Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood

Bruise Lee

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood
UK/USA/China 2019 Directed Quentin Tarantino
UK cinema release print

Warning: Even the presence of a spoiler warning for this movie would constitute a spoiler so you can see the kind of Catch 22 situation I am in with this... so let’s just say that, yes, there is a spoiler here.

Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is the... well, since I don’t seem to be as mathematically challenged as the Hollywood marketing machine, let’s just call it the ‘latest’ movie directed by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote it. It’s a film I had been looking forward to for a while since, although I find the director a bit hit and miss, when he’s on form he does create absolute masterpieces of cinema (such as Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds) and a film doing the ‘Manson murders’ and set in Hollywood in 1969 seems like a match made in heaven.

And, as a film it’s kinda entertaining but it’s also somewhat less than I was expecting from it, although I do reserve the right to change my mind on this one because, like some of the best Marvel movies of recent years, it might be that my brain needs to have longer to process it and it’s quite possible that if I ever do see this one a second time, I might like it a lot better than I did before.

Saying that, I still had a fairly good time with this movie... after all, one of the chief pleasures of watching a movie by Tarantino is spotting all the visual and audio references to other peoples movies and, as you can imagine, this film is filled to the brim with them in a much more overt manner (if such a thing is possible when it comes to Mr. T) than any of his other works.

The film follows fictional movie star Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and his stuntman/driver/best friend Cliff Booth played by Brad Pitt. It also follows real life Sharon Tate played here by Margot Robbie, who was of course the most noted of the victims of the slaughter by the hippy followers of Charlie Manson on that grim August night in 1969.

Now, while I loved both all the references to various movies which the film is littered with and, frankly, loved the film and TV shows created to slot into this era by Tarantino for the Rick Dalton character (I especially loved the authenticity of his Italian secret agent movie although, on reflection, it maybe looked a little more like a ‘polizei’ movie than the specific strand of Italian spy movies it was emulating). However, it has to be said that there was practically no story on this one and its all over the place in terms of the way elements of the characters are revealed...

Now I’ve got no trouble with this usually, especially coming from Tarantino. As he’s demonstrated in a few of his movies, he can do this kind of slowly developing story image put together out of myriad scenes which tell something intrinsic about the characters very well and he usually does it in an effective manner which is a joy to watch. However, this particular hodge podge of scenes involving the various main characters and people such as Bruce Lee or Steve McQueen are... well, they’re all still a joy to watch individually but for some reason they never really forward the story that much. At least that’s how it seemed to me. The reason being, I think, is as I said in the paragraph above, there is no story, as such. And everyone knows the outcome of the Manson murders, right?

Okay... spoiler coming up.

I had a couple of conversations with different friends on the lead up to the release of this film about what I thought was going to happen because people keep telling people not to ‘spoil’ the movie and, frankly, it’s hard to spoil a movie when you know how historic events play out. So, this led me to believe that, just as he completely rewrote the end of World War Two in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino would change the outcome of events as they happened in real life and create a ‘new ending’ for Sharon Tate and Manson’s followers. Indeed, asides from the obvious tribute to Sergio Leone in the title, it would also suggest a certain fairy-tale quality to the narrative being presented here and suggests that there will be a certain amount of, shall we say, ‘deviation’ in terms of how things are left. And... yeah. I totally called it, this film left things exactly as I thought they would leave them when I heard about this project so... the film’s two main male protagonists are injected into history and, of course, change it in the way that very few people other than Tarantino would do without some kind of logical alternate to the ending, or lack of, of certain characters... such as in the movies From Hell or The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (which I reviewed here).

And yes, it’s kind of a double edged sword in terms of the education of young movie goers everywhere when you present fiction as implied facts like this. I work at a college and know a lot of the kids think the war ended when Hitler was machine gunned down in a cinema and... I'm pretty sure that a lot of those same teenagers will be checking the IMDB after this to see what films Sharon Tate has been in recently too. It’s not fair that ignorance of history should block cinematic art like these Tarantino flicks and it’s no reason to censor the art in any way but... a disclaimer at the end might help clarify things to a certain section of the audience maybe. You know... like a statement saying that in real life Sharon Tate, her friends and unborn child were brutally slaughtered by the followers of Charlie Manson... something like that.

