holocaust and slavery are monuments to human depravity and suffering, and as uncomfortable as it is to admit, those two subjects are chock full of dramatic potential. The same is true of the AIDS epidemic, which was its own kind of Holocaust. The bottom line is that whatever subject has death as a constant and foreboding presence in it is going to be loaded with drama…and hence has the potential to be a good film.

They give the most hackneyed story structures a historical weightiness, elevating them into what votes believe to be classy award-winning pictures.

But the suspicion is that it’s even simpler than that.

The two cities at the heart of the film industry, Los Angeles and New York, are the cities with the largest Jewish and gay populations in the U.S., which most likely translates into a solid number of Academy members being Jewish, gay, or both.

Holocaust, slavery and gay-themed films are profound for most every audience due to their highlighting of humanity and inhumanity, but they most definitely resonate in the Jewish and gay communities, as those groups know the sting of persecution all too well.

The appeal of Hollywood themed movies at the Oscars is not quite so existentially based…simply put, Hollywood is the global center of narcissism and that results in the film industry liking stories about itself.

As for Jojo Rabbit, writer/director Taika Waititi is a very talented guy as proven by his direction of the very best Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnorak.

Waititi isn’t just a promising writer/director, he is also a gifted comedic actor, and in Jojo Rabbit he takes on the biggest challenge of all, playing Adolph Hitler as a charmingly lovable sidekick to Jojo.

While I think it was more artistic ambition than Oscar ambition that led Waititi to make a Holocaust/Nazi comedy, there is a Holocaust/Nazi comedy roadmap that leads to Oscar success. In 1999 Roberto Benigni wrote, directed and coincidentally enough, starred in, Life is Beautiful, the Italian language Holocaust movie that took home Oscars for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film.

If Jojo Rabbit was a noble attempt to make a profound and insightful film, it failed. If it was a cynical ploy to snag Academy Award nominations, it succeeded six times over, proving once again that the Oscar formula may be super cynical, but it is also highly effective.

Let’s hope once Taika Waititi has walked the Dolby Theater red carpet once, he deploys his solidified A-lister cachet to make the kind of personal and soulful movies that brought him to worldwide attention in the first place.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast - Episode 3: Oscar Nominations Reaction

This week on Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, Barry and I dive deep into the Oscar nominations in the top categories.

EPISODE 3 - OSCAR NOMINATIONS

Thanks for listening!

Top 10 Films of the Decade - 2010's Edition

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 24 seconds

Much to my surprise, I have been seeing a large number of writers putting out their “Best of the Decade” list in recent weeks. I was surprised by this because I had no idea the decade was ending. At my very best I barely know what day it is nevermind what month or year. Just this morning I saw a headline declaring the best movies of 2020 and had to stop and think about it a few moments and then eventually check my iPhone and make sure our current year wasn’t 2020 (the article was predicting what will be great in 2020).

Once I discovered that the 2010’s are actually ending just next week, I figured it was my duty to put together my own cinematic retrospective on the decade. In compiling my list I was wary of recency bias and tried to keep films from this year at arm’s length…but the problem is that 2019 is easily the best year for movies in the decade and thus far in the millennium…so my list simply HAD to reflect that.

So sit back, relax and enjoy my Best of the 2010’s movie list. As always, keep in mind my list is THE definitive list, and all other lists are incredibly, incredibly stupid and worthless.

BEST ACTION MOVIE OF DECADE

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - I was never much of a Mad Max fan at all. Mel Gibson was someone I never appreciated as an actor or action star (or a director for that matter), and the Mad Max phenomenon just passed me by when it was at its height in the 80’s. I missed seeing Fury Road in the theatre out of sheer disinterest, but stumbled upon on it one night on cable television and thought I’d give it a shot because I had no other options. I was ready to bail on the movie pretty quick but it totally hooked me and left me mesmerized to the point of being slack jawed.

Director George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road is insane. It is basically a violent, beautifully shot, continuous car chase. The film is supremely crafted and the long chase is exquisitely conceived, blocked and executed. I am so mad at myself for having not seen Fury Road in the theatres as I can only assume that the spectacle of it all was even more spectacular on the big screen.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a stunning spectacle to behold, a crowning achievement for the action genre and the best action movie of the decade.

BEST FRANCHISE OF DECADE

Planet of the Apes Trilogy - In a remarkable upset I went with Planet of the Apes over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel had a great decade, no doubt, and dominated at the box office for the entirety of the 2010’s, but the best franchise in terms of quality was Planet of the Apes.

The first film of the reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, came out in 2011 and I thoroughly expected it to be awful. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes film of 2001 was an absolute catastrophe that, being a huge Planet of the Apes fan since I was a kid, scarred me deeply. When I saw that James Franco was the lead actor in the 2011 reboot I figured this was nothing more than a vacuous money grab by producers trying to cash in on the glory of the older movies. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Rise was a stellar origin film that appreciated, correctly understood, and properly connected to the mythology of the earlier films from the 60’s and the 70’s, and was followed by the equally fantastic Dawn and War. The CGI now available to filmmakers elevated the myth and material at the heart of the story and turned Planet of the Apes into the top-notch franchise it was always meant to be.

Great performances by Andy Serkis and the rest of the CGI ape-actors turned these films, which could have been a punch line, into a compelling and profound series that is better than anything Marvel, or anyone else, has put out this decade.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF DECADE

A TIE!

Ladybird (2017)- Ladybird was the Greta Gerwig directed coming of age story set in Sacramento that critics absolutely adored (it has a 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes). I found the film to be little more than a sloppily slapped together mish-mash of trite SNL sketches completely devoid of insight, profundity or original ideas. Director Greta Gerwig is the darling of critics because she is the manic pixie dreamgirl of arthouse poseurs…this is only heightened by the fact that she married an arthouse poseur - Noah Baumbach! Look no further than the glowing adoration of her newest beating a dead-horse film, Little Women, for proof of my thesis.

Get Out (2017) - Critics loved Get Out because they were looking for a black director to be their messiah in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite nonsense. Get Out was a flaccid and forced piece of banal nothingness that exposed the bias of critics and the power of white liberal guilt. For proof of my thesis look no further than Peele’s second film Us…which is a total mess of a movie but which critics adored anyway.

WORST FILM OF DECADE

Detroit (2017)- Detroit attempts to tell the story of the Detroit race riots of 1967 but is so ineptly directed by Kathryn Bigelow that she should have her Oscar (for The Hurt Locker) retroactively revoked for setting the art of filmmaking back four decades. As anyone who has ever been to Detroit can attest, it is easily the worst place in the universe, so maybe Bigelow was doing some meta commentary by making the worst movie ever with the title Detroit to match the awfulness of the city with that moniker…who knows. Regardless, Bigelow’s directorial incompetence is remarkable in a way, as it seems impossible to make a film as dreadful as Detroit. That said, Tom Ford gave it a run with his abysmal Nocturnal Animals, but still fell short. better luck next time Tom.

BEST FILMS OF DECADE

10. Hell or High Water (2016) - Hell or High Water could have been named “Revenge of the Working Class”, as screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s script accurately captured the desperation of those of us living under the boot of the cancer of American capitalism that is devouring its own. Top notch performances from Jeff Bridges, Ben Foster, Chris Pine and Gil Birmingham (as well as the local hires and those with smaller roles) turn Sheridan’s script into a resonant and powerfully insightful commentary on modern-day America in the forgotten fly-over country.

9. The Big Short (2015) - Adam McKay’s cinematic adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, is miraculous. It artfully tells the intricate and dazzlingly complex story of the 2008 housing meltdown with comedic aplomb and dramatic power. A great cast and stellar direction make The Big Short not only one of the best, but one of the most important film of the 2010’s.

8. Phantom Thread (2017) - P.T. Anderson’s collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis is a mediation on control, power and the toxic and intoxicating brew when the anima is conjured. A twisted, lush and vibrant love story that peels away the skin and reveals the wound on the spirit of a powerful man, and the woman who loves him not despite of it, but because of it. A sumptuous feast for the eyes and the soul, Phantom Thread is powered by the masterful work of P.T. Anderson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps.

7. Dunkirk (2017) - Dunkirk is a film of exquisite technical precision, insightful political analysis, heart-stopping action and gut-wrenching drama. Director Christopher Nolan is one of the great artistically populist filmmakers of our time and Dunkirk is his most well-made and daring film yet. leave it to Nolan to twist time and perspective in what could have been a straightforward story of British heroism. A solid cast, which include such surprises as boy band star Harry Styles, give excellent performances that are buoyed by some of the very best technical work cinema has ever seen…or heard to be more exact, as the sound in Dunkirk is amazing beyond belief. The best war film of the decade, and one of the greatest masterpieces of the genre.

6. The Master (2012) - The Master boasts the very best acting captured on film in the last decade…and even further in the history of cinema. Joaquin Phoenix reinvents the art of acting as the literally and figuratively twisted Freddie Quell, a recent World War II veteran with a knack for making delicious, delirious and deadly concoctions from bizarre items. The acting clashes between Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd, are absolute sublime perfection. The Master, like its two stars, is a compelling and combustible drama that elevates acting beyond its previous bounds.

