Well put czeskleba. That is exactly it and I was carried along with the expectation of the Tate massacre. I was so carried along and excited, saying to myself, my God this is a terrific movie. When the switch to slapstick violence occured, I just thought, oh FFS!!! Quentin pulls a swerve as you say (good term) which is at the level of dumb teenager humour. What a shame.
It's too soon to tell - and the four-hour version is still in the offing. It's certainly my favorite film of his so far. Pulp Fiction is still the movie that pops into your head when you say 'Tarantino', so that can't be taken away or changed, historically or chronologically; it will always be his breakthrough film and epitomize his cinematic approach. Hollywood is the work of a more mature filmmaker, and ought to be savored for what it is. And 'what it is' is still being hotly debated, discussed, dissected, and reviewed... so we're in a good place.
I think you're asking for Tarantino to make a different film. That's not the film he set out to make: this was a film about two struggling actors who happen to have a brush with the Mason Family, and history gets changed. Exactly. I think you can say that reality was at its core -- the music, the sights, the fashion, pop culture and so on... but it's clearly altered a bit to suit the filmmaker. I gotta say, the moment Brad Pitt gets out to Chatsworth, the whole room tilts and we realize, "oh, this is going to be a much stranger film than we initially expected." That's a huge left turn from there on, and there's such a feeling of dread from that scene, you know there's eventually going to be a payoff. The shocker for me was that every detail actually meant something: the dog food cans, the trained pitbull, Pitt knowing the family's individual names, the family knowing who Rick Dalton was, Pitt being incredibly deadly at hand-to-hand combat, DiCaprio having a working flamethrower (!!!)... I laughed for a solid minute at how outrageous the whole thing was. BTW, was anybody struck by the "Rick Dalton" poster in the driveway at DiCaprio's house? I thought for sure it was Jack Nicholson, but it wasn't: it was Dalton in kind of a Nicholson pose. You wonder if maybe Tarantino was hinting that perhaps when next-door-neighbor Roman Polanski decided to make his Chinatown movie a few years later, maybe he'd cast Dalton in the role of a tired, cynical detective working in the seedy side of 1937 LA...
He definitely enjoys F'ing with the audience, but I laughed out loud just because it was so audacious. It was almost like a tremendous joke, and I finally got it at the and. "AH! Now I see what he's done!' And I continue to say that the ending is really said and poignant and thoughtful, just because he dwells on that shot for so long with just really mundane dialogue going on as the music comes up (Maurice Jarre's "Miss Jilly Lantry" from Judge Roy Bean), which to me forces the audience to think, "wow, all these people are still alive, they're all relieved, they're happy, and maybe they'll be friends now." And I thought about how the world would've been a different place, and hopefully a better place. It's a nice fantasy to consider, and I think it's interesting that a director known for rapid-fire cuts and intense camera moves would have the courage to just hold onto a single shot for over a minute without any distractions.
When Cliff was looking down the Western street it was like a Spaghetti Western. You can hear the wind blowing, the dogs barking in the distance and at the end of the road we see George's house and a dog wonders across the street. Yeah a different vibe for sure.
It's a 'beautiful moment' in film - something we don't automatically associate with Tarantino. He has given Tate's spirit and being an alternate timeline in which she (and her unborn son) got a reprieve from dying in a house of horrors. It's a small gesture and a huge gesture at the same time, and I appreciate that Tarantino steered the narrative of this particular film this way.
Yes, well-said. It's extremely rare that Tarantino actually showed something warm and sunny and uplifting in one of his films, and you could say maybe this final shot illustrates where he is in his life at the moment.
exactly. From the get-go people were saying that this was Tarantino's first film with "heart". Once I saw it I knew exactly what they meant.
Well, anyone who wanted a more "realistic" take may enjoy the biopic of Sharon Tate that is currently being produced, according to her wiki page.
Tarantino is a lot more sensitive and sentimental than people think. I think moments like this are exactly what the audience think they are -- no more, no less, but still very calculated to get a specific emotional response. Quentin's got a lot of skill as a filmmaker, and he's said this movie took him five years to write "but 56 years to think about" (referring to his life here in the city and his immense love for film history).
He shot twice as much film, but only used half of it for the final product. Couldn’t he just do a Kill Bill 1&2 ala Once Upon A Time In Hollywood 1&2, or was the remaining 2 hours of ...Hollywood unsalvageable to make into a part two film ?
He really seemed to go to great lengths to be respectful to Tate, who was a real person. Some say he didn't show as much concern for Bruce Lee. I'm not sure... basically he didn't/couldn't know either first-hand.
Yup. Exactly. I’m taking a friend Monday and that will be 3X for me, but apparently I’m behind some of you!
Dang. Hard to be a good father if you are gone a lot making movies. That really makes the odds so much higher he may retire, at least for now, if this has been his long term plan. Well, good for him, he’s earned it and I love his priorities.
Yes, it is true that the real Bruce Lee taught Sharon Tate some karate and judo moves for a few days for that film, and he was friendly with both Tate and Polanski. After Tate was killed, a pair of sunglasses was found at the scene, and Polanski was convinced for a few days that it might have been Bruce Lee's (!!!), making him a suspect. Not long afterwards, he found out that Lee had a completely different lens prescription, so the glasses did not belong to him... but it is a bizarre connection between Lee and Tate & Polanski that you would never otherwise know. Little trivia factoids like that are the kind of thing that Tarantino delights in, so that's a big reason why Lee is in this film.
Every movie ever made shoots a lot more footage than actually gets used in the final. Hell, the first cut of the Tim Allen Shaggy Dog film I worked on was 3 hours long, and trust me, you don't want to see that. They managed to whittle it down to 99 minutes, and that's a far more reasonable run time. So don't think this is anything unusual. The classic to me was Charlie's Angels 2, which reportedly shot 500 hours of film. Even edited down, I'm sure the first few cuts were on the side of 4 hours, easily. And that's a movie that completely sucked even cutting more than 2 hours out of it. Often, a longer cut is just longer... it's not better at all. It takes a skilled director and editor to understand what drags down the film and how you can literally cut to the chase much faster and keep the film moving quickly, so as not to bore the audience.
Kill Bill 2 was good. Very talky less manga. So that was more a continuity film. ...Hollywood just extra scenes. Tim Roth’s character must have been not necessary as his part was completely cut out.
Perhaps you're right. The film is pretty superficial and trashy and more on a level with Death Proof than his other films.
Liked Death Proof more than IB & Unchained. True the end of DP got very silly. But I don’t find Once..in any way trashy, the ending was a poetic “what if”.
Ultimately it comes down to did the film entertain you? Did you get your moneys worth ? In my case it did.