Tarantino’s Ninth
This week: A spoiler-fueled deep-dive into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s latest reality-bending epic. With Karina Longworth, A.S. Hamrah, Tom Doherty, and Ty Burr. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
It was movie week at OS; apologies for spoiler city, but the show is rich with conversations for both the Tarantino-obsessed and newbies alike.
A week ago Chris Lydon couldn’t spell Quentin Tarantino; now QT is his favorite filmmaker:
Keep a blindfold at the ready — it’s the only way to finesse the two tiers of Tarantino.
He is a grand master (thoughtful, original, humane) of big-screen storytelling — with this nasty habit of whacking you in the face with gory brutality before the show is over.
Tarantino has big blind spots in editing himself, but a blind fold enables us to edit him. Through the first two-thirds “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” you won’t need to look away at least until Brad Pitt starts punching out the Manson Family not-so-toughs at their Spahn Ranch. Yet to come is the worst of the preemptive massacre of the Manson wannabe killers on Cielo Drive overlooking Hollywood. But most of the first two hours of the film are propulsive excitement for the audience and a gripping engagement with two checkered characters and two magnificent players in Mr. Pitt and Leonardo di Caprio.On the Vanity Fair site the master-class conversation between di Caprio and Tarantino is everything we needed to know about QT the writer, director, teacher, obsessive historian of Hollywood and the art and craft of cinematic theater. My personal boycott of Tarantino (since “Pulp Fiction”) is over. “Jackie Brown” from 22 years ago is where my education resumes.
n+1’s A.S. Hamrah launched the show with a mighty argument for Tarantino’s morally complex filmmaking—for complexity in cinema in general. It’s really something to hear:
Once upon a time in Hollywood has a strange beauty as you put it because the film is essentially a fairy tale as well as a shaggy dog story about. A specific time in Hollywood before the loss of innocence that’s represented by the Manson murders. The Manson murders are seen by 70s kids as the ultimate evil. You recall that there was a TV movie called Helter Skelter based on the book by the prosecutor of Charles Manson that a lot of people my age saw and you know evil hippies who were constantly held up as potential kidnappers murderers home invaders et cetera. So in this film Tarantino is playing with that myth…So what he’s doing is creating a revisionist history much like the revisionist movies the movies isn’t a revisionist genre movies of the late 60s and early 70s like the Wild Bunch or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Yeah. But what has happened in the reception of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with older critics is that because they think they own that history they don’t want anyone to mess with it.
Later in the show, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe discussed how this kind of challenging filmmaking by Tarantino engages the audience, makes for a communal experience that other movies often don’t create.
If you saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, did you notice the audience’s audible reactions? Did strangers in the audience look at each other as they left the theater—in amazement, bewilderment, frustration, or some other mode? A lot of people have reported to us versions of this happening. Tarantino’s movie really does emphasize the collective, shared experience of cinema (even if it’s disputatiously shared).
Chris asked Ty Burr and Tom Doherty what other films of Tarantino’s we should see; both said Jackie Brown . From 1997 and starring Pam Grier, it was adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Jackie Brown is a thoughtful, comfortably Southern Californian movie. Doherty described it as a movie with which you can hang out.
It was a treat to speak to Karina Longworth, host of the awesome You Must Remember This, a podcast dedicated to Hollywood’s secret and forgotten history. Karina might be the only person around who can match Quentin Tarantino’s knowledge of movies and the movie biz, and she devoted 12 episodes to the story of Charles Manson’s Hollywood. It’s an amazing project. She was generous with us about the Manson backstory and Manson’s connection with Hollywood, then Tom Doherty talked with us about the broader cultural malaise around 1969. If you want to to weigh Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s take on this period against that history, and against the Manson history in particular, Rolling Stone did a close read.
The Times, which can’t seem to get enough of this movie, with a story a day last week by our count, ran a pop culture glossary in today’s paper, so you can see how many of those Hollywood references you caught.