5. The Irishman (2019) - The Irishman is a movie about introspection, retrospection and regret. Scorsese’s three and half hour masterpiece is both a genre and career defining and ending classic. The film boasts a solid performance from Robert DeNiro and two stellar supporting turns from Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, who are at their very best. Just as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven commented on his own career while making his career defining genre, westerns, dramatically obsolete, so does Scorsese have the final word on his career and puts the dramatic nail in the coffin of the genre that, for good or for ill, defined it, the mobster movie.

4. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) - This is Tarantino’s most dramatically potent and resonant film. DiCaprio and Pitt give two fantastic performances as a fading star and his stunt double and Margot Robbie is undeniably luminous as Sharon Tate. Tarantino transports audiences back to 1969 in order to tell the story of wishful thinking gone awry. A true masterwork from a master director.

3. Joker (2019) - In a decade where superhero movies ruled supreme, the last and final word on the genre was put forth by an emaciated lunatic with a Quaker’s hair cut. Joker has forever altered the current top genre by dragging it through the gutter and being brave enough to tell the actual truth about our time. When Arthur Fleck tells his disinterested therapist that “all I have are negative thoughts”, he spoke for millions upon millions of people living in the spiritual hell that is capitalism in late stage American empire. Joker is the best comic book movie of all time because it takes a chainsaw to the form and shapes it into an incendiary Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy sequel. Who knew that Todd Phillips of all people, had this level of greatness within him? It helps that Joaquin Phoenix, the best actor on the planet, used his formidable talent and skill to morph into the most interesting and human super villain (or hero) to ever grace the big screen. Joker is a game changer for superhero movies, and thankfully, cinema will never be quite the same.

2. Roma (2018) - Roma is a cinematic tour de force that was an exquisitely conceived and executed film of startling artistic precision and vision. Alfonso Cuaron wrote, directed and was even his own cinematographer on the film that catapulted him into the rarefied air of the cinematic masters.

1. The Tree of Life (2011) - The Tree of Life is not only the best film of the decade, it may very well be the best film of all time. Terrence Malick’s magnum opus veered from the present day to the 1950’s and all the way back to prehistoric times. Malick’s experimental meditation on life and loss covered large swaths of history but never failed to be breath-takingly intimate, thanks in part to sublime cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki and grounded and genuine performances from Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. As spiritually, psychologically, philosophically and theologically profound and insightful a film as has ever been made. With The Tree of Life, Malick takes his place on the Mount Rushmore of filmmakers…and atop my Best of the 2010’s list.

Thus concludes my Best of List of the 2010’s…and soon the 2010’s will end too! Let’s hope the 2020’s will bring us some more great cinema!

©2019

Martin Scorsese - Top Five Films

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 57 seconds

Despite an abysmal winter, spring and most of the summer, 2019 is actually shaping up to be a good year for cinema. The first ray of sunshine came in the form of Quentin Tarantino’s wish fulfillment ode to Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Then the cultural hurricane known as Joker came along and sent the woke brigade and the impotent cuckolds in the establishment media into a full blown panic before most ever even saw it. When the Joker finally made landfall it was an insightful and electrifying artistic nuclear explosion at the center of the comic book genre that has dominated the box office and the culture wars.

Now that Halloween has come and gone, cinematic master Martin Scorsese has a new film, The Irishman, hitting theatres, and shortly thereafter hitting Netflix, that is generating massive Oscar buzz. This will be followed by another enigmatic auteur, Terrence Malick, who has a new film, A Hidden Life, coming out this December.

With Tarantino, Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick in the mix, it is a good time time be a cinephile…and since Scorsese’s new film came out last Friday and I haven’t seen it yet, it is also a good time for me to rank his top five films.

Scorsese is the most important film maker of his generation and maybe the most important American film maker of all time. Unlike Spielberg and his popcorn movies, Scorsese hasn’t padded his wallet with his work but instead advanced the art of cinema. Nearly every single film and filmmaker of note over the last 40 years has used Scorsese’s artistic palette to paint their own works. His use of dynamic camera movement, popular music and unorthodox storytelling structures and styles have become requisite and foundational film making skills. Scorsese didn’t invent cinema, but he did invent a new style of it that did not exist prior to his rise to prominence in the 1970’s, and that is why he is the most unique of auteurs.

Scorsese’s filmography can be split in two, with 1997’s Kundun being the end of the first half of his film making career, and 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead being the beginning of the latter part of his career. The first half of his career is staggeringly impressive, as he jumped genres with ease. Films as diverse as the gritty Taxi Driver, the musical New York, New York, the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, the remake of Cape Fear, the enigmatic sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money, and his biography of the Dalai Lama, Kundun, showcase Scorsese’s cinematic versatility.

The second half of his career has shown Scorsese to have lost a few miles per hour off his fastball and to have been brow beaten by the studios into making more mainstream fare. 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead was awful, most notably because Scorsese fell under the then popular spell of acting charlatan Nicholas Cage. Gangs of New York had similarly bad casting decisions, such as Cameron Diaz, no doubt encouraged by meddling money people…like Harvey Weinstein, who also took a gigantic shit on Scorsese’s vision of the film by demanding he cut 45 minutes off the running time. Other notable films from this period are The Aviator, Shutter Island and Hugo, all of which are less Scorsese films than they are studio films made by Scorsese.

Scorsese’s lone Academy Award win for Best Director came during this period with the film The Departed. The Departed is an ok movie, but it definitely feels more like a knock-off of a Scorsese film than an actual Scorsese film. It also feels like it could have been directed by anybody, which is more an indictment of the movie than and endorsement of the movie making.

The first half of Scorsese’s career is highlighted by his frequent collaborations with Robert DeNiro, and the second half by his frequent collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio. If you’re looking for any greater piece of evidence that Scorsese is no longer at his peak, look no further than that fact. DiCaprio is a fine actor, but he is no Robert DeNiro, as DeNiro in his heyday was as good an actor as we have ever seen.

That said, Scorsese has made some great films in the second half of his career…as my list will attest…and who knows, maybe The Irishman will be worthy of inclusion. I am definitely looking forward to seeing it.

Now without further delay…onto the the list of Martin Scorsese’s “five” best films!

5C - Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Wolf of Wall Street sneaks onto the list because it is uproariously funny while also being socially and politically insightful. In the face of the grotesque corruption so evident on Wall Street and in Washington, it was nice to see Scorsese focus his talents on the decadence and depravity that are the soul of American capitalism. It also helps that this is the only time the DiCaprio collaboration works, as Leo does the best work of his career as Jordan Belfort.

5B - Casino (1995) - Casino is an often often overlooked gem in Scorsese’s filmography. The film may have suffered from “Scorsese fatigue” as it appeared to tread on the same “mob” ground his recent masterpiece Goodfellas (1991). Casino is an indulgent masterwork in its own right, as Scorsese tells the story of how the west was won, and lost, by the Italian mafia, who were replaced by the corporate mafia. The film showcases some stellar performances from DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.

5A - Silence (2016) - Silence is the very best film of the second half of his career…so far. Scorsese has always carried a Catholic cross bearing a tortured Christ on it throughout most of his films, and Silence is a tantalizing glimpse at the muse that has haunted Scorsese his entire artistic life. Silence is an ambitious film, and it doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions, but it still is great. One thing that I felt hampered the film was that it also was the victim of cuts for time, which is frustrating as Silence is a rare film in that it runs 160 minutes but deserved, and needed, to run at least another 45 minutes. Secondly, Scorsese once again falls for artistic fool’s gold by casting this generations Nicholas Cage, the mystifyinly popular Adam Driver.

4. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)- Speaking of Scorsese’s Catholicism…The Last Temptation of Christ hit theatres while I was attending Catholic high school, and you would’ve thought that Satan himself had put the movie out. Students were read a statement by the diocese imploring us not to see the movie because it was blasphemous and viewing it would guarantee a one-way trip to eternal damnation. Obviously, I responded to this warning by rushing out and seeing the film as quickly as I could…and I am glad I did (and I’m still Catholic!). The Catholic Church’s fear over this film was so absurd as to be laughable, and this is only heightened by the fact that the film is the most spiritually vibrant and resonant depiction of Christ ever captured on film.

3. The Age of Innocence (1993) - The Age of Innocence is the most un-Scorsese of Scorsese films, as it tackles romantic intrigue among the austere world of Edith Wharton’s 1870’s New York. In many ways The Age of Innocence is a massive cinematic flex by Scorsese as he shows off his directorial versatility and exquisite film making skill. While the casting of Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer were hurdles to overcome, Scorsese does so and in magnificent fashion as The Age of Innocence is an exercise in dramatic and cinematic precision.

2. The King of Comedy (1982)- The King of Comedy is a piece of cinematic gold that accurately and insightfully diagnoses America’s star-fueled, delusional culture. The film is highlighted by Robert DeNiro, who gives an unnervingly committed and forceful performance as Rupert Pupkin, the celebrity obsessed comic wannabe who tries to get his big break by any means necessary.

The King of Comedy crackles because Scorsese creates a palpable sense of claustrophobic desperation that permeates every scene in the movie. The film is genuinely funny but uncomfortably unsettling and undeniably brilliant.

