A film that takes us somewhere, yet goes nowhere.

Quentin Tarantino once again brazenly rewrites history in his scintillating homage to La La Land of the 1960s, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

Hollywood 1969. Two tales intertwine – one, a tale of an actor and his stuntman, hustling for work in a business that has moved past their cowboy attitudes and advancing ages; the other, a tale of a rising young starlet going somewhere, while her throughline goes nowhere.

And that’s the small gripe I have with this meticulously made film: a little less homage, a little more story.

Writer-director Tarantino paints two fictional characters from scratch and portrays one real life character; the fictional pair are actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman bro Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, as leathery and runneled as Tommy Lee Jones), while the historical character is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who is connected to real life acquaintances that would scar history forever – the Manson Family (portrayed as peripheral characters, including a lookalike who could be a young Liam Neeson or, I’m guessing, Charlie Manson).

Tarantino also re-dresses Hollywood the town (either in CGI, practical effects or a combo of both) in the glitter gown it wore in the ‘60s, from the shop facades on Hollywood Boulevard, to the car models from that era, down to the street signs, bus shelters and billboards. And credit where it’s due – that effort in itself is a stunning achievement!

However, Tarantino seems to have lost his throughline in chasing his art. Firstly, only movie-philes would know or care that he has brought 1960’s Hollywood to life so fastidiously; secondly, he spends way too much time with eyes on Sharon Tate. Movie might have benefitted had Tarantino simply followed the two buddies (with their own compelling narratives), because by inserting Tate and rewriting her as a survivor of the “Tate Murders,” her appearance in the film is meaningless to any cinemagoer with no knowledge of her real history (victim to the Manson Family, that murdered five people in Roman Polanski’s Los Angeles home in 1969), and she ultimately becomes nothing but a red herring to those who do know the history. Tate happens to be Rick Dalton’s neighbor, therefore a motivating subplot for actor Dalton, who craves to make contact with Tate’s director husband, Polanski. After the film’s climax (in which Tate is not involved), she appears as a concerned neighbor, in the smallest of comedic payoffs.

That being said, allow me to commend IN HOLLYWOOD for its sudden, savage climax – one of the most satisfying payoffs in cinematic history, with Brad Pitt pulling out his big dick for the type of studied gore-ballet that Tarantino is renowned for. The crafted gutshock blunt blow to our skulls doesn’t get any better. It’s Hero Time.

Most women have to be held back when confronted with The Pitt.

Like the two films that inspired its name (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, both directed by one of Quentin’s heroes – Sergio Leone), ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD is a tale about a few connected characters set against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic cultural sprawl. Definitely a passion project for Quentin (who admits 1969 holds a rose-colored grip on his youth), movie is a pastiche wrapped in a homage and doused liberally with roman a clef, packed with Easter eggs, classic rock, in-jokes, and parts for all his brahs.

There’s ice-cool Timothy Olyphant and ice-veined Michael Madsen as cowboys, Kurt Russell as a producer (and narrator), stuntwoman Zoe Bell as his wife; there’s even Bruce’s daughter Rumer Willis and Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn, as Manson cultists. Leo, of course, did DJANGO, and even Pitt has crossed paths with Tarantino before… remember Floyd the stoner in the Tarantino-penned TRUE ROMANCE? “Don’t conden-send me, man! Fucken kill you, man!…”

Al Pacino is producer Marvin Schwarz, who steers Dalton toward spaghetti westerns out-of-country, to build an overseas cachet and return a hero (a real life gambit that rocketed none other than Clint Eastwood to stardom); Margaret Qualley is Pussycat, a free spirit who tempts Booth to the cult; Bruce Dern is old George Spahn, who allows the Manson Family to camp at his Spahn Movie Ranch (which features in the other prime scene of the movie – Booth visiting the eerily stagnant Ranch and talking his way through the ominous female hippies to visit old George, who may be… dead? prisoner? worse?…)

Martial artist Mike Moh plays Bruce Lee (during his Kato period in THE GREEN HORNET), comparing dick size with Cliff Booth on the set of a movie. Booth ends up getting kicked off the set for beating up Lee. Now that’s just wrong. No matter how funny or artistic license the scene is – no one beats up Bruce Lee!

