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

Eight is Enough to fill our hearts with dingus.

THE THING meets CAPTAIN RON. And all Snake Plissken breaks loose.

Wyoming. Post-Civil War. At a snowbound outpost, eight strangers must survive the stormy night. And each other.

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino‘s THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a slow burn; a firecracker waiting to be ignited in a nunnery. Unlike many of his films, we are not bled with anxiety in the first scenes. It can be said this is Tarantino’s first linear plotline. Or is it?

MungaPoff

This eighth film by the master of mayhem is styled along the lines of the master of mystery, Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945) and TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1965), and, due to the snow and Kurt Russell, holds more than a little resemblance to John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982). Or does it?

Isolated strangers, hidden agendas, mysterious deaths. The Tarantino fan – and the casual Western buff or thriller buff – must wait a good way into the film to discover it is one big ulterior motive waiting to happen. Or is it?– Okay, that’s enough of that. Just asking contrary questions doesn’t create tension, y’know… Or does it?

Opening scene finds bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell, sporting a mustache that is more mungabush than handlebar) as he dashes through the snow in a stagecoach, headed for the town of Red Rock, racing a storm, with his cuffed bounty, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh in a primal, dangerous-funny role). Ruth aims to see her hang and collect his $10,000 reward. They are stopped by a stranger in the street sitting on a pile of dead bodies – Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), another bounty hunter who is begrudgingly allowed to share Ruth’s expensive coach. Soon they come upon yet another strandling in the snow, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be the new Sheriff of Red Rock, in transit to his new post, without a badge or official paperwork yet. John Ruth trusts no one – not while he’s chained to a $10K bounty that others might kill for – yet he lets Mannix aboard on the indisputable logic that “If you want to collect your bounty in Red Rock, I’m the one that’s gotta pay you!”

Sam Elliott’s mustache called Kurt’s mustache,
and told it to dial down to a 7.

Forced to stop at a way station called Minnie’s Haberdashery, to let the storm blow over, these four strangers encounter four more stranded strangers in transit: the hangman of Red Rock, Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a cowpuncher writing his autobiography (Michael Madsen), a Confederate General looking for his son (Bruce Dern), and Bob the caretaker (Demian Bishir), who says he is taking care of the place while Minnie is on vacation.

Even at this point, there is still none of that characteristic Tarantino tension. And the dialogue is not up to par with Tarantino’s usual repartee that keeps us glued to our seats through Nothing Happening (foot massage from PULP FICTION, Superman’s idea of humanity from KILL BILL VOL 2, et al). The strangers are somehow all linked in tenuous ways, and though John Ruth blusters his way around the tavern, eking out everyone’s motivation on the pretense of knowing who his mustache is spending the night with (while getting everyone’s backstory exposited for screenplay purposes), we find ourselves almost anxiety-ridden that there IS no anxiety.

Then comes Chapter Four.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is told in Six Chapters (starting with Last Stage to Red Rock), and in Chapter Four (Domergue’s Got a Secret), something dark starts to rise like a shadow in a corner. As introduction to this Chapter, we hear Tarantino himself in voiceover – like a storyteller – detailing a plot point that only one character sees (even we the audience did not see it). It’s strange, it breaks filmmaking rules, but we are home! Coming out of nowhere as it does, it disorients us – yet we suddenly feel that Tarantino paranoia embrace us like a lost lover…

Tarantino has become such a force in movies for contravening convention so fearlessly. Only to create new conventions that others adopt in their filmmaking vernacular. Or he uses techniques that have fallen out of favor, like his penchant for cartoonish titles showing character names or information; techniques that have become such staples in hip movies nowadays that a younger viewer might easily mistake Tarantino for copying his own copycats. So though we titter for the voiceover’s obvious invasiveness, it gives the movie Tarantino’s unique stamp. They’ll be copying this raw invasiveness soon enough…

Suddenly – like piano wire tightening around our throats – everything gets slanted, everyone becomes a suspect, everywhere is a big black dingus.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is filled with all the tiny details that make a good film great. Firstly, it is shot “in glorious 70mm.” (Ultra Panavision widescreen filmstock that hardly exists in reality. Tarantino’s DP, Robert Richardson, tells us this is only the 11th feature made on Ultra Panavision.) It was Tarantino’s recurring descriptive in his script notes, and not so much a detail, as an overarching ethos. Tarantino wanted to isolate his cast and crew to ensconce them in 1800’s frontier survival mode. Even though only a few moments capture the breadth of the exterior snowbound vistas, we’re told the interior cabin shots are also out there. The indoors was in fact outdoors.

