Tarantino X: The Movie Critic

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby snuggle » Fri Aug 16, 2019 4:34 pm

Can’t hype myself up to see this! Even the ppl in this thread who like it are dissuading me
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Postby archaic » Sat Aug 17, 2019 11:16 pm

If I didn't know anything about Tarantino as a person, I'd assume this movie was meant to show that your preference for Rick and Cliff over the hippies is a purely aesthetic preference. Like, you could take the script of this movie and make a pro-hippie/anti-cowboy movie out of it with very few structural changes.
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Postby Eyeball Kid » Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:14 pm

archaic wrote:If I didn't know anything about Tarantino as a person, I'd assume this movie was meant to show that your preference for Rick and Cliff over the hippies is a purely aesthetic preference. Like, you could take the script of this movie and make a pro-hippie/anti-cowboy movie out of it with very few structural changes.

The hippies were the Manson family, who were murderous racists who wanted to start a race war.
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Postby Eyeball Kid » Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:16 pm

I don't recall Inglorious Basterds being this aggressively misinterpreted, but I guess people didn't need to be told Hitler was bad?
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Postby murray st. » Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:22 pm

still thinking about brad pitt and his sexy arms driving his cool car
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Postby kirito » Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:23 pm

hippies sucked anyway. you thought the vietnam war was bad, whoa good for you
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Postby Eyeball Kid » Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:23 pm

I'm seeing it again tomorrow. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie three times upon its release.
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Postby murray st. » Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:42 pm

kirito wrote:hippies sucked anyway. you thought the vietnam war was bad, whoa good for you


hard to argue with this
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Postby murray st. » Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:43 pm

you profess to hate "boomers," yet you think it is bad that cliff booth bludgeoned a murderous hippie to death on his friend's mantel... very curious
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Postby Eyeball Kid » Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:47 pm

Just when I thought it couldn't get any dumber, I saw that comic circulating Twitter today that was basically a woke defense of the Manson family and yes, I felt my blood pressure spike.
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Postby kirito » Mon Aug 19, 2019 4:50 pm

every girl i liked in college watched margaret qualley in this movie and thought "damn that could have been me back then"
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Postby archaic » Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:53 pm

Eyeball Kid wrote:
archaic wrote:If I didn't know anything about Tarantino as a person, I'd assume this movie was meant to show that your preference for Rick and Cliff over the hippies is a purely aesthetic preference. Like, you could take the script of this movie and make a pro-hippie/anti-cowboy movie out of it with very few structural changes.

The hippies were the Manson family, who were murderous racists who wanted to start a race war.

But not in the movie. In the movie they were misguided burnouts living off of a has-been who made his fortune a decade earlier on Bounty Law. And the movie is at pains to point out that Cliff is a direct parallel here---living in squalor off of the has-been Rick, watching his shows with him that very evening, etc.

And instead of the insane irl motivation of Helter Skelter, the hippies in this movie are given this motive of taking revenge against a violent culture. This is actually coherent in the context of the film. It's not some great idea, but it's probably a more defensible moral premise than "kill your wife because she's annoying".

Just to be clear, I don't think anyone is going to watch the movie and not be pulling for Cliff or Rick. I watched the movie, and I had a great time rooting for them. It's just that on reflection I can't help but get a sense that the movie was really trying to make that rooting as arbitrary as possible, tied up in the tonal/aesthetic decisions that anyone with sufficient skill could use to tell a story. I think this is actually pretty interesting, especially in the context of a film that no sane person is going to see as a serious attempt at revisionist history. That said, I have too strong of a notion of who Tarantino is as a person to think this was actually intended.
Last edited by archaic on Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby archaic » Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:53 pm

Eyeball Kid wrote:Just when I thought it couldn't get any dumber, I saw that comic circulating Twitter today that was basically a woke defense of the Manson family and yes, I felt my blood pressure spike.

link?
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Postby furrowed brow » Mon Aug 19, 2019 6:00 pm

Eyeball Kid wrote:The last non-franchise/sequel/remake to break the $100 million mark domestically? The Mule (Eastwood, 2018).