Rare picture of Bruce Lee at one of his Fight Club meets.

The primo performance in this movie is Leo. His Dalton looks haggard, old, he’s coughing, smoking, clearing his throat, he has a slight stutter (which is beautifully played by DiCaprio, not as a full-blown “b-b-b-but” type of impediment, but an occasional slight hesitation when he is talking to people in uncomfortable situations), his usually pretty eyes are bloodshot with lack of sleep, but also with the knowledge that every hour he rests is one less hour he is spending trying to stay on top of a profession which is leaving him in its wake. Though he’s starred in his share of TV serials, his confidence as a viable leading man is waning, because he cannot get the breaks to transition to the big screen, (like Steve McQueen and other contemporaries).

On the cusp of a new decade, Dalton feels aged and used up, realizing the movie industry is No Country for Old Men. And we are in the fibers of his being and suffering with his soul through his existential crisis. And I personally feel every bladed inch of his anxiety; that character – is ME. And I’m guessing a lot of YOU as well…

His crisis is brought to a head when he meets a precocious little girl on set (an outstanding performance by young Julia Butters, who is reading a book where the hero feels the world has moved on without him. Dalton confesses “I’m more useless every day,” and breaks down in tears in front of her.

Tarantino is transmitting directly into my darkest limbic fluids, that place where hope goes to die, my sunken place…

While Dalton is Acting The Shit out of his angst, Pitt’s Booth – also in the autumn of his career – comes across as still vital and more in touch with his previous power. He seems happy to flit from one odd job to the next, always the faithful second banana to Dalton, his stuntman skills serving him well in street fights, drifting, and taking life on the chin; in essence, DiCaprio has the meatier role, while Pitt has the meat.

“I’m having such a good time doing nothing in this movie.”

The Rolling Stones’ Out Of Time drives us into the third act, and I found myself wondering why I was not gripped around the throat yet, which is the usual modus operandi for Tarantino films at this late stage. Also, besides Dalton and Cobb starting a new life chapter, eyes are back on Tate, and no one will fault me for thinking the Stones song is a harbinger of her doom, “Baby baby baby – you’re out of time…” (hinting that her time is up soon?). Not only that, Russell’s narration describes the people who would be the real life Manson victims moving in next door with Tate – but in this movie, they do NOT meet a tragic end, and are therefore useless to this movie’s plot, yet the narration continues this red herring throughline! Looking back on it, I’m actually getting annoyed. Technicians and actors spent days, weeks on these scenes; editors, lighting, costumes, et al, only to have this thread completely dropped when the Manson Family – led by the real life character “Tex” (Austin Butler) – skulked up Cielo Drive to start the mayhem. And Tarantino cut out all Tim Roth’s scenes for that non sequitur garbage?!

Maybe Tarantino is right, when he says he only has 10 films in him. In this penultimate one, he is finding it hard to clear his own high bar; his own legacy of leaving us breathless for weeks, months, years after viewing his iconoclastic product. Besides the compelling performance from Leo and the mantastic muscle of Pitt, this film wasted more time meandering up and down the Hollywood Hills than idiot tourists searching for the Hollywood sign.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, “The 9^th Film from Quentin Tarantino,” definitely ends with a bang not a whimper, which flavors our exit libido, however, do we allow Quentin to skate on the body of the film being “merely great,” or do we insist on nothing less than gripping from film start to final frame?

We await Quentin’s 10^th, insisting on, and anticipating, the latter…

END

Deus Ex Magica.

Arbitrary magic. The last resort of bad storytelling. When Magic has no limits, when it works here but doesn’t work there, when it is employed as deus ex machina here, then forgotten there, just throw out the story and start again, because you’ve obviously written yourself into an illogical corner – and now you get to call it a “kids’ story” as blanket excuse for thoughtless writing.

KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS is meant to be an inspirational journey, the quest of a young Japanese boy to find his father’s mystical armor, to defend himself against his pursuing grandfather, but – like any story driven by arbitrary magic – this technically brilliant stop-motion animated adventure ends up merely a pointless quest where no one needed to leave home.

Pity, since the tale started auspiciously, with a Japanese woman in a small boat, adrift in a stormy ocean. Head bowed, she slings a shamisen – a Japanese instrument like a three-stringed banjo. She wears a red backpack. A boy’s narration informs us, “Pay careful attention to everything you see and hear, no matter how unusual it may seem…” (Oooh, it’s going to be an intriguing mystery like THE PRESTIGE or maybe a twisted thriller like INCEPTION or MEMENTO!) A giant wave threatens to crash over her boat. The woman raises her arm and strums the shamisen – and cuts the wave in two. It is awe-inspiring. It is Magic. We accept this, taking it she is a powerful sorcerer, or that the instrument is magic. But then… A wave rises up behind her and topples the boat. (Uh, you just used  magic to cut that other wave. Why not–? Onward…) She is washed ashore, wounded. A distance away, we hear crying from her backpack. Again we are touched with emotion as we see the courage of a wounded mother, struggling across the sand, to be with her baby at any cost. Excellent. Then more narration: “If you forget what I tell you, even for an instant, then our hero will surely perish.”

As it turns out, none of this is pertinent. Because – magic.

Young Kubo (voiced by Art Parkinson), now living with his debilitated mother atop a seaside cliff, frolics into town to play his magic shamisen in the square, having his origami come to life as he relates a tale that is actually the plot of this film. (From the crowd, we hear a baritone, “Oh my!” and realize George Takei is one of the characters.)

We give him a pass on all this magic, because now something else is bothering us… the accents. This is feudal Japan. And everyone – EVERYONE – is speaking with a modern American accent and vernacular. It is very off-putting, and illustrates the small-mindedness, disrespect and venality of American cinema. (I’m not expecting to see a “kids’ cartoon” in subtitles, but at least make them Japanese-toned. For those who consider that racist, consider how much more racist the current American English is.)

Then the magic starts piling up and topples the story itself: Kubo’s evil grandfather, Moon King (voiced by Ralph Fiennes), took Kubo’s eye when he was a baby (as revenge for his daughter marrying the man she was sent to kill, Hanzo), and is searching for Kubo even now to take his other eye (uh, immediately I ask: When Moonie was taking the first eye, why didn’t he just spend the time taking both? And the reason he wants both Kubo’s eyes?  So Kubo can join him in the spirit realm. Sounds mighty catholic to me. Moonie extrapolates, obviously not listening to a word he himself is saying, “While you still have that eye, Kubo, you can see all the hate and pain in the world. But if I take the eye, you can come live with me in paradise.” Well, that makes all of ZERO SENSE. Doesn’t have to: kids story.)

Moonie’s two daughters, Kubo’s aunts (voiced by Rooney Mara), are also after Kubo – they’re totally magic and appear out of nowhere, fly, make explosions, you name it. Why do they even want his eye? Like Moon King, they’re the most powerful bitches in black hats around. Kubo’s mother saves him from their attack by putting two wings on Kubo’s back so he can fly away (because – why not?) then making her own giant explosion to kill her sisters and herself (because – why not?).

So Kubo flies to a faraway deserted town, and sees a helmet hanging from a high tower. Stay with me on this, Movie Maniacs: Kubo lands, divests himself of the flying robes, then runs at the tower to try and topple the helmet with his boy-weight… Uh, YOU WERE JUST FLYING! And you saw the helmet before you landed… This is what I mean by arbitrary magic. And its contradictions within its own story.

Kubo embarks on a quest to locate the same three pieces of mystical armor that his father Hanzo sought. To defend himself against Moon King. Turns out Moonie didn’t want Hanzo finding the armor because it would make Hanzo too powerful. (So do we deduce that Hanzo – who is painted as a dead hero – was seeking ultimate power to topple the rule of the Moon King? Sounds mighty military coup to me.)