Details like hammering two boards on the front door to shut out the raging tempest. Why not just one board? Authenticity. The amount of time spent for characters to hammer two boards into the front door every time someone kicks it in to enter the cabin, is enough to get you drunk if you’re playing the drinking game.

Details like hat brims: Jackson’s character is in Bichir’s face, shouting at him. Their hat brims touch. But then Jackson moves into Bichir’s personal space – signified by their hat brims starting to overlap, as Jackson’s slides under Bichir’s and inches closer. Excellent.

Details like Jackson’s lascivious story describing what a freezing man did for a warm blanket, revolving around what he terms alternately his “big black pecker,” “big black johnson” and – wait for it! – his “warm black dingus.”

Details like the Lincoln Letter: A key element that opens doors for African-American bounty hunter Major Warren. Until Mannix smirks, “The nigger in the stable has a letter from Abraham Lincoln?!” the phrasing of which tells us why he must carry that letter.

Details like nigger: Yes, Tarantino’s characters have no compunction blurting his second favorite word. With Tim Roth putting British spin on it, “…my Nubian friend…” Activist groups get another chance to feel relevant as they twitter their faux-outrage…

And this is not a detail – but a coup: composer Ennio Morricone! Whereas Tarantino has used this giant’s soundtrack music in previous films, (KILL BILL, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, DJANGO UNCHAINED), at last he hires the man himself – 89-year-old master of Westernized Mexican music – Ennio Morricone!

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is not structured to convention. You will find no character that arcs or finds redemption. None do, and no one does. Like the best bucking of convention, the galloping story subsumes the subtexts. By Chapter Five: The Four Passengers, the stagecoach is running off the rails. And we pray to a non-existent god that when it ramps over a cliff, we can keep our crotches safe.

Strangely enough, though Jackson, Madsen and Roth are Tarantino veterans, though Leigh ravages the screen with her savagery, though Dern is an old seadog, though Kurt’s mustache is ten times the badger it was in TOMBSTONE, this movie belongs to – Walton Goggins!

Walton Goggins, perennial creepy-guy character actor (Steve Buscemi-adjacent), a Junior Bruce Dern – here sharing scenes with ACTUAL Bruce Dern, and blossoming as we watch him! He’s been co-star on series like JUSTIFIED and SONS OF ANARCHY, but never red meat like this primo role. Though one of the B-characters, he grabs the reins like an A-Lister and steals the show. He’s at first goofy, then steadfast, and comes out damn righteous. Tarantino had to cast someone who could emerge from amongst the stellar ensemble to shoulder the denouement, and after Goggins’s small, unimpressive turn in Tarantino’s DJANGO, it’s pleasantly surprising that he was chosen to carry this beast to its intriguing conclusion.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is intelligent, well-paced, gory and mungabush. Enough to fill our hearts with dread. Or a big black dingus.

END

Once Upon a Black Time in the White West.

Whiteys: 0. Niggers: 1

Quentin Tarantino, as he did with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009), once again punches history in the face and rewrites the underdog as the alpha dog in DJANGO UNCHAINED. And says nigger a lot.

DJANGO UNCHAINED throws that word at us in such forceful abandon that it becomes hilarious to hear from the mouths of rednecks and high society alike; a grim reminder of the times (1858, two years before the American Civil War), when even the educated elite were conditioned to call African slaves niggers, not as pejorative or juvenile display of superiority, but as reference.

Rock solid Jamie Foxx is slave Django, liberated from a slave gang by dentist/bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (eternally mesmeric Christoph Waltz), at first to help King identify a bounty kill, then going Marvel Team-Up to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was sold to a dandy Mississippi plantation owner, Kandie (a very sinister Leonardo DiCaprio).