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Postby Eyeball Kid » Mon Aug 19, 2019 6:10 pm

furrowed brow wrote:
Eyeball Kid wrote:The last non-franchise/sequel/remake to break the $100 million mark domestically? The Mule (Eastwood, 2018).


Us?

Ah, you're right! It slipped my mind, which given how few non franchise/remake/sequels do huge domestic business, it shouldn't have.

And archaic, the movie plays with fantasy and reality throughout its running time, but knowing about the reality of the Manson family is important to it and plays a huge part in why the final scene is so affecting.
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Postby archaic » Mon Aug 19, 2019 6:58 pm

Eyeball Kid wrote:And archaic, the movie plays with fantasy and reality throughout its running time, but knowing about the reality of the Manson family is important to it and plays a huge part in why the final scene is so affecting.


No doubt. But this doesn't explain the obsessive doubling in the movie, which is just... there. Like, Smerdyakov is supposed to double Ivan in the Brothers K but the point isn't that Smerd is good, but rather that Ivan is bad. That we hate Smerd and kinda like Ivan reminds us that our hate comes more from the fact that he stinks and plays bad music and is dumb.
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Postby Eyeball Kid » Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:47 pm

I hope the Blu-ray release includes as an extra a complete scene of Rick and Cliff watching and commenting on the full episode of FBI.
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Postby shacky » Tue Aug 20, 2019 3:00 am

haven't seen this yet but a big group of my housemate's friends were just here critiquing it:

- nothing happens and boring for two and half hours
- too much violence in last half hour
- too many cigarettes (proposed counter-argument: potentially realistic portrayal of cigarettes given time period???)
- extended sidebar surmising anguish felt by noted environmentalist leonardo dicaprio for having smoked so many ozone-destroying cigarettes

unanimous conclusion: zero stars
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Postby shacky » Tue Aug 20, 2019 3:04 am

i asked what they thought of the twist but they didn't know what the manson family was or that sharon tate was a real person
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Postby it's the suspense that gets me » Tue Aug 20, 2019 3:34 am

archaic wrote:
Eyeball Kid wrote:
archaic wrote:If I didn't know anything about Tarantino as a person, I'd assume this movie was meant to show that your preference for Rick and Cliff over the hippies is a purely aesthetic preference. Like, you could take the script of this movie and make a pro-hippie/anti-cowboy movie out of it with very few structural changes.

The hippies were the Manson family, who were murderous racists who wanted to start a race war.

But not in the movie. In the movie they were misguided burnouts living off of a has-been who made his fortune a decade earlier on Bounty Law. And the movie is at pains to point out that Cliff is a direct parallel here---living in squalor off of the has-been Rick, watching his shows with him that very evening, etc.

And instead of the insane irl motivation of Helter Skelter, the hippies in this movie are given this motive of taking revenge against a violent culture. This is actually coherent in the context of the film. It's not some great idea, but it's probably a more defensible moral premise than "kill your wife because she's annoying".

Just to be clear, I don't think anyone is going to watch the movie and not be pulling for Cliff or Rick. I watched the movie, and I had a great time rooting for them. It's just that on reflection I can't help but get a sense that the movie was really trying to make that rooting as arbitrary as possible, tied up in the tonal/aesthetic decisions that anyone with sufficient skill could use to tell a story. I think this is actually pretty interesting, especially in the context of a film that no sane person is going to see as a serious attempt at revisionist history. That said, I have too strong of a notion of who Tarantino is as a person to think this was actually intended.


yeah, thanks for this post. both my partner and i read this film pretty similarly (and both felt like it was his strongest film since jackie brown, in no small part because it seemed less hung up on ideas of binary good and evil/revenge fantasy shit since anything since then) but i didn't really think of some of the parallels here.