1C - Raging Bull (1980) - The top three films here could be in any order as all of them are undeniable masterpieces and the height of cinematic achievement. Raging Bull, the black and white look at former Middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, is a tour-de-force from not only the film’s star Robert DeNiro, who won a Best Actor Oscar, but from Martin Scorsese, who brings all of his cinematic skills to bear on the most cinematic of sports, boxing.

Scorsese uses LaMotta’s story to explore the meaning of masculinity, its incessant fragility and its inherent volatility. While Scorsese does masterful work bringing LaMotta’s battles inside the ring to exquisite life, his most brilliant film making achievement is in illuminating LaMotta’s most imposing fight, the one raging inside of himself.

1B - Taxi Driver - Taxi Driver once again shows both Scorsese and DeNiro at the very top of their game. The film perfectly captures the madness of New York City in the 1970’s, and the spiraling madness of a delusional loner who is the modern day everyman.

Scorsese’s camera rides along a taxi cab as it ventures through the gritty streets and bares witness to the sick and venal society that produces pimps, whores and politicians, and we get to know Travis Bickle, who is the rain that will wash these filthy streets clean.

A simply astonishing film in every respect. Not just one of Scorsese’s greatest films, but one of the greatest films of all-time.

1A - Goodfellas - Goodfellas is a not only a monumental cinematic achievement, it is also a fantastically entertaining and eminently rewatchable masterpiece. Over the last thirty years, whenever I have stumbled across Goodfellas playing on cable, I will always and everytime stop and watch whatever scene is on, and 9 times out of 10, will end up watching the rest of the movie.

A terrific cast that boasts superb performances from Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, turns this film about New York gangsters, into a familiar and familial tale that everyone can relate to in one way or another. The New York of Goodfellas, is the New York of my youth, and those populating that world are my Irish family…all of them. In my family there’s a Paulie, a Henry, a Jimmy and everyone knows a Tommy. These guys are my uncles and their friends and cousins, and their wives are my aunts. Watching Goodfellas is like watching a home movie for me.

The film teems with iconic scenes and sequences, from entering the Copa to the “Layla” dead bodies sequence to “hoof” to “go get your shine box” to “what do you want fucko?” to “funny how? I mean, funny like a clown? I amuse you?” I can’t get enough of Goodfellas, as I’ve probably seen the movie at least 100 times, and I’ve discovered something new every time I’ve seen it.

Scorsese has made many masterpieces, but Goodfellas is his most entertaining masterpiece, and is a testament and monument to his greatness.

More proof of Scorsese’s genius is that I had many, many films that I love sit just on the outside of my top “five”…such as Mean Streets, The Color of Money, Cape Fear and Kundun, and they stand up to most other makers very best work.

And thus concludes my Scorsese top “five”…which is really a top nine, because Scorsese, the consummate rule breaking director, deserves a list that breaks the rules. So go forth and watch as much Scorsese as you can, and let’s hope that The Irishmen lives up to the hype!

©2019

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood: A Review and Commentary WITH SPOILERS!

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS AHEAD!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****

My Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is the fictional story of fading television star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth, as they navigate Hollywood during the turbulence of 1969. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dalton and Brad Pitt as Booth, with supporting turns from Margot Robbie, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell and a cavalcade of other actors.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino’s 9th feature film and like all of his other movies it is a cultural event. With two of the biggest movie stars in the world on the marquee, and one of the most recognizable directing talents in the business at the helm, this movie was bound to stir up interest. Add in the fact that it is an unabashed homage to Hollywood history that also mixes in the toxically intriguing Manson family and you have a recipe for drawing a lot of attention. While I have loved some Tarantino films and loathed some others, I recognize his genius, and part of that genius is making movies that stir controversy and attract enormous amounts of both good and bad attention.

I went to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on the Friday morning of its official opening. The 10 AM screening was pretty full…full enough that I had to endure not one but two elderly couples sitting on either side of me talking throughout the movie like they were sitting in their own living rooms. Even after very politely and delicately asking them to please not talk, they continued anyway. As my buddy Steamroller Johnny astutely observed, “at some point old people think the rules of the world no longer apply to them”. Despite the incessant and idiotic yammering of these old fools, the likes of which included such gems as “remember Mannix? Oh yeah…I remember Mannix!” and “Where did Leo go? Why don’t they tell us where Leo went?”, I soldiered on to the end of the movie and much to my broke lawyer’s chagrin, never once smashed anyone’s head in.

I must admit that my first impressions of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood were not overly positive. Besides the distracting moronity of the decrepit couples around me, I thought the film looked and sounded sub-par. The visuals were terribly imprecise and muddled, and the sound was atrociously bad, with Tarantino’s constant use of music suffocating the dialogue. The visual darkness and audio messiness made me feel I was watching the movie underwater. Even though I saw the movie in a high end art house theatre, I blamed the projector for the technical mess as the screening I attended used a digital projector which is how most movies are displayed nowadays. After leaving the theatre I shook my head at the sad state of film projection in America and what a crime it is to demean the art of cinema in such an egregious way.

Another first impression I had was that this movie was two hours and forty minutes long but ultimately did not do much considering it is historical fiction and could have done absolutely anything it wanted. I sort of felt like…is that all there is? Is that all you can come up with? it felt really…limited…at least in terms of the story.

Needless to say, while I didn’t hate the movie, I didn’t love it either, and felt it landed somewhere in the bottom half of the Tarantino canon, ahead of The Hateful Eight and behind Inglorious Basterds. Then, out of both frustration and curiosity, I decided to see the film again, except this time to see it in 35mm…as it was intended to be seen. 35mm screenings are pretty rare nowadays but Tarantino usually sets up special screenings where you can see his movies either in 35 or 70mm. It took some effort as I had to track down the theatres and special screening times for the 35mm print, but I did it and then went and saw it once again on Monday at noon.

Let me tell you…the difference between digital and 35mm is like night and day in every single way. In 35 the film is gorgeous to look at, the colors and contrast are distinct, and the visuals precise and specific. As much as the look of the film improved, the sound made an even more gargantuan leap. In 35mm the sound is astounding, as the music really pops and the mix is as clear as a bell…no more dialogue pulled under the tide of music.

The second viewing, much to my delight, also gave me a much clearer perception and understanding of the narrative and the sub-text. It certainly helped that I didn’t have to listen to elderly conversations about Mannix and could focus on the action on screen, but I was also aided by just being able to let the film wash over me as opposed to figure out what will happen next.

My second viewing changed my entire opinion of the film…and it quickly skyrocketed out of the bottom tier of Tarantino movies and into the upper echelon if not the Mount Rushmore of his canon.

Tarantino has always gotten great performances from his cast and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is no exception. The entire cast is stellar, with Margaret Qualley (a 2017 Breakout Performance of the Year Mickey Award Winner!), Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Al Pacino and Julia Butters doing terrific supporting work.

As for the leads…Leonardo DiCaprio is at his very best in this movie. DiCaprio perfectly embodies the self-destructive, self-absorbed desperation that is epidemic in Tinseltown. His Rick Dalton is a star who is fading fast who represents an era and archetype that is under siege. DiCaprio’s Dalton is barely able to keep his mind and body in tact as he tries to navigate the minefield of semi-stardom in an entertainment business going through as much upheaval as the rest of the country in 1969….which is eerily similar to 2019.

DiCaprio gives Dalton a subtle but very effective stutter and stammer that reveals a mind deteriorating after years of alcohol abuse. Dalton’s stutter and stammer indicate he is no longer able to speak his mind and do it clearly. His stutter/stammer show a man second guessing himself and his entire life.

Dalton is also in a perpetual state of cough and spits up gallons of phlegm as he is metaphorically dying on the inside. Dalton smokes and drinks like a condemned man…which is what he really is. Dalton is the archetypal American Male…the Cowboy…and in 1969 that version of American Male was losing its standing and its balance, and in 2019 it is an outright villain. It isn’t until Dalton describes a novel he is reading about a cowboy who has outlived his usefulness and grows more and more useless as everyday passes, that his plight goes from being unconscious to conscious, and it devastates him.

DiCaprio has had moments of greatness in his acting career, most notably as a mentally challenged teen in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and as a depraved slave owner in Django Unchained, but Rick Dalton is by far his most complex and frankly, greatest acting accomplishment, and he is deserving of not only a Best Actor nomination but a win.

Brad Pitt plays the stuntman Cliff Booth with all the movie star aplomb he can muster. Pitt’s work is much more straight forward than DiCaprio’s, but no less effective. Booth is an enigmatic character…at once cool but also combustible. Pitt’s charisma oozes off the screen and he and DiCaprio have an interestingly uneven chemistry that is compelling to watch. Booth seems like a combination of the cult 1970’s Native American action hero Billy Jack (one of my favorites) and Burt Reynolds character Lewis Medlock from Deliverance. He is, unlike DiCaprio’s Dalton, unambitious, but also unlike Dalton, he is the genuine article in terms of rugged, old school masculinity. Booth is no faux tough guy, he is an actual tough guy…the epitome of a real man in that he will kick the shit out of you if you deserve it, even if you’re Bruce Lee. And while Booth is a red-blooded man who is attracted to an alluring and eager teenage girl…his moral code won’t allow him to consummate such an ethically dubious act. And it is of note that the teen in question, named Pussycat, is at one point standing in front of a rainbow colored building, no doubt a strip club, named Pandora’s Box.

Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate and there has been much made about the paucity of her dialogue. The usual suspects are crying misogyny due to her role being “less than" her male co-stars. I find this sort of thinking to be so tiresome and vapid as to be absurd. As for Robbie’s actual performance…it is utterly spectacular. Robbie’s Tate is bursting with life for every second she appears on film. Robbie has filled her Tate with such a powerful and specific intentionality she is like a supernova of magnetism.

The Tate character is the embodiment of life, potential and the archetypal feminine. Tate is bursting with life, literally and figuratively, and her effervescence cannot be contained. When she walks down the street she seems to float or bounce, the earth barely able to grasp her ebullient spirit.

Tarantino’s decision to use actual footage of Tate in the film is a masterstroke, as he successfully pays homage to her and humanizes her at the same time. Tarantino takes Tate out of the clutches of not only the Manson gang but of the culture that has turned her into nothing but a headline and symbol. Sharon Tate was a person, a real person with hopes and dreams and aspirations and the Mansonites snuffed that out…and Tarantino reminds us of the depth of that loss without ever being heavy-handed or maudlin.

The sub-text of the film is one of a battle between traditional masculinity and femininity and the assault upon them by “woke” culture. Tate and Dalton’s wife Francesca and Booth’s dog Brandy represent the traditional feminine archetype and Dalton and Booth are two halves of the traditional male archetype in the film…and the Manson family? They are representative of our new cultural wave…they are liberalism gone awry…they are “The Woke”. In a brilliant twist Tarantino makes this connection abundantly clear as he casts one of the most grating and loathed woke apostles, Lena Dunham, as one of the leaders of the Manson gang at Spahn ranch.

The gaggle of Manson women at Spahn Ranch are the neo-feminists of our age as they are little more than harpies who incessantly yap like neutered lap dogs in the presence of genuine masculinity (Booth). To quote Reservoir Dogs, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood asks modern day neo-feminists represented in the film as Manson women, “you gonna bark all day little doggie, or are you gonna bite?” Of course, these women do not bite when they first meet Booth…they sit and stay when told…and later when they do try to bite, the hounds of hell are released and these women serve as nothing but chum to the big dogs that do bite.

When the female Manson acolytes scream at Booth as he pulverizes a hippie dude at the Spahn ranch, they symbolize the nagging neo-feminists/woke brigade who say a lot but do nothing. They express their love for the weakling and cowardly Mansonite man getting the Booth treatment, but they don’t help him, they just touch their hearts empathetically and mouth their support. It is also worth noting that these woke women may softly proclaim their love for their hippy brethren, but they want to have actual sex with the real man…Cliff Booth. Ultimately when “the woke” women do trifle with Cliff Booth, he obliterates them. Booth and his faithful canine companion unleash a fury upon the woke and smash their heads into dust, no doubt because their heads are empty, as they are incapable of any thought…only regurgitation.

Speaking of dogs…maybe my favorite character in this entire film is Brandy the pit bull, who is Cliff Booth’s beloved pet. Brandy is occasionally a lap dog, but only because she wants affection, not protection. Brandy is a female…but unlike her Manson family/neo-feminist/woke counterparts, she is no bark and all bite. Brandy is the embodiment of loyalty and when unchained she opens the gates of hell upon anyone who would try to disrupt the order of her universe. Brandy may be subservient to Cliff, as he is the one who feeds her and directs her fury when necessary, but she also ferociously defends the traditional feminine in the form of Dalton’s young bride, Francesca.

At both of the screenings I attended, the audience cheered when the Mansonites get their comeuppance…and that is because it is so deliciously satisfying. In our culture The Woke are intolerant of intolerance but are totally intolerable. Tarantino is basically giving voice to people who are sick to death of the incessant woke posing in our culture by saying, “Hey assholes, you want equality…here it is…a can of dog food smashed in your fucking face”. The Woke are, in their own way, Nazis, and Tarantino treats them as such as he has Dalton torch them just like he does the Nazis in his hit World War II movie The Fourteen Fists of McCloskey, and just like Tarantino did in Inglorious Basterds.

In a piece at The Ringer about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Alison Herman wrote “the Manson family aren’t Nazis, or slave owners, or even Bill (from Kill Bill); they were young, manipulated, drugged-out kids” and thus “…watching Rick take a flamethrower to one feels a lot less cathartic and a lot more uncomfortable”. One need look no further to find the vacuity of woke ideology than Ms. Herman’s quote. The young women and man (Tex Watson) getting their faces kicked in, bitten off and torched in the fantasy of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in reality brutally murdered Sharon Tate as she begged for the life of the child in her belly, as well as Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Wojciech Frykowski with the utmost cruelty, savagery and viciousness. They are not drugged up and confused girls anymore than the SS were noble patriots fighting for the German homeland. Ms. Herman’s woke inspired, insipid thinking is prevalent throughout our culture and is a leading cause of the epidemic of mental myopia verging on retardation in our nation. It is Ms. Herman’s thinking that Tarantino smashes in the face with a can of dog food, gets devoured by a pit bull and then gets lit up by a flamethrower…and deservedly so.

Tarantino also deftly plays with audience perception in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. The film is obviously a fairy tale and another bit of historical fiction/wish fulfillment from Tarantino, and it plays with this fact throughout. Tarantino subtly but continuously keeps asking the audience what is real? Is it a blind man who watches tv? Is it a man who claims he’s never been to prison yet says he was on a Houston chain gang for breaking a cop’s jaw? Or is it a man who allegedly killed his lusciously-bottomed, nagging wife or is that just rumor/lie/legend too? What about Dalton, who hates hippies but looks a lot like Manson in his Lancer costume when he gives his great performance…or Booth, who is adversarial with the hippies too but partakes of an acid laced cigarette he buys from a hippie girl?

At times the movie is a daydream within a fairy tale within a nightmare….and that makes it a hypnotically compelling film. Tarantino expertly captures the dream state that is Los Angeles…and Hollywood…a dream state that is so bright during the day as to be blinding, and so dark at night as to be deadly. Hollywood during the day is, like Sharon Tate, beautiful and full of potentialities. When night descends on Los Angeles it becomes a city of menace…the city of Charles Manson, mass murderers, serial killers, street gangs, violent lawless cops…a shadow city of predators and prey.

The ending of the movie is a combination of the dream/nightmare that leads up to it. After the “real men” Booth and Dalton save the day, greatly assisted by the traditional females in the house, Brandy and Dalton’s wife Francesca, the movie shifts to what should be a happy ending, but which feels extremely unsettling.

As Dalton stands at the end of his driveway, he is greeted by Jay Sebring, who seems like a ghostly apparition at the gates of heaven, asking what happened. Sebring is reminiscent of a ghost stuck in the place of his death, in this case Cielo Drive, who is unaware of what happened to them. Sebring and Dalton are then joined by the haunting and ghostly disembodied voice of Sharon Tate over the intercom. Tate invites Dalton up to the house for a drink…and the gates slowly open for him to enter. This is Rick Dalton walking into the gates of heaven (Tarantino’s version of heaven anyway). Dalton…the symbol of the 1950’s all-American cowboy archetype…is dead and he is going to mix and mingle with Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring and the others who did not survive the cataclysm of the 60’s.

Cliff Booth is technically alive at film’s end but physically injured (in the thigh…which in biblical stories/Jungian terms is symbolic of the genitals - which leaves Booth emasculated…just like Tex Watson who gets his balls chewed off by Brandy…and the hippie dude who Booth beats at the camp…who had no balls to begin with) and mentally altered from a hippie delivered acid laced cigarette. Although he avoided the moral trap of Pussycat, he ingested the poison cigarette willfully…like Adam eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge…for this sin he is banished from Eden. After Dalton declares his true friendship with Booth, Cliff is rushed away to a hospital…but in reality he too is gone…disappeared into the L.A. night never to be seen again.

The only ones left alive at the conclusion of the film are Francesca and Brandy…but they are sleeping in the bedroom, no doubt dreaming up the scenario played out over the preceding two and a half hours of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where real men/traditional masculinity saved the day and real women/traditional feminine got to appreciate them for it.

In conclusion, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a staggeringly rich, layered and thoughtful film that is entertaining both as art and as popular cinema. I highly recommend you see it and even if it takes more effort…see it in 35 mm. Tarantino is a polarizing filmmaker, and this movie will no doubt receive a great deal of enmity from politically correct critics and their woke minions in our culture. The bottom line is this, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a gigantic and well-deserved fuck you to The Woke, and that is what makes it so deliciously entertaining, but what makes the movie so poignant, insightful and exceedingly relevant is that it is aware that it is pure fantasy, and that in reality The Woke have won the culture war and cinema, and the rest of us, are all the worse for it.