Kubo is joined on his quest by a toy-monkey-turned-real called Monkey and an insect-turned-warrior called Beetle. Monkey sounds like Sigourney Weaver (–is Charlize Theron), and Beetle sounds like George Clooney (–is Matthew McConaughey). [These spoilers ahead do not spoil the story any more than the stupidity of the story itself, wallowing as it does in arbitrary magic.]

In the film’s final act, we realize that the quest was pointless – as the spirit of Kubo’s mother was in Monkey (which means she didn’t die in that explosion), and the spirit of his father is in Beetle (who conveniently had memory loss). The family that he desired was with him all along, and the Moon King was defeated NOT by the indestructible armor, but by magic. (Who woulda guessed?!)

The finale is based around Kubo’s “Two Strings” of the title – one is a hair of his mother’s, one is his father’s bowstring, and he plucks a third from his hair to string the shamisen and then strum it at Moon King while reciting bullshit platitudes.

Writers Marc Haines, Chris Butler and Shannon Tindle must have been on a tight schedule to not step back for one second and think about the illogical events and unsustainable motivations of their characters. Animator and first-time director Travis Knight nonetheless frames the illogical story beautifully. And the stop-motion artists should be commended for creating a piece so smooth I doubted I was watching stop-motion at all, and pondered many times that it may be CGI or 3D animation rather than that veteran artisan technique. The film is filled with Japanese culture – being raped by American studios.

While we’re going cross-eyed trying to figure where the next deus ex magica will land, everyone dies, because the very last deus ex – in a film driven by arbitrary magic – must necessarily be to bring everyone back to life. Funny how Magic can bring all the supposed “good” characters back to life, but the much more potent black magic employed by the “evil” characters has somehow ceased to function for them. Like any good Japanese massage parlor – a happy ending. Happy for infants who think this is how the world works; intolerable for actual storytellers.

END

Terminator Salvation.

Today is a good day to die.
— attributed to Crazy Horse at the Battle of Little Bighorn

Every day above ground is just another day above ground.
— Poffy The Cucumber

Idiot Sarah Palin might be inclined to call him a “Death Panel.” Doctor Jack Kevorkian. If you know the name, you know the game: euthanasia, assisted suicide, mercy killing. And your mind is set one way or the other. This movie won’t change it, whichever side of the razorwire fence you’re on.

YOU DON’T KNOW JACK features Al Pacino as the good doctor (pathologist, painter, inventor, musician), detailing his right-to-life activism from his first assisted suicide patient to his eventual incarceration in Michigan in 1999.

Known as “Doctor Death” (an epithet which Kevorkian humorously embraces) Kevorkian’s credo was that he was not causing death, but ending suffering. Patients who were terminally ill or who suffered chronic pain and who REQUESTED TO COMMIT SUICIDE WITH HIS AID were compassionately helped by Kevorkian to end their suffering. If Kevorkian assessed that someone was merely clinically depressed, he declined to assist them in their requested deaths. It’s as simple as that.

Every time the phrase “saving a life” is used, we imagine it is tantamount to “preserving” that life, but Kevorkian forced modern society to raise the question, “What is life except the quality of it?”

Al Pacino gives the Armenian-American Kevorkian an accent like Frances McDormand in FARGO, but he brings his A-game, so we don’t snigger too loudly into our palms. He is aided by like-minded individuals, his sister Margo Janus (Brenda Vaccaro), civil rights activist Janet Good (Susan Sarandon) and medical lab technician Neal Nicol (John Goodman).

Danny Huston plays Kevorkian’s power lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, who won trials for Kevorkian and kept him out of jail from 1994, when he first started representing him pro bono. There is a terrifying subtext to this movie: as soon as Jack fired Fieger and tried to represent himself with a timid court-appointed attorney, he went directly to jail for eight years on second-degree murder. What does that say about the legal system that is supposedly meting out “justice”?