i have no idea how to read anything tarantino says in interviews and that's probably for the best. he seems like an idiot savant who lucks into creating an entertaining film that may or may not have something to say every once in awhile. i guess i'm ok with that.
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Postby easy » Wed Aug 21, 2019 12:13 pm

yes

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Postby carlagain » Wed Aug 21, 2019 2:20 pm

should i see this
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Postby NegativeCapability » Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:05 pm

Will watch it this weekend. Only seen the trailer a while back. Excitement right now is at about 6.5/10.
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Postby galactagogue » Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:38 pm

Sweet Gregory Pectin wrote:
spix et chicho wrote:I was not totally convinced by this movie until the exact moment when the gates to the Polanski/Tate house swing open for Rick. something about that moment clinched it and tied the film's goals together in my mind in one instant, in a kind of last-minute Bressonian way


same


yeah this was genuinely unexpected even though it seemed really obvious once it happened. it fit real nice-like imo.
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Postby galactagogue » Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:39 pm

Viola Swamp wrote:my signif was so pissed at the johnny guitar ripoff shot



...why? that kind of cribbing is literally built into the narrative of the movie lol
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Postby galactagogue » Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:50 pm

The Producer wrote:
Bananafish wrote:I just thought that by including that cliff backstory scene it created this weird dynamic that seems thematically at odds with the rest of the movie where one woman is allowed to live while the other has to die


no it didnt, the movie wasnt about her in the way it was abt Tate (it's more about the Manson murderer women than his wife even)


see i feel like taking that a step even more removed and say it's not about Tate or the Manson murder but the Story of the Murder or the way the event became a fiction that people re-told. And honestly, I couldn't help but think about a Joan Didion essay from the White Album that cites this murder as an event that seriously shook Hollywood/LA. I can't help be read that into the overall film. Why else focus on this event and re-write it in such a way that totally disregards reality? It's not like he's trying to get to a truth about the real event or anything like that.
Last edited by galactagogue on Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby galactagogue » Wed Aug 21, 2019 3:51 pm

Sorry really wanted to catch up with this thread. Saw the movie like a week ago but i've been itching to rewatch it ever since. I was pretty satisfied as spectator looking for an entertaining film on a slow sunday night and as someone who sorta annoyingly tries to digest the choices directors make.
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Postby galactagogue » Wed Aug 21, 2019 4:39 pm

truncated wrote:
brian dennehy fan wrote:guy behind me laughed waaaaaaay too hard at pitt's mexican line and only good indian is a dead one movie title read


Yeah my theater ate all the iffy race shit up. To a degree that seemed beyond the film's intentions, the type we had that correct thread premise that was stupidly shit all over about.

I want to go back for a 2nd viewing but likely won't just based on how edgelordy the audience felt the get to/need to(?) be for a ninth film by director Quentin Tarantino. It needs crushing beer and getting hazy on a stuffed couch to it, on one's lonesome.



I saw this with a mexican person and they laughed harder than anyone in the theatre at the 'don't cry in front of the mexicans' line. i'm not saying that renders all problematic interpretation moot. idk, i will really need to rewatch this but as a POC who watched with other POC the racial stuff didn't land with much vitriol or even problematic tropiness. I can see the anger about the depiction of Bruce Lee but it also feels weird to reduce the treatment to a conversation about race as if Bruce Lee wasn't an icon for EVERYONE. I'm sure the choice of mocking that status is super deliberate and I don't doubt the backlash was expected—and I can see a critique where making the this choice anyways can feel like trolling, but I just tend to read it more as an opener for dealing with the tropes as opposed to more of the same. Maybe I'm being too generous though !

:continues to comb thru thread to find more shit to react to days later...:
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Postby inkling » Wed Aug 21, 2019 5:16 pm

do y’all ever wonder when you’re watching a movie by Quaton Taradino what it would be like if we gave other people money to make grownup movies, like if once a month we had an auteur movie in theaters instead of once a year

I bet it would be cool and we’d forget all about Quata Tabadabo
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Postby manvstrees » Wed Aug 21, 2019 5:25 pm

Nah that's dum
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