As with all Tarantino films, the movie MAKING sells it, not so much the simple buddy/road-movie plot, which is once again littered with audacious coincidences and maddeningly convenient plot points. Tarantino’s signature compelling vignettes still litter the celluloid, the hip dialogue as ferocious as the bullet-fests, yet of all Tarantino’s oeuvre, DJANGO stands apart as arguably his first film that can neatly be sliced into three acts.

The acts are split into comedy, drama and violence. First act finds Django and King bonding on bounty kills, second act is the Long Con, and third act is all Foxx, hero angles, hero bloodshed, and hero slomo.

Act I, we meet heavily-drawling Don Johnson as plantation owner Big Daddy, replete with Colonel Sanders goatee, imperious white suit and finger-lickin’ necktie; Django posing as a “free man,” the plantation slaves so inculcated in perceiving black men as slaves that Big Daddy must instruct them on how to treat Django – “like a white man” – which flabbergasts them; and a wildly-miscast Jonah Hill, arguing with fellow Klan members over the eye-holes in their hoods being constrictive to their vision, like a Python sketch.

Act II is the Long Con, the most intense psychodrama sequence, where Tarantino sets up his beautiful dangerous tableaus: Django posing as a black slave trader (“lower than a house nigger”), he and King masquerading to Kandie as business partners seeking new talent for “mandingo fighting,” a whitey bloodsport pitting black against black to the death (broken arms, hammers to the head and other such whimsy). They attempt to buy Django’s wife from Kandie, on the pretense they would be investing thousands more buying mandingoes. When the ruse is uncovered – by the lowly “house nigger” – and Kandie brings out his father’s skull, we just know we’re in for some sweet Tarantino mindfuck dialoguing. And who is the house nigger? None other than Samuel L. Jackson; a wonder how he pulls off a role alternately so funny and so slimy.

Second act wraps with wild gunfire, dodging impossible hails of bullets, gouts of blood spurting in bucketfuls, each death an art statement, human entrails exploding in fiery red fountains… It’s classic Tarantino by way of Sam Peckinpah and early John Woo, with better technology, ergo better gratuitous gore. That’s why we love him. We also love Tarantino for his brazen deus ex machinae  that always seem as natural as spitting blood after being shot in the lung. But in DJANGO, for the first time – Tarantino fails to make it seem natural…

It is in these impossibly tense Kandie sequences that all Tarantino’s storytelling errors are made: firstly, King could have avoided Kandie’s revenge with one simple lie (that he bedded Broomhilda); secondly, King is outfitted with guns hidden up his forearms (TAXI-DRIVER-style) and opts not to go out blazing; thirdly, Django is saved at the annoyingly last minute by the person who hates him most, the house nigger. And he is sent on a cross-country trek with infinite opportunities to escape, like a 1960’s Batman episode. A jaw-dropping display of lazy screenwriting.

In BASTERDS, Waltz played someone so demonic, his every innocuous gesture contained menace, his every courteous word laced with arsenic and occluded intent. In DJANGO, Waltz is still lucid, ruthless, merciless (and it’s incongruously hilarious hearing him say nigger in that Germanic brogue) – but this time, he’s on our side. Here, Leo is The Christoph Waltz, teetering on a tightrope of volcanic eruption and insatiable violence, his beatific smile masking a sociopathic nihilism. And boy does he love saying nigger. Walton Goggins is a crazy-eyed Kandie ranch-hand (the guy you call when Steve Buscemi is unavailable) and the most comfortable having nigger in his redneck vernacular. But the movie is Foxx’s, to have and to hold. And he’s the only one who can say nigger with any conviction and impunity.

Act III is Jamie Foxx Unchained. Who would’ve thought Wanda would end up such a big brutal star?

