Category: Films
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Tarantino Thoughts
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is kind of a love story, kind of a biopic, and kind of a history.
Note that this post contains spoilers. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled.
Or maybe “buddy pic,” rather than “love story;” but the relationship between the two leads will be analysed for its homoerotic content, no doubt.
How it certainly has been described is “a love letter to Hollywood,” and that’s fair enough. What it also is, is a counter-factual, or alternative history. But don’t worry, I’m not going to claim this one for SF.1
The main characters – fading cowboy actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his regular stunt double Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt – are invented. But most of the other named characters, and many who are mentioned or appear as extras, are real people. The most significant of these is Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. And it’s her story that makes this film most interesting, and maybe problematic.
Because of course she died tragically, murdered by members of Charles Manson’s “Family” cult. And in this version — she doesn’t.
If you know the history — which of course, many younger people won’t, which makes for different ways of experiencing the film — then you spend half the time expecting the massacre. There are captioned dates, and even though most of us wouldn’t know the date of the murders, there can’t really be any other reason for showing them. And then when it comes, something else happens.
The violence in that scene is gruesome, over the top, ludicrous — almost hallucinogenic, making me wonder if the tripping Booth2 is meant to have hallucinated some or all of it. But there’s no need for there to be so much of it, or for the majority of it to be directed at women. The “Family” did consist largely of women, I guess, but I can’t help but feeling that Tarantino is revelling in it a little too much.
And on top of all that, as my family agreed after seeing it: there’s no real need for the whole Sharon Tate thread of the story. It would have made a fine tale if were just about the two actors against the backdrop of late-60s Hollywood. I wonder what the point of it was. Did Tarantino feel he could in some way “save” Sharon Tate?
In Dreams: A Unified Interpretation of Twin Peaks & Other Selected Works of David Lynch, by H Perry Horton (Books 2019, 7)
This is an incredible piece of work, about an incredible body of work.
I don’t recall how I heard about it. I think I saw a tweet, or something, thought it looked interesting, and instantly bought it because it was only a few quid on Kindle. It’s a huge book which tries — successfully, in my mind — to explain how the bulk of David Lynch’s creative works can be considered part of a single story, which Horton refers to as The Dream.
Now obviously Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Twin Peaks: The Return are all part of the same story. As are the various spinoff books: Jennifer Lynch’s The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and Scott Frost’s The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, from back around the time of the original broadcast; and Mark Frost’s more recent The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, which I’ve written about here.
But Horton argues that the whole story gets kicked off in Eraserhead, and that Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr and Inland Empire are side stories related to the main branch. The overall story being about an eternal being, The Dreamer, who dreams reality into existence, and also creates another being, known as Jowday, or Judy, who becomes his adversary. BOB, the possessing spirit of the original Twin Peaks, is a creation of this entity, and the Black and White Lodges are the vanguards in the battle between the two beings.
Sure, on one level it’s just good vs evil, heaven & hell — “just,” I say, as if that wasn’t enough. But the sheer scope of it is astonishing. The eighteen hours of The Return has been hailed as an incredible masterpiece of visual storytelling. But when you include all that I’ve listed above, and three of Lynch’s paintings to boot — it must be one of the greatest — in terms of size, at least — creative works by a single visionary. True, it’s far from being by a single creator, but the vision behind it is solely or primarily Lynch’s, or that of Lynch and Mark Frost.
And even if the connections to the other films are just in Horton’s head (and, to be fair, those of others whose work he acknowledges): the obviously-connected stuff is still amazing, and the current work, Horton’s book that I’m writing about, is something a of a creative triumph itself.
One that is slightly marred by its self-published nature and obvious lack of an editor — there are a lot of typos — but a hugely impressive one nonetheless.
Though obviously it’s only for the very serious Twin Peaks fan.
Rude and Rough
I watched Rude Boy for the first time in many years. It is, in case you don’t know, a film from 1980 about and featuring The Clash. It’s kind of a fictionalised documentary, in that the titular character, Ray Gange, is both someone who was a sometime roadie for/hanger-on of The Clash, and playing the part of “Ray Gange.”1
The worst part of it is, as I recalled, his “acting.” Well, that’s not quite true. Viewing it as a film, that’s the case. But viewing it as a document of the end of the seventies, the worst part of it is the casual racism. And indeed the organised racism of the National Front rally shown at the start.
Also bad are the violence from police and bouncers, and the general horribleness of Britain in the seventies. Nothing looks clean, everything looks run-down or broken. It looks, in fact, far worse than I remember it being.
Don’t worry, by the way, if you don’t remember what it was like, are too young to have experienced it, and/or don’t want to watch the film. It’ll be like that again in a couple of years if things go as we fear.
The best parts are, of course, the scenes of The Clash live and in the studio. And we won’t get them back after Brexit.