©2019

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood: A Spoiler Free Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A rich and compelling film that highlights Tarantino’s singular genius and boasts exquisite performances from Leo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie. Make the extra effort and see it in 35mm if you can! A must see movie!

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is the fictional story of fading television star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth, as they navigate Hollywood during the turbulence of 1969. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dalton and Brad Pitt as Booth, with supporting turns from Margot Robbie, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell and a cavalcade of other actors.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino’s 9th feature film and like all of his other movies it is a cultural event. With two of the biggest movie stars in the world on the marquee, and one of the most recognizable directing talents in the business at the helm, this movie was bound to stir up interest. Add in the fact that it is an unabashed homage to Hollywood history that also mixes in the toxically intriguing Manson family and you have a recipe for drawing a lot of attention. While I have loved some Tarantino films and loathed some others, I recognize his genius, and part of that genius is making movies that stir controversy and attract enormous amounts of both good and bad attention.

I went to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on the Friday morning of its official opening. The 10 AM screening was pretty full…full enough that I had to endure not one but two elderly couples sitting on either side of me talking throughout the movie like they were sitting in their own living rooms. Even after very politely and delicately asking them to please not talk, they continued anyway. As my buddy Steamroller Johnny astutely observed, “at some point old people think the rules of the world no longer apply to them”. Despite the incessant and idiotic yammering of these old fools, the likes of which included such gems as “remember Mannix? Oh yeah…I remember Mannix!” and “Where did Leo go? Why don’t they tell us where Leo went?”, I soldiered on to the end of the movie and much to my broke lawyer’s chagrin, never once smashed anyone’s head in.

I must admit that my first impressions of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood were not overly positive. Besides the distracting moronity of the decrepit couples around me, I thought the film looked and sounded sub-par. The visuals were terribly imprecise and muddled, and the sound was atrociously bad, with Tarantino’s constant use of music suffocating the dialogue. The visual darkness and audio messiness made me feel I was watching the movie underwater. Even though I saw the movie in a high end art house theatre, I blamed the projector for the technical mess as the screening I attended used a digital projector which is how most movies are displayed nowadays. After leaving the theatre I shook my head at the sad state of film projection in America and what a crime it is to demean the art of cinema in such an egregious way.

Another first impression I had was that this movie was two hours and forty minutes long but ultimately did not do much considering it is historical fiction and could have done absolutely anything it wanted. I sort of felt like…is that all there is? Is that all you can come up with? it felt really…limited…at least in terms of the story.

Needless to say, while I didn’t hate the movie, I didn’t love it either, and felt it landed somewhere in the bottom half of the Tarantino canon, ahead of The Hateful Eight and behind Inglorious Basterds. Then, out of both frustration and curiosity, I decided to see the film again, except this time to see it in 35mm…as it was intended to be seen. 35mm screenings are pretty rare nowadays but Tarantino usually sets up special screenings where you can see his movies either in 35 or 70mm. It took some effort as I had to track down the theatres and special screening times for the 35mm print, but I did it and then went and saw it once again on Monday at noon.

Let me tell you…the difference between digital and 35mm is like night and day in every single way. In 35 the film is gorgeous to look at, the colors and contrast are distinct, and the visuals precise and specific. As much as the look of the film improved, the sound made an even more gargantuan leap. In 35mm the sound is astounding, as the music really pops and the mix is as clear as a bell…no more dialogue pulled under the tide of music.

The second viewing, much to my delight, also gave me a much clearer perception and understanding of the narrative and the sub-text. It certainly helped that I didn’t have to listen to elderly conversations about Mannix and could focus on the action on screen, but I was also aided by just being able to let the film wash over me as opposed to figure out what will happen next.

My second viewing changed my entire opinion of the film…and it quickly skyrocketed out of the bottom tier of Tarantino movies and into the upper echelon if not the Mount Rushmore of his canon.

Tarantino has always gotten great performances from his cast and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is no exception. The entire cast is stellar, with Margaret Qualley (a 2017 Breakout Performance of the Year Mickey Award Winner!), Bruce Dern, Mike Moh and Julia Butters doing terrific supporting work.

As for the leads…Leonardo DiCaprio is at his very best in this movie. DiCaprio perfectly embodies the self-destructive, self-absorbed desperation that is epidemic in Tinseltown. His Rick Dalton is a star who is fading fast who represents an era and archetype that is under siege. DiCaprio’s Dalton is barely able to keep his mind and body in tact as he tries to navigate the minefield of semi-stardom in an entertainment business going through as much upheaval as the rest of the country in 1969….which is eerily similar to 2019.

DiCaprio gives Dalton a subtle but very effective stutter and stammer that reveals a mind deteriorating after years of alcohol abuse. Dalton’s stutter and stammer indicate he is no longer able to speak his mind and do it clearly. His stutter/stammer show a man second guessing himself and his entire life.

Dalton is also in a perpetual state of cough and spits up gallons of phlegm as he is metaphorically dying on the inside. Dalton smokes and drinks like a condemned man…which is what he really is. Dalton is the archetypal American Male…the Cowboy…and in 1969 that version of American Male was losing its standing and its balance, and in 2019 it is an outright villain.

DiCaprio has had moments of greatness in his acting career, most notably as a mentally challenged teen in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and as a depraved slave owner in Django Unchained, but Rick Dalton is by far his most complex and frankly, greatest acting accomplishment. DiCaprio will definitely be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar and would be very deserving of the win.

Brad Pitt plays the stuntman Cliff Booth with all the movie star aplomb he can muster. Pitt’s work is much more straight forward than DiCaprio’s, but no less effective. Booth is an enigmatic character…at once cool but also combustible. Pitt’s charisma oozes off the screen and he and DiCaprio have an interestingly uneven chemistry that is compelling to watch. Booth seems like a combination of the cult 1970’s Native American action hero Billy Jack (one of my favorites) and Burt Reynolds character Lewis Medlock from Deliverance. He is, unlike DiCaprio’s Dalton, unambitious, but also unlike Dalton, he is the genuine article in terms of rugged, old school masculinity. Booth is no faux tough guy, he is an actual tough guy…the epitome of a real man in that he will kick the shit out of you if you deserve it.

Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate and there has been much made about the paucity of her dialogue. The usual suspects are crying misogyny due to her role being “less than" her male co-stars. I find this sort of thinking to be so tiresome and vapid as to be absurd. As for Robbie’s actual performance…it is utterly spectacular. Robbie’s Tate is bursting with life for every second she appears on film. Robbie has filled her Tate with such a powerful and specific intentionality she is like a supernova of magnetism.

The Tate character is the embodiment of life, potential and the archetypal feminine. Tate is bursting with life, literally and figuratively, and her effervescence cannot be contained. When she walks down the street she seems to float or bounce, the earth barely able to grasp her ebullient spirit.

Tarantino’s decision to use actual footage of Tate in the film is a masterstroke, as he successfully pays homage to her and humanizes her at the same time. Tarantino takes Tate out of the clutches of not only the Manson gang but of the culture that has turned her into nothing but a headline and symbol. Sharon Tate was a person, a real person with hopes and dreams and aspirations and the Mansonites snuffed that out…and Tarantino reminds us of the depth of that loss without ever being heavy-handed or maudlin.

The sub-text of the film is one of a battle between traditional masculinity and femininity and their upheaval by “woke” culture. Tate represents the traditional feminine archetype and Dalton and Booth are two halves of the traditional male archetype in the film…and the Manson family? They are representative of our new cultural wave…they are liberalism gone awry…they are “The Woke”. In a brilliant twist Tarantino makes this connection abundantly clear as he casts one of the most grating and loathed woke apostles, Lena Dunham, as one of the leaders of the Manson gang at Spahn ranch.

Tarantino also deftly plays with audience perception in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The film is obviously a fairy tale and another bit of historical fiction/wish fulfillment from Tarantino, and it plays with this fact throughout. Tarantino subtly but continuously keeps asking the audience what is real?

At times the movie is a daydream within a fairy tale within a nightmare….and that makes it a hypnotically compelling film. Tarantino expertly captures the dream state that is Los Angeles…and Hollywood…a dream state that is so bright during the day as to be blinding, and so dark at night as to be deadly. Hollywood during the day is, like Sharon Tate, beautiful and full of potentialities. When night descends on Los Angeles it becomes a city of menace…the city of Charles Manson, mass murderers, serial killers, street gangs, violent lawless cops…a shadow city of predators and prey.

In conclusion, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a staggeringly rich, layered and thoughtful film that is entertaining both as art and as popular cinema. I highly recommend you see it and even if it takes more effort…see it in 35 mm. Tarantino is a polarizing filmmaker, and this movie will no doubt receive a great deal of enmity from politically correct critics and their woke minions in our culture. The bottom line is this, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is a gigantic and well-deserved fuck you to The Woke, and that is what makes it so deliciously entertaining, but what makes the movie so poignant, insightful and exceedingly relevant is that it is aware that it is pure fantasy, and that in reality The Woke have won the culture war and cinema, and the rest of us, are all the worse for it.

©2019

Quentin Tarantino Films Ranked Worst to First

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 01 seconds

Quentin Tarantino is the most important filmmaker of his generation. That isn’t to say he is the best…just the most important. Tarantino’s distinctive aesthetic, a dialogue and violence driven stew of pop culture, spaghetti westerns, kung fu movies, film noir, pulp fiction, and satirical comedy, revolutionized movies.

Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, hit theatres in 1992 at the height of the grunge rock revolution. Popular music was being turned upside down by the gritty, yet stylized, realism of grunge which was eviscerating the manufactured, corporate rock preening of the previous decade. Tarantino’s uber-confident brand of filmmaking was to Hollywood what Nirvana’s music was to the music industry, an artistic nuclear bomb obliterating business as usual.

Reservoir Dogs, like grunge, created a stylized, gritty realism that was fictional but seemed more true, and honest, than the fairy tale bullshit Hollywood and the music industry had been selling Generation X for the entirety of their lives.

If Reservoir Dogs was akin to Nirvana’s cult hit album Bleach, then Tarantino’s second feature, Pulp Fiction, was Nevermind. Pulp Fiction was the ultimate game changer as it was both populist entertainment, yet also an unorthodox arthouse movie, and it became an instant classic, a box office smash and a critical darling. With Pulp Fiction, Tarantino managed to resurrect not only John Travolta’s moribund career, but also give artistic credibility to Bruce Willis of all people, and catapulted both Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman onto the A list.

Like Nirvana, Tarantino spawned a myriad of copycats who watered down his stylistic brand over the years that followed his breakthrough success. Like grunge, Tarantino went into a deep lull after his initial glorious burst of creativity as his follow up to Pulp Fiction, 1997’s Jackie Brown, fizzled both critically and commercially.

A new wave of independent minded auteurs hit the theatres in the mid to late 90’s, directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson, and they were quickly putting Tarantino in the critical rear view mirror as the millennium closed. It would be six long years after Jackie Brown before another Tarantino film would hit the theatres, and during this time it certainly had felt like the Tarantino moment had passed.

During post-production there was a steady stream of bad press leaking out about Kill Bill, Tarantino’s Kung Fu movie. When word came out that Tarantino was going to split the film into two features to be released in back to back years (2003-2004), I thought that was a very, very bad sign. If the rumors were to be believed it seemed as though Tarantino’s ego was quickly becoming inversely proportionate to his directing ability. Then Kill Bill Vol. 1 came out…and not only was Tarantino not becoming irrelevant and obsolete…he was proving himself as the master of edgy populist arthouse American cinema. Kill Bill solidified his status of king of cool cinema who ruled over Hollywood, indie-land and the arthouse.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 saved Tarantino and Tarantino-ism, which long outlived its musical counterpart, grunge. For the next 15 years Tarantino has churned out big movies…they weren’t always great…but they were always cinematic events. No one makes movies like Quentin Tarantino, and as the years have passed people have even stopped making the type of movies Tarantino can make…big populist Hollywood movies that aren’t part of a franchise or comic book universe.

Tarantino’s career has not only survived but thrived despite his multitude of naysayers, and nowadays the naysayers include the cultural revolutionaries and revisionist historians of the woke brigade. If you read or listen to pc establishment film critics nowadays you hear them describe Tarantino the man, and his films, as “problematic”. He is accused of all sorts of things…like using too much violence and racially charged language in his films…and of filling his films with violence against women and “sex”. Even though I disagree with these criticisms, I will admit that some of these charges, such as the violence and racial language, can at least be made in good faith, but claims of violence against women and too much sex are absolutely absurd and reveal either a staggering ignorance of Tarantino’s work or a dubious and dishonest assessment of his intentions.

The point of all this is to say that, like him or not, Tarantino has cemented his place in our popular culture and in the history of cinema. To ignore this fact would be to ignore reality. With this in mind, and since Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, opens this weekend, I thought it would be wise to try and put together my rankings of Tarantino films.

Ranking Tarantino films is no easy task as my list is almost always in a state of flux. My top four Tarantino films are always the same, but their order can flip by the second. So this list is just capturing my thinking…and feeling…at this very moment. With that in mind…sit back…be like Fonzie and stay motherfuckin cool…and enjoy the list.

8. DEATH PROOF (2007) - Death Proof is a 2007 “exploitation horror film” starring Kurt Russell that pays homage to 1970’s slasher and muscle car movies. Death Proof is undeniable proof that paying homage to a shitty genre will result in a shitty movie. I have seen this exactly once and have zero interest in seeing it ever again. Death Proof is a bad idea made manifest which not surprisingly is a badly made, bad movie. Death Proof is what happens when you become a super successful director and no one has the balls to tell you no.

7. JACKIE BROWN (1997) - Something funny has happened in recent years where aging hipster douchebags (there is an important distinction to be made at this point…while I am aging, am a hipster, and am widely regarded as a douchebag, I am most definitely not the specific breed of monster known as an “aging hipster douchebag”) have decided that Jackie Brown, Tarantino’s homage to blaxploitation movies, is a great movie. In fact, some have gone so far as to claim that Jackie Brown is Tarantino’s greatest film. Let me be as clear as I can about this…Jackie Brown is an actively awful movie. The script is dreadful, the directing abysmal, the pacing lethargic and the acting comatose.

Jackie Brown was a Tarantino flex where he thought he could pull his Lazarus routine on some more actors just like he did with Travolta on Pulp Fiction. But this was where Tarantino’s ego got kicked in the nuts by cold hard reality. There is a reason Pam Grier and Robert Forster were, at the height of their careers, D-level movie actors…it is because they are not good actors. Building a film around such minimal talents ended with…not surprisingly…a really shitty and entirely forgettable movie. This movie was so highly anticipated and so fucking terrible it almost ended Tarantino’s career.

And if you are an aging, hipster douchebag who thinks this is Tarantino’s greatest film, I’m going to Tony Rocky Horror you’re ass and throw you out a four story window and then I’m gonna get medieval on your ass. Got it?

6. THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015) - The Hateful Eight is a pseudo-western thriller that attempts to make grand statements on race in America all while trying to suss out a second rate Agatha Christie type of whodunnit. There are some good things in The Hateful Eight…like Robert Richardson’s stellar cinematography, particularly his glorious opening sequence. But overall…this is a terribly flawed film that suffocates under the weight of its unwieldy and impotent script.

Tarantino succumbs to his lesser instincts and ego in The Hateful Eight when he fatally undermines the archetypal, mythic and narrative structure of the film by making his “hero”, played by Sam Jackson, a male rapist. The film lacks cohesion and tension and devolves into a rather vacuous bloodbath that bores more than it repulses or titillates.

This film is a frustrating cinematic venture, sort of like being marched at gunpoint naked through a blizzard.

5. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (2009) - This is where things start to get interesting on the list as Inglorious Basterds is at once a brilliant and yet also a troublesome film. This movie boasts the single greatest scene of any of Tarantino’s films and among the greatest in film history…the opening sequence where SS Officer Hans Landa question a French farmer, Monsieur LaPadite, in his farmhouse. The film also boasts the masterfully tense and taut “basement bar” scene which is a thing of cinematic beauty. In contrast it also has some awful scenes, like the Mike Myers scene and the climactic orgy of ridiculous Hitler slaughtering violence in the movie theatre.

On the bright side the movie boasts tremendous performances from Christoph Waltz (as the aforementioned Landa), Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt but on the dark side it is saddled with the single worst performance ever in a Tarantino film…the utterly abysmal Eli Roth as The Bear Jew is excruciatingly awful and set the art and craft of acting back centuries.

The thing I disliked the most about Inglorious Basterds though was that it came out during a time when the torture of “enemy combatants” in the war on terror was being debated and it very surreptitiously acted as a piece of vociferous pro-torture propaganda. Anyone who couldn’t see the Manichean philosophical underpinnings of beating captured German soldiers to death with a baseball bat being equivalent to torturing Muslims in Guantanamo Bay or Bagram or Abu Ghraib is being willfully obtuse. And it should be noted here that the German soldiers in the Wermacht getting their skulls bashed in and being scalped by "The Basterds’ were not Nazis party members. Some may see this as a distinction without a difference, and Wermacht complicity and guilt is a contentious historical debate, but considering the context of the torture discussion when the film was released, I find this distinction of note.

Another thing that bothered me about the film was that it was, at its core, nothing but a Jewish revenge fantasy. of course, there is nothing wrong with a Jewish revenge fantasy, in particular a Jewish revenge fantasy against Hitler, who certainly deserves whatever horrors we can imagine for him, but what felt uncomfortable to me was that in Tarantino’s case his revenge fantasy felt manipulative and pandering. Context is important here, as Tarantino is not Jewish, but even though you are not allowed to say it, the majority of Academy members and studio heads are and it felt like Tarantino was trying to make a movie to shamelessly pander to them in order to win an elusive Best Picture and/or best Director Oscar.

Bottomline is this…as great as Inglorious Basterds can be, its failures make it an uneven cinematic experience. Of all my conflicting feelings over this movie, the most overwhelming one is my impulse to bash Eli Roth’s head in with a baseball bat after taunting him with a dreadful Boston accent.

4. DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012) - Some would argue that Django is, like Inglorious Basterds, just a revenge fantasy, except this time for African Americans against slavery. I think this point is terribly off the mark. Yes, there is a certain level of revenge fueling Django Unchained, but the archetype driving the film is not revenge but love, as Django Unchained is a mythic love story. Django is not fighting for any grandiose principles or objectives like freeing the slaves or to punish slave owners, he is just trying to get back to his wife and save her. In contrast, Inglorious Basterds is NOTHING BUT a revenge fantasy where love is nowhere to be found.

Django Unchained is, like the other films in the top four, a masterpiece in its own right. This movie is a thrilling and exhilarating ride that only suffers from one minor (although it felt major at the time) lull, and that is when Tarantino himself is on-screen as an Australian slave trader. As great a movie as this is, and it is great, Tarantino’s sloppy and narcissistic cameo nearly scuttles the entire enterprise.

That said, the film highlights exquisite and sterling performances from Jamie Foxx (easily the best work of his career), Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. The film was pilloried for its use of violence and exploiting slavery for entertainment, but these criticism hold no water. The violence in the film is cartoonish…except when it involves slaves…then it is handled with brutal realism and gravity. Tarantino’s dance between the polar opposites of his entertaining, over-the-top violence and acknowledgement of the horrors of slavery is actually very well-done and shows a deft directing touch.

if you ask me on another day I may say that Django Unchained is Tarantino’s best film…but today I put it at #4. Even though I have it at #4, make no mistake, it is a first ballot hall of fame movie.

3. RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) - There are times where I have Reservoir Dogs as the top film in this list…and even more times when I have it ranked ahead of Pulp Fiction….but today isn’t one of those days. Like Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs is a first ballot hall of famer.

This movie hit theatres like a hand grenade and launched Tarantino as a serious auteur. This staggeringly confident film is like a neo-noir stage play set in this well-defined but not overly explained universe where thugs, hitmen, cons and shady people all live and work. This world is not real but is so thoroughly put together it feels hyper-real.

The low budget for the film adds to its mystique and highlights Tarantino’s real talent as a writer and director. The rawness of the movie is part of its great appeal.

Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Steve Buscemi and Michael Madsen all give stellar performances and Tarantino’s script is explosively good. His use of music, camera movement, pop culture dialogue and violence make for a combustible and compelling feature film debut for Tarantino.

A truly great movie and an instant classic that launched Tarantino’s journey to the top of Hollywood’s Mount Olympus.

2. PULP FICTION (1994) - Pulp Fiction garnered Tarantino a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and rightfully so. This script crackles with life and is a master class in world and character building. The terrific script is elevated even more by sublime performances from Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Harvery Keitel, John Travolta, Christopher Walken and even that dullard Bruce Willis.

Tarantino’s ability to mess with narrative structure, to masterfully use music and pop culture as reference points and his exquisite ability to place multi-dimensional characters into a palpably real but entirely manufactured world, is what makes Pulp Fiction the iconic film that it is.

Pulp Fiction reinvented the Hollywood film, and for good or for ill, forever changed the movie industry. It is the type of film that if you stumble across it on cable, you will sit and watch it from any point in the story through to the end.

1. KILL BILL VOL. 1 & 2 (2003-2004) - I realize I am in the minority on this but I think Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 combined is the greatest Tarantino film….it is certainly my favorite.

Some have accused these films of exploiting and encouraging violence against women, this strikes me as a short cut to thinking. Uma Thurman is the lead in the movie, she is an action hero, she is beaten, shot, stabbed, you name it. Just because violence happens to a women doesn’t make it misogynist…and in this case the exact opposite is true. The weak kneed, mealy mouthed woke clowns who claim this film is misogynist should ask themselves…are the Lethal Weapon movies anti-male because Mel Gibson gets the crap kicked out him in every movie? No, of course not. Tarantino empowers his female lead, an astounding Uma Thurman as The Bride/Black Mamba, to be an action hero not despite of her gender…but because of it…and that is not misogyny.

Like Django, Kill Bill is on its surface a revenge story but in its soul is a love story. The love is that of a mother for her daughter. Thurman’s Black Mamba character is unconsciously tracking down her daughter while consciously slaying all who are impediments to her maternal bond.

The brilliance of Kill Bill is in the world and character building. Tarantino’s kung fu world is populated by ninja and samurai assassins with distinct and specific histories and motivations. A rich, textured, vivid and vibrant creation that is Tarantino at his very best.

In conclusion, while there are some misfires, like Death Proof , Jackie Brown and The Hateful Eight, Tarantino has over the span of his career been a must-see filmmaker who has heightened the craft of moviemaking while celebrating the art of cinema.

The bottom line in regards to Tarantino’s best movies is this…you simply can’t go wrong with Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Django Unchained in any order, as they are among the very best films of the last thirty years and are monuments to Tarantino’s unique vision and singular genius.

The question now becomes…where does Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood rank in Tarantino’s canon? My verdict will be in shortly, but in the mean time why not go re-watch Django unchained, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill or even Inglorious Basterds, as a primer before you see Tarantino’s newest offering. It will get you into the Tarantino spirit and you will not be disappointed.

©2019

The Hateful Eight : A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS. THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW****

MY RATING : SKIP IT IN THE THEATRE*, SEE IT ON CABLE/NETFLIX

*(unless you are an avid lover of lush cinematography, in that case go see it in anamorphic 70mm in the theatre)

The Hateful Eight is enigmatic writer and director Quentin Tarantino's eighth feature film. It is the story of eight seeming strangers seeking refuge from a blizzard in a stagecoach stopover in post-civil war Wyoming. The film boasts an all-star cast of Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Damien Bashir, Walter Goggins and Bruce Dern.

The Hateful Eight has been distributed in two different versions, one version, the "general", runs 167 minutes and is shown in regular 35 mm. The other version is the "Roadshow" version, which has a running time of 187 minutes, and is shown in theaters specially equipped with anamorphic 70mm projectors, in order to show the film "as it was intended" by Tarantino, in 70mm, widescreen format. I saw the "Roadshow" version, which actually runs 210 minutes due to an overture to open the film and a twelve minute intermission. Like many of Tarantino's films, this story is told in chapters. There are six chapters, and the intermission came between chapters 3 and 4.

While I have loved some of his films, I am not one of those fan boys who worships Tarantino. I find his work to be at times brilliant and at other times appalling, sometimes within the same film. I loved Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction but thought Jackie Brown was one of the sloppiest and worst films I had seen in years. I was stunned by the audacious genius of the two masterful Kill Bill films. I was repulsed by the brazen pandering and artistic imbalance of Inglorious Basterds, even while being mesmerized by two scenes in it which were two of the best scenes I'd seen in recent memory. I thought Django Unchained was, minus a clumsy cameo by its director, a masterpiece. 

The Hateful Eight is a frustrating and sometimes infuriating film. The first half of the film, where we meet the eight characters, is well done and accentuates Tarantino's strength as a writer and a director. The first half wonderfully builds characters and a story that leave the viewer in a heightened state of anticipation as they walk out for intermission. Sadly, after the intermission, the film never lives up to its premise, promise and set-up. The second half of the film devolves into a tangled and uneven mess of Tarantino's worst, unfocused impulses.

Without getting into specifics or divulging any 'spoilers', the second half of the film feels lost and rushed, like Tarantino is attempting to cover the holes in his own storytelling. He uses a voice-over for the first time in the film right after the intermission to fill in the gaps of his narrative and it is jarring for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Tarantino does the voice over himself. The voice-over signals we are transitioning to not only a different (and lesser) film, but also a different type of film. The confidence, subtlety, and deft touch on display in the first half of the film vanish and we are left with a writer/director struggling and failing to come up with something interesting to say and do. The film flails around trying to be daring and bold but it only stumbles over it's own self-satisfying and delusional narcissism.

What the film is really about is not the intrigue of eight people stuck in a cabin to ride out a blizzard wondering who among them are the good guys and who the bad, but rather it is about race in America. This is a noble and complicated theme for any film maker to tackle, but in the hands of Tarantino this time out, it is like a gun in the hands of a toddler. The examination of race is shallow and sophomoric at best and repugnant at worst. The racial theme, like everything else in the script, seems to be a rushed add on used to fill in space and add the illusion of depth rather than a genuine topic of examination and exploration.

The Hateful Eight also contains some very basic storytelling and myth making errors. There is one monologue in particular, by Sam Jackson's character Major Marquis Warren, that is so repulsive it ends up working at cross purposes with the films narrative structure, which requires the audience to attach themselves to Major Warren and to root for him. This monologue is well done by Jackson the actor, but poorly done by Tarantino the writer and director, who intersperses visuals throughout Jackson's speech which end up undermining it, much like the speech itself undermines the viewers empathy with Major Warren. The monologue, like much of the script, feels like a first draft that was written by a freshman film student at a second rate community college.