On his trek to the Batman prison with three other caged slaves (minded by Tarantino in a jailer cameo with an atrocious Australian accent), Django, in his overbearing confidence, spins a tale to free himself, spitting at his dubious captors, “Do I talk like a slave?” (An excellent line, reminding us that though most slaves must have been cowed into obeisance, there must have been men among them who yet held their heads high enough to rise above the physical and psychological cowing of Whitey, otherwise Lincoln and his cronies would never have thought it morally reprehensible to keep these men captive.) After a brutally quick shootout with his captors, Django rides off armed to the teeth on an unsaddled horse, and one of the caged slaves watches him, the hint of a smile on his face. That smile, edged with tears, is a hammerblow button to this scene. It’s like the slave was looking at everything the black man could be; like he was looking at the revolution right there; witness to the beginning of the rising up from underfoot. Unwritten history written all over his face…

UNCHAINED is another Tarantino thunderball. Though based in an historical period, it unapologetically blazes outside the arc of history. Its lead character is an anomaly – Django is not just a rebel slave, he doesn’t even consider himself an underdog. It is not in his vernacular; he holds an intrinsic belief that he *is* superior to his captors, an aspect that was literally beaten and bred out of generations of Africans.

Tarantino had to field a slew of interviews to justify why his characters said nigger so much. (Why do you idiots focus on that one word? Is anyone hearing Waltz mention Alexandre Dumas to Leo, who coincidentally played THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK? Is anyone hearing the authentically Western soundtrack that contains numerous Ennio Morricone compositions, including themes from TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA? Is anyone commending QT for alluding to Wagner’s Brünnhilde?)

And here’s the thing: even though writer-director Tarantino set DJANGO during slavery and feels justified in sprinkling n-words like glitter, the tale of the unbound slave-turned-bounty hunter is hyper-realism – it’s not meant to be a documentary or authentic representation of the era – so Tarantino could have opted to be more niggardly with the “niggers.” But – as we discovered in PULP FICTION – QT just loooves dropping that bomb… I think it’s a case of just liking the way the word sounds, like “fuck.”

Like fuck, it drops like a ball-peen hammer every time you hear it. It never gets old and it never wears thin. Like fuck, it is all-purpose, can be used in any context, to friend or foe, to black or white, for stop or go. Could it be that modern Whitey guilt just doesn’t like admitting how blasé and passe the derogation was back then? That, just like rewriting “Mark Twain” and Republicans’ disavowal of slavery, they don’t want such a harsh light shone on their past cowardly White-nited States of America?

Once again, the purveyors of the message are attacked, instead of the message being heard. When I state that the Pope and his cronies fuck boys, it’s me who gets vilified for saying “fuck.” (What would you prefer I say – making love?) Do you critics think the actual crime/sin of fucking boys can be overlooked simply because you turn your hypocritical derision to the people who are calling it what it is?

Nigger, please!

END

Bridal Power.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
— William Congreve, “The Mourning Bride” (1697).

The second installment of Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL masterpiece blasts in with “Chapter Six”– Yes, a movie starting at Chapter Six is audacious enough, but this chapter itself is a flashback to the events that engined the revenge of VOLUME 1 – the previous film. Audacity, genius, or insanity?

chapter six: massacre at two pines

DAUGHTER TO THE SLAUGHTER! Assassin Beatrix Kiddo aka The Bride (Uma Thurman) attends her wedding rehearsal with her redneck fiancé (who looks like Bobcat Goldthwait) at Two Pines Chapel, when Bill (David Carradine) unexpectedly appears. We learn, though cryptic dialogue, that Bill is the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which The Bride was a member, that he is The Bride’s ex-lover, and that the baby she is gravid with is his. To Bobcat, she introduces Bill as her father (and we see a “surprised” look cross Carradine’s face that is simultaneously hilarious and a testament to his acting prowess).

Then the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (Michael Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah) enters the chapel and guns down everyone.

With this wedding, The Bride aka Black Mamba wanted out of the Squad, but, like all assassins, her boss would not let her leave with her life.

And KILL BILL VOLUME 2 continues its mad dash for gory…

chapter seven: the lonely grave of paula shultz

ANOTHER NAIL… Flashforward from the end of Chapter 1 in the last film. Keeping up, pagans? Having disposed of O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Fox, The Bride goes after Budd aka Sidewinder (Madsen)–

And I have a problem with her method.