Also, in looking up the IMDB article, I discover that a) Ray Gange has actually been in a couple of other movies, and b) far more importantly, there is a 2016 movie called London Town, which is a drama about those times. With people acting as The Clash. Whaaaat? Why did no-one tell me about this?
- Or not quite. That’s how I remembered it, but Wikipedia suggests the story is slightly different. ↩
Musical Malady
This morning I saw a poster for Heathers: The Musical. Err, What?
I rewatched Heathers fairly recently and I thought, this could never get made today. I figured teenage suicide is too high-profile, and the facts of people being driven to it, and the fear of copycatting — these would put a treatment of it like the one in Heathers off the table today.
Yet there’s a musical version playing in the West End, apparently.
Not that you can’t make a musical about serious subjects. I’ve just been to see one about the founding of the USA, after all. But Heathers is not what you’d call sensitive about the subject. It could have been changed significantly for the musical, of course, but to remove that aspect would be to take out an important part of the story, so I don’t know where they’d go with it.
Turns out that it’s been around since 2014; and that there’s a even a “High-School Edition,” made more suitable for kids.
Furthermore, it seems there’s a TV series based on the film as well, so what do I know? But it makes me wonder if I’m remembering a different film.
Looped
It’s six years old, but I finally got round to watching Looper. Interesting. Not sure about it. Some of the time-travel stuff didn’t make sense — or was confusing, at least. The loopers do their killing and body-disposal in the past, but by the time Bruce Willis comes into it, everyone involved is in the same time, 2044, the past of the movie.
Also I thought I had heard that it wasn’t well thought of, but Rotten Tomatoes has it at 82% from audiences and 93% from critics. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?
This review at The Mary Sue is good on the weak points. Some interesting discussion in the comments, too.
The future was unconvincing — people still driving petrol-burning cars in 2044 and 2074? And the status of women was terrible. You can be a sex worker or a farming mom in future America. I mean, OK, we didn’t see the rest of society, but it’s not great. And a major Bechdel fail. Oh yes, and: the currency is silver? Actual, metallic silver? Time travel has really messed things up.
I enjoyed it on the whole, though, and the ending is great. We could have done without the voiceover, but maybe Rian Johnson, the director, has plans to release a cut without it in one possible future. Now where have I come across that idea before?
Star Doctors
It was drawn to my attention a couple of weeks ago that I have not yet expressed (publicly) an opinion on either Star Wars: The Last Jedi or the Doctor Who Christmas special. That is both true, and very remiss of me. Trouble is it’s now been quite a while since I saw them both.
Still, I should be able to gather together a few memory cells.
The Last Jedi
I went on opening night, as I microblogged. It was great. There are some points that could have been done differently, or left out, or speeded up; and it had the weird effect towards the end of there being a series of times when I thought it was finished, and it still wasn’t. But all in all a fine work. Not as good as The Force Awakens, maybe. But that’s partly because that one raised our expectations so high.
‘Twice Upon A Time’
Peter Capaldi’s last episode. It was damn fine, loads of fun. Great to see Bill back, even if not exactly. Unnecessary Daleks, but quite a good use of them — or ‘it,’ I should say.
And the introduction of ‘Testimony,’ scooping up people’s memories and saving them, is great. Though how many computer-simulated afterlives can one series have?
And what a dramatic start Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor is going to have.
There you go, only a month or so after the events.
Mouse Takes Fox
The news that Murdoch plans to sell 21st Century Fox and Sky TV to Disney is interesting for how it will reshape the media landscape. But it’s good from my point of view for a number of reasons, some relatively trivial and to do with content consumption; and one big.
- The X-Men and the Fantastic Four will come under the control of Marvel Studios. Just in time for Infinity War. Well, of course, far too late — even, I would imagine, for Infinity War Part 2. I expect that’s at least planned by now.
- Even more trivial, Lucasfilm can put the Fox fanfare back at the start of future Star Wars movies (and add them in to future reissues of the recent ones).
- It will become ethical to watch Sky TV. More of which below.
Above all: better Disney than Murdoch.1
Will Disney own too much? Hell yes. But see above.
On the ethics of watching — and paying for — Sky TV: see this blog passim for my thoughts on that. Like here and here. If Sky had not been owned by Murdoch we might conceivably have got it in the past. But I feel we’re highly unlikely to get it now. Buying a dish in 2017 would just be weird, and our side of the road is not cabled, by some odd historical aberration. But there’s the online version, which I think is called Direct TV. If we had had that I would have been able to watch the new Twin Peaks when it was actually broadcast, instead of now, on DVD, as is actually happening.
Loving it, by the way. And managed to hear no spoilers whatsoever, surprisingly.
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I mean, better almost anyone than Murdoch. ↩︎