Anyway, other than this and despite the kind of directionless, almost spectator sport of 'picking out little details on the screen' kind of nature of the film, there are still some sequences which demonstrate Tarantino’s absolute mastery of the art. Two scenes spring to mind, both featuring Brad Pitt where, frankly, even though I’d worked out exactly how they were going to play out before they finished, were nevertheless almost excruciatingly suspenseful to watch and this is where the director really shows why we go and see his films time and time again. One is where Brad Pitt goes to check out an old friend on a ranch (I won’t say more) and the other is when a bunch of hippies invade a house towards the end of the picture. I’d liken them to the scenes with Alfred Molina in them from Boogie Nights in terms of just how insanely intense they are here and, as always, Tarantino has a way of taking things which we take for granted as fetishised instruments of death and reminding us that they are, truly, very dangerous.

And that’s me about done on this one. The common Tarantino needle-drop approach to the music was less appealing to me this time around (and it really shouldn’t have been since I love that period in music) and, although there is the obvious Manson reference to The Beatles White Album in the dialogue, you don’t actually get to hear any of it in the movie. Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood is probably not a film I would recommend to anyone but the most cine-literate of my friends, truth be told but I expect it will grow on me in time and might even be worth a Blu Ray purchase at some point in the next few years. Nothing more to say except... stay on for the end credits.

The Revenant

May The Horse Be With you

The Revenant
2015 USA
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
UK cinema release print.

I really wasn’t that up for going to see The Revenant, if truth be told. I’ve not been the biggest fan of Leonardo DiCaprio and, even though I recognise him as being a pretty great actor, he tends to pick on playing the kind of personalities who I am less than interested in. For example, I’m sure he does a marvellous job in Tarantino’s Django Unchained but, for me, the second half of that movie is almost unwatchable and DiCaprio’s villain is someone who I just don’t enjoy looking at in that. Yes, I realise it’s the brilliance of his performance that allows me to hate him so much in that movie but... he’s just not an actor I tend to get on with.

Secondly, I saw the advance trailers for The Revenant a number of times with various movies over the last couple of months and, if I wasn’t already put off by DiCaprio’s involvement then I was certainly put off by the trailer.

All that being said, however, I then stumbled upon a review of the film’s score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai (for some reason credited as Alva Noto here) that stated that the score was quite avant garde and unusual in it’s musical make-up. Well, maybe it’s not actually that unusual or different, to be honest, but it did get me into the cinema to have a listen to it and so I’m grateful for that review for kicking me in that direction because, as it happens, The Revenant really is quite a good little movie.

After a brief sequence right at the start of the picture, which uses a compilation of what appears to be both dream and flashback/forward imagery (a recurring motif which slowly, in its use throughout the running time of the story, starts to inform or support the narrative a little more), we are thrust into a slow moving shot of water running through a stream or river in a forest. This won me over straight away because the picking out of a textural detail such as this immediately reminded me of the cinema of one of my favourite directors, Andrei Tarkovsky. More specifically it reminded me of the opening shot of that director’s Solaris to some extent, in terms of its intent, although it has to be said that director Iñárritu is a lot more dynamic than Tarkovsky’s more simplistic, static shooting style on these kinds of things. This certainly doesn’t make Iñárritu’s style any better for sure, and he’s still a million miles away from Tarkovsky, but it is certainly reminiscent of the former director’s spiritual concerns, it seems to me, and so Iñárritu goes up a notch or two already, in my esteem.

It’s interesting, actually, because all through The Revenant, the camera keeps picking up these wonderful textural details of the desolate but beautiful, snowbound landscape that is the film’s natural environment. It’s a free for all in terms of long static shots, long slow sweeping, moving shots and short static shots edited together but... it seems to have a definite pattern to the way the main action of a scene is reached throughout the picture. What the director and cinematographer seem to be doing, I believe, is to move the camera to concentrate on beautiful, rich shots, holding it for a while, before moving the camera up, down, or to the side and into the main action or narrative of a scene. Like a slow sweep from detail into an establishing shot and then cutting to closer moments in the progression of the narrative.