After all her expertise, after knowing her wily enemy, after all the skulking to deal a death blow efficiently, she stupidly flings his trailer door open and rushes headlong into a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Quentin, you do us an injustice! Are we to believe The Bride could be that girly-silly? Further, Budd does not simply shoot her dead, but buries her alive in the manner of a Batman villain. Will she escape? Doi…

chapter eight: the cruel tutelage of pai mei

COCKY CHOP SOCKY! Flashback to The Bride’s training by an overcheesed Chinese sensei ripped from the reels of old kung fu cinema. Master Pai Mei is Chia Hui Liu (he played Johnny Mo in VOLUME 1!) so it’s quite laughably obvious he is a young guy with old guy makeup. But with Liu’s eccentric, sarcastic performance, the audacity works!

Tarantino leaches and grains the filmstock to make it look like those trashy 1970’s kung fu films; wirework, superhuman disciplines and Pai Mei’s cruel swishing of his footlong beard.

chapter nine: elle and i

EYE-EYE! The Bride takes one step closer to Bill by meeting the eye-patched Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) head-on. Here again we marvel at fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s inventiveness, as what could have been just another samurai fight is transformed into a scrabbling, punching, trash-filled mêlée in the confined space of Budd’s trailer. Elle continually tries to unsheathe her sword and bangs it on the roof and walls, while the camera itself seems to fight for space to film the hand-to-hand blonde-on-blonde. And we eventually “see” the pun in the title of this chapter…

last chapter: face to face

KILLING BILL. The Bride has come a long way for just this vengeful, bloody moment and finds – her daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), thought dead, happily playing with Bill.

And before we can forget that Tarantino is the master of making mundane dialogue sound compelling and nerve-wracking, Bill launches into monologue after monologue. He speaks of B.B.’s goldfish, he speaks of Superman being the real identity and Clark Kent being the disguise, he speaks of his love for The Bride, yet everything he says in that measured rasp is like winding a spring tighter until it threatens to explode in your face. (We even get a quick, darkly funny flashback to The Bride discovering her pregnancy – just as an assassin has tracked her down. The dialogue in this scene is bravura not only for Tarantino’s writing but for the actors pulling it off so convincingly.) We wonder whether Bill isn’t speaking so much because he knows a reckoning is imminent and that one of them is going to die tonight, so wishes to prolong his time with the woman he obviously loves, but whom he must kill out of principle or be killed out of principle.

After the massive fight sequence with the Crazy 88s in VOLUME 1, we wondered how Tarantino and Woo-Ping could top each successive fight scene. They did. It was not a case of escalating the violence, but moving it in different directions. Unlike the STAR WARS saga, where Lucas and his choreographers kept repeating themselves (see one lightsaber battle, seen ’em all – even poor Yoda got boring with his dynamic ghetto moves), Tarantino and Woo-Ping never rehash the same old moves. As Elle’s fight was an ingenious closed quarters brawl, The Bride and Bill’s last pitched battle is fought with katanas and hands and the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique (ain’t the language just beautiful?!) – while sitting in chairs!

Like Leone on heat, like Kurosawa on angel dust, like an American pioneer, like a Japanese traditionalist, the KILL BILL saga proves there is only one person who makes movies – like Quentin Tarantino.

END

Revenge is a Bumblebee.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.
— opening text, KILL BILL, VOL. 1

Something about Uma Thurman in her yellow and black top-to-toe leather, lopping limbs and severing arteries – how hot is that?!

Quentin Tarantino writes and directs KILL BILL VOLUME 1, an epic masterpiece of simple brutal story, brutally vicious direction, viciously creative dismemberment, and revenge as cold as liquid nitrogen.

Tarantino once again defies modern movie convention and structures KILL BILL not in Three Acts but in two whole movies, this VOLUME 1 made up of five chapters of dynamite keg vignettes. And, sticking to his own inimitable convention, each of the Chapters hits the ground running like a reservoir dog.