It was a crazy time, for sure. There was no shortage of mayhem. Our guests said, creepily, that it was the worst time in modern history until now. As if we needed the reminder.
Watch: Return of the Dragon
There’s a controversial Bruce Lee character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but if you revisit Lee’s work itself, you can see just how much he offered, and what an astonishing martial artist and performer he was. Enter the Dragon is the place to start, but there’s also a more off-beat movie, written and directed by Lee, called in the U.S. Return of the Dragon (it does go by other titles, too). There Bruce Lee’s character, while a Roman cat looks on, defeats Chuck Norris in the Colosseum.
Watch: The Center Will Not Hold
We plugged The White Album last week (and it’s almost essential reading to complete the OUaTiH experience); after that watch this documentary directed by Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne — as Godfrey Cheshire puts it:
[T] fact that it was made by her nephew, actor/filmmaker Griffin Dunne, gives it a warmth and intimacy that might not have graced a more standard documentary . . .
Containing engaging interviews with Didion fans and friends including Calvin Trillin, David Hare and Hilton Als, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold” does that thing that the best documentaries about writers to: it makes you want to return to its subject’s work as soon as possible.
Listen: Ennio Morricone
A.S. Hamrah talked to us about the debt Tarantino’s films owe to the moral logic of Spaghetti Westerns — those Italian films directed by people like Leone and Corbucci (the most famous example is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). These are movies famous for their music along with their darkly comic, bleakly moral plots, and the superstar of Italian Western music is Ennio Morricone. Morricone himself scored the previous Tarantino film, The Hateful Eight, bridging contemporary cinema and films of the Sixties with his darkly lush music.
In other music history…
Beatles world has released a new mix of Abbey Road with previously unreleased session recordings and demos. There won’t be a Woodstock anniversary concert this month, but there’s a new PBS documentary Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation and there will be screenings of the original documentary Woodstock: The Director’s Cut for one night only, August 15th, to coincide with the official 50th anniversary. We’ll be working. Damn!
Listen: Joe Rogan
The podcast phenom Joe Rogan is new to us, but his hour-long interview with Bernie was the best we’ve heard (and lots of people agree). Then listen to his sesh with Cornel West. Two hours of pure jazz.
Read: ‘A People’s Cry of Indignation’: A Dispatch from Puerto Rico
Our friend Molly Crabapple covered the protests in Puerto Rico for The New York Review of Books: The protesters were young, exquisite, and mostly masked. They waved Puerto Rican flags, banged on pots, shook the outstretched hands of supportive motorists, then jumped up and down, bathed in the headlights, ecstatic in their own bodies.
The protests had revealed, in the words of Puerto Rican writer Ana Teresa Toro, “the true social animal that we are: a beast that is joyous, wild, indocile and untamed, that has slept… until now.” Protesters renamed the streets around La Fortaleza “Calle de la Resistencia” and “Calle de la Revolucíon.” The barricades in front were transformed into stages for selfie posts. One person after another clambered up, grinned, and waved their pale-blue independence flags.
Don’t Miss: Dateline Saigon Screening and Convo August 20 at 7:00 pm
The Coolidge Corner Theater is screening our friend Tom Herman’s incredible documentary about journalists who covered the Vietnam War. Chris will talk with Tom and historian (and friend of OS) Fred Logevall. Details here.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
Gabriel O’Malley’s “Death of the Neighborhood Bar” (Gabriel is the co-owner of one of the world’s greatest pubs, the iconic Plough & Stars near Harvard Square in Cambridge.) A.S. Hamrah takes on all kinds of movies at n+1. Karina Longworth has a book out about the forgotten stories of women linked to Howard Hughes. Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? The best Toni Morrison appreciation was this one from 2015 in the NYT Mag by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. And stay tuned, we dug up Chris Lydon’s interview with Toni when she was on The Connection. Boom!
Til next week!
The OS Culties