Written by Adam Mazer (BREACH, 2007), directed by the great Barry Levinson (whose recent work has been shaky, starting with ENVY, 2004), YOU DON’T KNOW JACK adopts a brave stance in sympathizing with Kevorkian – because an issue like euthanasia is bound to draw inculcated, ignorant and fanatic detractors.

Detractors abound in the movie, once again throwing up straw man arguments (“Are you going to kill everyone in a wheelchair?”) and irrelevancies (“Have you no religion? Have you no god?”).

Firstly, Kevorkian was not on a crusade to kill disabled people, or people who did not subscribe to his ideology (unlike the Christian Inquisition or the Christian Crusaders or the Christian Vatican), and he lamented the media and activist groups “keeping death alive” by vilifying him so simplistically; secondly, his aid to people who were cognizant of their agony had nothing to do with the mysticism of religion.

The paradox is (as Bill Maher also notes): the “christians” who supposedly believe that paradise awaits on the other side of death are the most vociferous in their attacks on the good doctor who is sending “souls” to this purported paradise. They say clinging to life is the “christian” thing to do; they say “suicide” is frowned upon by their deity; they will do anything – financially, medically, psychologically – to stay alive even though their professed “belief” is that life is merely transitionary. Shouldn’t their vitriol against Kevorkian, suicide and even murderers be negated in light of their “belief”? Yet their damnation of Kevorkian conclusively proves that at their core – none of them believe.

Either that or these snide christians just cannot abide anyone making it to paradise while they’re still stuck in this wretched existence. Which is also a case for not being very christian at all, innit? Brings another dimension to “misery loves company.”

Fieger could arrogantly keep Jack out of jail because of the technicality of how Jack performed his assisted suicides: with the patient wearing a breath mask leading to a canister of poison gas, the patient would be the person who performed the final action of opening the tube to inhale the poison gas.

Fieger even made a deal with a new D.A. – that Jack would not be bothered by the law if Jack kept a low profile. That wasn’t enough for Jack. He wanted his medical policies respected and incorporated into state laws. Not for money – he did most of his work for free. We might say, Let well enough alone – but whenever anyone is made to feel like a second class citizen, when their rights are denied, when they are shunted into darkness, when their sense of integrity is impugned, their outrage is fully justified. It’s what makes America great; so say all those who would be the first to deny inalienable rights and free speech…

Then Jack made his fatal mistake. We might think that mistake was in filming himself giving a lethal injection to a patient and then publicizing that video. Whereas previously, his hand was not the final stroke in a patient’s death, now it was – and it was on film. Courts regarded it as evidence of murder, not assisted suicide. But though that was an inadvisable action, it was not Jack’s biggest mistake. The thing that eventually got him convicted was getting rid of his lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger.

For some reason Jack believed he could represent himself in court, that he could “put the system on trial” if they could only hear his case directly from him. Apparently, he believed the only way to take the issue to the Supreme Court was to get convicted and then appeal. Canny prosecutors promptly crucified Jack Kevorkian, while Fieger watched from the sidelines, fuming and helpless.

So if you think Kevorkian’s euthanasia clashes with The Law were about actual ethics and morality and religion and humanity, instead of the juvenile stupidity of legal technicalities… you don’t know jack.

END

“Yes, Officer, third from the left. That’s the man I saw with the bloody gloves getting into the white Bronco…”

Idiotic fodder for Moon Landing conspiracy theorist idiots.

As a child in Australia, I remember seeing posters for CAPRICORN ONE: the visage of the lone, space-suited astronaut, movie title scrawled across his glare-shield. Something foreboding and sobering about that poster had me believing (as I attained full cucumberhood) that the film was one of the all-time greats, placed alongside 2001:  A SPACE ODYSSEY, or PLANET OF THE APES, or SEVEN SAMURAI; a movie that rankled sensibilities and incited societal disturbance… Upon recently viewing for the first time this insipid, miscast, paranoiac, clueless attempt at professional film-making, I now realize it would more suitably rank alongside ERNEST SCARED STUPID, or GAMERA VS. GAOS., or MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE.