We are told the KILL BILL epic is “Based on the character of The Bride, created by Q & U.” That would be Quentin and Uma. This was the period in Tarantino’s life when he was infatuated with Thurman, calling her his “muse”; and why wouldn’t he be? Uma possesses that intangible inclination to sometimes look like a man with her big nose and strange lips, yet throughout this rambling saga, she is absolutely beautiful – and my summation of why may not sit with most men; it is because she never tries to be feminine or sexy or alluring – most of the time she is covered in blood, mucus, sweat, grime, snow, water; she is intense, threatening, sarcastic, haughty, baleful, desolate, determined. Never weak. Never dependent. Never “feminine.” So hot.

chapter one: 2

CATFIGHT! Girl on girl violence between Thurman as a vengeful warrior known as The Bride (although her actual character name is purposefully bleeped out) and Vivica A. Fox as Vernita, her opponent from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. We do not realize until the end of this sequence why the Chapter is called ‘2.’ Before she drives off, Uma crosses Vernita’s name off a list – it is the second name crossed off. The first name already crossed off is “O-Ren Ishii.” True to non-chrono form, Tarantino has dropped us somewhere in the middle of his movie and half the fun is in putting the jigsaw together while his crazy train is going off the rails.

chapter two: the blood splattered bride

MASSACRE! A wedding chapel in El Paso, Texas; a heavily-pregnant bride (Thurman) left for dead. Four Years Later, this Bride wakes from a coma in a hospital bed, just in time to stave off another unconscious rape from one of intern Buck’s paying customers. She makes off with Buck’s “Pussy Wagon.” (“You know that I ain’t braggin’ / She’s a real pussy wagon – greased lightning!”… Greased Lightning, from GREASE, 1978.) He won’t need it anymore on accounta her thoughtful crushing of his head in a hospital door.

Though we still do not know exactly what is going on (except that The Bride is out for revenge on the people who “killed” her), Tarantino has an uncanny knack of keeping his films kinetic with his gunslinger direction and eclectic soundtrack. Every element of the film works in concert to create a perception of immediacy, of wanting to be a part of this hip, cool animal; there is narration, there are flashbacks and flash-forwards; there are split frames and crafty reveals; there are Eastern musical motifs overlaid with Western rock, and suddenly–

Delicious Vicious, Frantic Romantic.

A brazen thug-fest, played like an adventure story for boys.

Tony Scott (TOP GUN, DAYS OF THUNDER) directs TRUE ROMANCE, but it’s got Quentin Tarantino‘s stank all over it – delicious dialogue juggled with vicious gun play. Though Tarantino is listed only as “writer,” TRUE ROMANCE seems to be the middle child of what could be construed his breakout trilogy, bookended by RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) and PULP FICTION (1994). A middle child just as misfit and misbehaved as its two outer siblings.

Comics/kung fu geek Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) marries naif hooker Alabama (Patricia Arquette) after just one night of molesting her mungus ta-tas, and resolves to rescue her from debauchery and bad people (which is somewhat ironic, considering he uses a big shiny gun to do so.) Cross country to The City of Angels they flee, with $5 million in cocaine that Clarence unwittingly steals from Alabama’s pimp after a Very Serious Shootout.

So begins a series of vicious vignettes, featuring a smorgasboard of delicious cameos. Dreadlocked Gary Oldman is Alabama’s pimp Drexl, more nigga than wigga (“He musta thought it was White Boy Day!”); diabolical Christopher Walken is unstoppable mob boss, Mr. Coccotti, who slams up against the immovable force of Clarence’s working class father (Dennis Hopper) in the most intense genealogical examination of “the nigger gene” this side of a Klan rally; James Gandolfini is – what else? – a hitman, which would inform his own breakout role soon enough in THE SOPRANOS; Brad Pitt, hilarious in a tiny stoner role; Michael Rappaport is Clarence’s bad actor buddy who just landed a role on T.J. HOOKER (Clarence: “You get to meet Captain Kirk!”); Val Kilmer as Clarence’s inner Elvis monologue.

If ever there was a dialogue-driven scene for aspiring young actors to hone your emotive palette, grab the few pages of Hopper and Walken. If you can pull off the galaxy of nuance between those two acting leviathans seemingly jovially discussing telltale signs of lying and eggplants, yet with the undercurrent of lives in the balance, you’re ready. Call William Morris.