A large part of Tarantino's filmmaking style is to pay tribute to other films and filmmakers in his own films. It is bizarre, but in The Hateful Eight it seems Tarantino is paying homage to himself and his own work. If Reservoir Dogs, Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds had a prematurely born, bastard-child which only inherited the very worst traits of its' parents, then that enfent terrible would be The Hateful Eight.  The most obvious form of this homage is in the casting and in the characters. For instance, Samuel L. Jackson seems to be reprising his iconic Pulp Fiction character Jules Winnfield, only this time in a Union civil war uniform as bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren. Put a Jheri curl afro wig on Major Warren and he is Jules. In a convoluted way, Tim Roth does the same thing by reprising his Reservoir Dogs character Mr. Orange, this time as a British hangman named Oswaldo Mobray. The matching details between Mr. Orange and Mr. Mobray are uncanny. The problem with this sort of masturbatorial, self-referential naval gazing is that it borders on directorial self parody.

In terms of the performances, all of the actors do as well as they can. These are quality, top-notch actors and they all do solid and captivating work with the flawed script given them. 

Jennifer Jason-Leigh is a fabulous and terribly overlooked and under-appreciated actress, and she does the best with what she is given here as the prisoner Daisy Domergue, but when the story goes off the rails in the second half, any interest in her character goes right with it.

Michael Madsen is one of my favorite actors, but he seems like an add-on here in order to make the cast round out to the number eight (a tribute to Tarantino himself and the fact that this is his eight feature film, which is made very clear in the opening credits). Much like Madsen's under written and under used Joe Gage, Bruce Dern's General Sanford Smithers seems thrown in only for monologue convenience purposes. 

Kurt Russell plays John Ruth, a.k.a. The Hangman. Tarantino has occasionally tried to reignite once successful actor's careers by casting them in his films. He gave John Travolta a career renaissance by putting him in Pulp Fiction, and attempted to do the same with Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, David Carradine in Kill Bill, Don Johnson in Django Unchained and now he does the same with Kurt Russell. Russell does a very good job in the role, so much so that one can't help but wish he wasn't more the focus of the story. Russell creates a brutal character but one with an intriguing internal life to him that draws the viewer in deeper and deeper the more you see of him. I have never been much of a Kurt Russell fan but there is no doubt that this film needed more Kurt Russell and not less. The Hateful Eight would have been much better served if the John Ruth character had the opportunity to be more fully fleshed out.

As underwhelming as The Hateful Eight was, it is not without some greatness. Robert Richardson's cinematography is sublime. The opening shot of the film is both visually and narratively exquisite in every way. Richardson takes full advantage of the beautiful natural setting and expanse in the Rockies and of the sharp contrasts of the blizzard raging around the story. If you are someone who loves great cinematography, then definitely see the film in the theaters and see it in anamorphic 70mm. It is well worth the time just as a piece of visual art.

Famed composer Ennio Morricone's(The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) soundtrack is pretty fantastic as well. When they told us that their would be an overture, I rolled my eyes, wanting to just get to the film, but the overture was glorious. And having an overture and an intermission was actually pretty cool and made going to the theatre seem like a grandiose event and a 'special', worthwhile experience. It is all too easy to see films in the comfort of our own homes instead of the theatre nowadays, so having a throw back overture takes the viewer out of the routine of movie watching and puts an element of grandeur and mysticism back into the experience.

In the final analysis, I think Quentin Tarantino shot a much much too early draft of the script with The Hateful Eight. I believe with many more rewrites the script could have given greater depth to the characters and themes explored, and given more clarity and precision to the narrative. I consider The Hateful Eight to have been a lost opportunity for Quentin Tarantino as all of the pieces were there for this film to have been great. A superb cast of terrific actors, the glorious cinematography of Robert Richardson, a world-class soundtrack from Ennio Morricone, and the blueprint for an interesting and intriguing story…but due to a script that wasn't done marinating or cooking, and was shot prematurely, all of these elements never had a chance to come together and achieve the cinematic greatness that could have been within reach. 

If you are a big fan of Tarantino, you will enjoy the film as it is a very "Tarantino" film, meaning it has a lot of violence and innumerable uses of the word "nigger". But if you are simply a lover of great cinema, this is not the film for you. At the end of the day, The Hateful Eight is in the bottom half of Quentin Tarantino's impressive filmography, probably just above Jackie Brown and just below or tied with Inglorious Basterds.

With that said, if you love transcendent cinematography, I would implore you to go see the film in the theatre in anamorphic 70mm. Robert Richardson is a master craftsman of the highest order and his visual artistry is well worth the price of admission if you are into that sort of thing.

****WARNING: THIS SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS!! PLEASE SKIP IT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM YET!!!***

Ok, just a brief little write up with a little more detail for those of you who have seen the film.

The Major Marquis/Sam Jackson monologue I wrote about above is the monologue that ends the first half of the film where he tells the story of how he mouth raped the confederate general's grown son. It is such an over the top speech that it breaks the spell that the film had so carefully cultivated in the lead up to it. Another point about it is that we are meant to root for Major Marquis, he is really the mythic hero of the film. While we can hear "bad" things about him from other characters, Sheriff Mannix telling the story of Marquis' burning of the prison for instance, it totally undermines the mythic and psychological power of the narrative if Major Marquis himself tells the story of mouth raping a desperate man for purely sadistic purposes. This is such an egregious act that Major Marquis can no longer be relied upon to carry the audience's positive projections. No one watching the film who sides with Major Marquis, namely people that consider themselves non-racist and would be against slavery and the confederacy (in other words, self-identifying "good" people), could ever imagine themselves wanting to rape another man just to make him suffer and degrade him.

Tarantino has used male on male rape and the threat of it before in his films, most notably in Pulp Fiction where Zed rapes Marsellus and tries to rape Butch. The difference there though is that Zed is, from the moment we meet him on screen, a loathsome character. He is a horrific obstacle to be overcome by Butch on his hero's journey. Zed represents the threat of Butch losing his manhood and masculinity. When Zed is finally overcome by Butch, Marsellus tells Butch to keep the knowledge of the rape to himself, as it is the most shameful thing that can happen to a man, and he also tells Butch that he is going to "get medieval" on Zed, administering divine justice and vengeance for this most heinous of acts.

So it is established in the world of Tarantino, and frankly, in the real world too, that a man raping another man, with all of the mythic and psychological power that goes along with it, is the most despicable thing a man can do to another man. And yet, we are supposed to empathize with Major Marquis after learning of this? We are supposed to root for him and project ourselves onto him? It is an impossibility for any viewer to do so. A rapist, whether they rape men or woman, is as deplorable and despicable a person as one can imagine. So it is absurd to expect audiences who have been set up by the first half of the story to empathize with Marquis, to not feel betrayed by the film and to tune out and turn away from the rest of the story. Simply put, an unrepentant, dare I say gloating rapist, can never be the hero in a story. And if they are the hero, no one will care whether they survive their journey or not. While Marquis gets "some" divine justice for his heinous act in the form of castration, he is never held to account for his deeds or made to repent, quite the opposite actually….he wins at the end.

The Major Marquis rape monologue is also mishandled by Tarantino when he keeps cutting away to show the viewer what Marquis is describing. Then Marquis asks the General "You're seeing pictures aren't you?" Why not have the confidence in the actor Sam Jackson to tell the story and carry the viewer through it. Jackson is as compelling an actor as you'll find, and his monologues are legendary. Cutting away from the monologue undermines it's power and its mystery…as we are left with no doubt that Marquis is telling the truth, since we've seen it ourselves. If we are left wondering if Marquis is lying just to get under the General's skin, then we can continue to root for him as the story goes forward. But we aren't, and we don't.

Another issue I have with the film is the finale is terribly bungled. Why not have the Sheriff turn on Marquis and take Domergue's offer? That is the more interesting choice. And then have him think he is home-free only to hear the rumble of horses coming up to the cabin, signifying that he made the wrong choice and that Domergue's gang will kill him. The ending is a shockingly weak one for a director who usually defies convention and the easy way out. Tarantino was trying to fit a nice ending into his racial exploration. It comes across as little more than wishful thinking. It is also a complete contradiction to the nature of the Sheriff's character to side with Marquis at the most important moment. Why side with a man who raped one of your compatriots? That is inconceivable. 

Also, we have no reason to feel that Daisy Domergue is a villain. We've not seen her do anything terrible. We've been told she is a criminal, but we're not shown it. We have only seen her be beaten and mistreated by John Ruth and Marquis. We actually like her much more than anyone else in the film. Yet the glee the men show at her hanging feels disproportionate to the evil we may or may not have seen her commit. This is just one more in a long line of storytelling mis-steps that emotionally and psychologically disconnect the viewer form the film. 

And finally, the idea that anyone had enough of a connection to the John Ruth character that they would make a huge, life and death decision, based on what John Ruth would have wanted, is ridiculous and unsupported by the entirety of the film. Doing something for John Ruth's sake is a very very cheap way to give an unrealistic motivation to the characters in order to find a way out of the story.

And in order to end on a more positive note…the opening shot where Richardson excruciatingly slowly pulls out and holds on the frozen crucifix, with it's painfully tortured and contorted snow-framed face, and then the stage coach comes into view in the distance, was a cinematically powerful way to not just open the film, but also start the story. That shot is so artistically impeccable and mythically precise that I could hardly contain myself. In hindsight, that transcendent shot set up an expectation that the rest of the film was unable to live up to…but that doesn't make it any less glorious.

That is all I have to say on the film for now. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section. 

©2016