The concept might have been brilliant, were it not for the dogged naïveté exhibited by the screenwriters and technical personnel, all of whom, it is patently obvious, have never even push-buttoned a blender from Wal-Mart, let alone worked or even been allowed near the fail-safe redundant systems inherent in the NASA space flight program.

Poff-Scam

A manned mission to Mars is subverted by the very organization that launches it – NASA. Apparently, the Mars capsule’s life-support system would have failed, killing the three astronauts (a boring Sam Waterston, an ineffectual James Brolin and an as-yet-unindicted O.J. Simpson). In an inspired asinine turn, instead of mathematically proving that they had the grounds to sue the vendors who created the faulty system, NASA executives decide to waste incalculable time and energy on staging a fake landing on a studio set, in order to keep receiving funding for the mission; duplicity which doesn’t rectify any problems, save any money, or justify any effort, whilst confining the astronauts against their will, away from the public, for the duration of the “mission.”

The ruse goes swimmingly – with Earth’s media actually buying the fakery, which begs a treatise on stupidity at least as extensive as an Encyclopedia Britannica 24-volume set – until the returning Mars rocket explodes on re-entry and NASA realizes that, in order to continue the ruse, the astronauts have to “disappear” – but now NASA’s going to kill them themselves! ‘Twould be bittersweet irony if it weren’t so damn retarded.

The underlying motive behind all government collusion of this ilk is that massive profits be gleaned from the deception. But even with the aforementioned funding, the cover-up costs alone for such a slipshod conspiracy’s execution would far outweigh any reimbursement brought about by legal income. And that’s considering that the cover-up was a success – the fake mission itself was so sophomorically staged that it could’ve been picked apart by any first-year actor pretending to be a lawyer in any court of law at any time.

Writer-Director Peter Hyams‘s story-telling incompetence is astounding to behold: to fool the whole flight-ops crew and the media into believing the mission is underway, the conspirators “replay the radio transmissions of the astronauts’ recorded trial runs over the intercom.” Would this fool anyone remotely cognizant of human communication, let alone every single veteran technician in constant contact with the Mars spacecraft? Hyams likes to think we’re stupid enough to believe so. Hal Holbrook (as the NASA executive helming the conspiracy) almost seems embarrassed when he voices this idiocy.

Conspiracy Theorists must have thrown a week-long booze-up when this movie hit cinemas, cries of “We told you so!” reverberating off their Lonely-Guy hobbit-hole walls, postered with tech specs, affidavits, diagrams and blurry photos all “proving” that the Moon landings were faked as well.

Hyams’s decision to place NASA – one of the few truly respected, sorely under-funded, genuinely intellectually adroit institutions on Earth – at the heart of this conspiracy is defamation of the highest degree. And then (like the Moon-Fakers) to afford them not one jot of respect, by performing exactly zilch amount of research in the field of manned space missions. Technical malfeasance is elevated to art, as scene after scene insults audience intelligence by trying to sneak in any budget generic hardware or scenery or gadget that looks “scientific” and by sprinkling the dialogue with any technical terms that sound scientific to further the ill-contrived illusion. Trust me – it’s all bogus. There is no single area where one can begin to effectively critique the lack of dedication towards any kind of plausibility which would lever this film above that of cack wedged between the treads of my shoe.

Intermittent snappy dialogue between Elliott Gould (when he was still a leading man) and cross-eyed Karen Black is the only respite in a film overburdened with superfluous dialogue (OJ Simpson talking to himself as he collapses in the desert), pointless dialogue (“I’m four steps from the bottom, I’m three steps from the bottom, I’m two steps from the bottom,” as a crewman descends to the “Martian” surface), and downright idiotic dialogue (Telly Savalas‘s opening lines, and all the “technical” claptrap).

The most dangerous aspect of a hideously-deformed piece of trash like this film is the overwhelming sludge of misinformation it purveys. Use the time you would have wasted on this movie reading a book by Carl Sagan or Richard P. Feynman. Not only will you be more entertained – ya might jess learn yaself sumpin’. 

END