Honorable mentions to Bronson Pinchot (with sweater tied around neck, like he is part of a Country Club who is embarrassed to admit he is a member) as a director’s go-fer, misrepresenting himself as only those whom Country Clubs repudiate can; and Saul Rubinek as the esteemed Hollywood director so egotistic he believes he can have someone killed if they cut him off on the highway.

With the uplifting music of Hans Zimmer sparkling the savage storyline, TRUE ROMANCE is a paean to youth and freedom and impulsiveness and righteous wrongdoing, oozing that insouciant hipness that Tarantino does so effortlessly. And yes, it all leads to that Tarantino trademark of everyone pointing a gun at everyone else.

True love is so much more romantic when hookers and drugs and guns are involved.

END

Gloriously Bastardly.

Quentin Tarantino loves cinema. Even the characters in his movies talk cinema. And the ones who aren’t talking cinema still seem to realize they’re in a damn fine piece of it. And the major plot point of Tarantino’s latest cinematic masterpiece, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, revolves around the screening of a movie!

The Bear Cuke Jew

Tarantino knows cinema so intimately, he smashes a conglomeration of styles together to arrive at BASTERDS; we could trace the lineage of Kurosawa, Woo, Hitchcock and Leone, but unless you’re a film scholar with your hand down your pants, you just wanna get to the Jewish ultra-violence.

That’s where Brad Pitt comes in. As half-breed hillbilly Apache Aldo Raine, he recruits vengeful Jews during Hitler’s Holocaust and takes the fight to the Germans. His mission: “killin’ Natzees.” Ambushing, scalping, mutilating, baseball-batting… terrorizing. These blood-mad Jews become known as “The Basterds.” Their ultimate plan involves strapping bombs to themselves and blowing themselves up in a cinema packed with Nazi high command, including Hitler (Martin Wuttke) and his Minister for Propaganda, Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who was also a real life film producer (leave it to Tarantino to uncover that nugget).

But Pitt is here purely for marquee muscle. His screentime is minimal. And though he puts in a fine performance, impressing us with how long he can hold that constipation face, he does little else, except spouting a few lines of dialogue which are far from Tarantino’s most luscious work, trying to perfect a redneck drawl that sounds like it’s coming from a guy who’s making a constipation face.

This movie belongs to Christoph Waltz.

As SS officer Hans Landa, “The Jew Hunter,” Waltz’s chilling performance will make your testicles shrivel. Every foreboding appearance he makes as the death-dealing interrogator makes your sphincter tremble in fear. Landa knows when you’re lying. And even if you’re not, you feel like you are. Because you probably are. It is such a fearsome tour de force of fatal charisma and nerve-wracking trepidation, it’s like Waltz did all his acting training with Goebbels.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is unconventionally structured, in Four Chapters, four tenuously linked storylines eventually intertwining for the payoff. And what a payoff! A catharsis for Jewdom. DEFIANCE (2008) showed us Jews who actually fought back during World War II, in a story Inspired By Fact. But writer-director Tarantino, unbound by facts, rewrites history without any compunction (let’s face it, like every American war movie about Viet Nam, Korea, WWII, only without pretending historical authenticity) and takes his WWII fantasy to a level that can only be described (by producer Lawrence Bender) as “a Jewish wet dream.”

It’s the Nazis who burn now, not the Jews; it’s the Nazis whose flesh is marked by the Jews as a sign of contempt; it’s the Nazis who tremble at the brutality of the Jew “basterds.”

Movie opens like a Leone western, officer Landa inviting himself into a desolate farmhouse of a poor farmer and his trembling daughters. He is looking for Jews that the farmer might be hiding. The tension that follows is like the best of Leone, hard closeups of the two faces and master shots that never budge. We are so gripped by the movie in these opening minutes and into the following Chapters, we never even realize its unconventional structure. Proving that good story wins out every time over a Hollywood system atrophying in its glossy rut.

It’s like four TWILIGHT ZONE vignettes strung together; every time the screen goes to black to end a Chapter, we find ourselves exhaling in relief and needing a neck massage from a nude female provider slash dancer. And as every new Chapter opens, we are thrust spittle-mouthed and unbreathing into the tension-driven second act of something that started before we arrived. It’s Total Tarantino.

In the Chapter “A German Night In Paris” we are introduced to Mélanie Laurent, who plays Shoshanna, doing Clint Eastwood as a sexy French, blond, green-eyed avenger. (This is what Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint, should have become, instead of the C-Movie junkie she ended up as.)

Eli Roth is Donnie Donowitz, “The Bear Jew,” who gets his kicks beating Germans to death with a baseball bat. (Roth is the writer-director of HOSTEL, 2005 – any wonder he loves the ultra-violence? In a German interview, when asked to justify his character’s bloodthirstiness, he was outraged, “This movie is nothing but magic tricks, but your grandparents turned my ancestors into furniture! Into lamp shades!”)

The characterizations are formidable, each actor embodying the French and German and British characters they play. Noteworthy is August Diehl (as Major Hellstrom), another German-born actor, who – like Karl-Otto Alberty and Anton Diffring before him – scares the hell out of us like a real life Gestapo officer.

I think this might be the first time I noticed the power and prowess of German-born Michael Fassbender. (He was Spartan warrior Stelios in 300, but lost amongst the abs, and would soon go on to greater glories in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, SHAME, and beyond.) His British undercover officer Archie Hicox is a tour de force performance, square-jawed and steely-gazed, slipping effortlessly in and out of English and German. Like Fassbender, Diane Kruger is also German-born and also impresses with her effortless bi-lingual German tongue.

Being a Tarantino film, there’s bound to be a Mexican standoff, where everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else. How Tarantino arrives at this situation is the true wonder; how it all makes perfect sense by the time everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else WHY everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is that rara avis – a dialogue-driven war film more intense and exciting than any driven by pretty orange explosions.

nation’s pride

Within the film INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is Goebbels’s NATION’S PRIDE, which premieres at Shoshanna’s theater. Daniel Brühl (looking like a young Christopher Reeve) stars as “himself” Fredrick Zoller, a German hero who staved off an American advance singlehandedly by sniping from a bell tower. It’s a blackly hilarious satire on war films. (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN actually has a scene like this – from an American sniper’s point of view.)

It slots neatly with the concept that Tarantino tries to convey: that Germans are heroes too. The German commander who refuses to answer Raine and gets beaten by Bear was awarded his medal for “bravery” – proving it by dying at the bat of Bear. Message may be lost not through Tarantino’s fault, but that of his audience – because American war films and politicians have indoctrinated generations into believing all enemy combatants are quivering cowards – even if they display heroism.

In 2002, Bill Maher’s TV show, POLITICALLY INCORRECT, was cancelled because he expressed the – ahem – politically incorrect view that the terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers were anything BUT cowards. Which is true, by all definitions of American bravery. But which was blockheadedly refuted because they were enemy combatants.

the inglorious bastards

There’s a strange paradox with the misspelling of this movie’s title.

Like THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (2006), I hate misspelling for the sake of street-cred. Tarantino must know the film QUEL MALEDETTO TRENO BLINDATO (aka THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, 1978), an Italian WWII flick with a completely different plot; also called G.I. BRO, cos of star Fred Williamson’s blackness – I’m not EVEN joking. (Bo Svenson, another star of that film, plays an American colonel in Tarantino’s BASTERDS – which is either a giant coincidence or Tarantino simply flaunting his filmic erudition. Which proves he knows that film.) Is he trying to differentiate his movie from that one? Why not name his film something else? Even THE BASTARDS would have been sufficient.

So here is the paradox: Tarantino acknowledges his audience’s intelligence in many ways, not least by allowing his characters to speak in their native tongues (with subtitles), yet he simultaneously drives the intelligence quotient down by misspelling the title, for a whole generation of youngsters to be confused if this is the first time they are encountering those words. (The same kids who won’t understand the rage of the Jews against Nazi atrocities that are never shown.) Not to mention keeping that swathe of current American adults ignorant who don’t know the difference. You know, the Stoopid Basterds.

END