Similarly, the director will also often leave a sequence by moving the camera off and away from the action to come to rest on a similarly breathtaking composition for a while. And it’s often a shot of either water or sometimes looking up into trees, for some reason. I guess we can all thank my favourite director, Akira Kurosawa, for beginning to look up into the sky with his camera in his masterpiece Rashomon for the legacy of that kind of detail... whether people consciously remember that he popularised the freeing of the camera in this way or not. However, I sense a certain practical motive in the way Iñárritu uses this technique too... possibly to cover up some behind-the-scenes elements which need to remain hidden to maintain the illusion.

Interestingly, mixed in with this leading in and out style of detail is another tactic the editor sometimes uses... that of breaking down action into short shots and then editing into tighter shots or further away as an alternate means of leading the audience in or out of a sequence. I don’t recall the film doing this quite as much as the other modus operandi going on but, it certainly happens a number of times and maybe the director does this on occasion to produce a kind of ‘relief’ on the visual cortex when there’s an overabundance on the other kind of entrance/exit to the scenes. Either way, whichever methods the director employs in any given scene, it's all done quite masterfully and it makes for an astonishing piece of cinema.

Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty amazing as the man who, after being attacked by a slighty dodgy looking CGI bear, sees his son killed and is then, himself, left for dead by the villain of the piece... equally excellently played by Tom Hardy. As the trailer perhaps demonstrates... but without showing the real beauty of the film, the story or DiCaprio’s rebirth as the metaphorical revenant (including a perhaps too heavy handed but visually stunning sequence where a Christ metaphor is kinda hammered home to the viewer) and his survival and pursuit of Tom Hardy through a harrowing landscape of hostile indians and heavy snow plays a little like an early Werner Herzog epic on acid... although I have to say that in comparison to Herzog, I actually find this director a lot more interesting to watch. The tale is very simple and is pretty much a small scale, exploitation style revenge movie in its simplicity but, even though it’s very small in content, the director still manages to shoot this in a way that makes it feel extremely epic and gives it a sense of being, somehow, something much more than the sum of its parts. Kinda like the movie is a wet rag and he’s wringing out all the detail out into the frame.

I was also reminded of Tarkovsky again in one of the dream sequences which litter the film. Tarkovsky would make long, slow movies where not much would happen but, every now and then, he’d have a moment where something ‘blink and you miss it’ startling would happen and there’s a beautiful shot of DiCaprio’s character’s former wife levitating above him which is just such a special moment... although that too is frustratingly brief in the edit. Maybe running as little as two seconds and therefore further enhancing the haunting quality of the image on the brain, perhaps.

It’s a truly mesmerising film and the performances, even by Domhnall Gleeson (another actor I’m kinda on the fence about at the moment) are way beyond the realms of competent. If I did have one criticism of the movie, though, it’s the sense of unevenness between the set up and the pay off at the end. DiCaprio survives certain death time after time, even going so far as to do something with a horse that fans of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here) will be more than familiar with when it comes to surviving in an icy wilderness... and it feels very gruelling. By comparison, when DiCaprio rejoins the land of the living, the post survival pursuit and denouement of the movie runs to maybe less than a third of the running time. It’s quite obvious in places, with what looks like a ‘surprise reveal’ at some point being scuppered by the director telegraphing that moment in a scene with DiCaprio’s character cutting down tree branches minutes before it happens, and it’s all over just way to quick. There is a certain poetic sense of ironic justice at the end of the picture, which joins the main narrative to a sub plot involving an Indian warrior’s quest for his missing daughter... in the way in which DiCaprio has a hand in inadvertently helping him on that quest... but ultimately, considering the long haul of the character’s survival as he stumbles and fights his way across the wilderness, it’s just all seems tied together way too hastily for my liking.

That being said though, it’s not an uncommon occurrence in modern cinema and it would be a shame to let that put you off going to see and appreciate what is, frankly, a really great example of modern motion picture art, by anybody’s standards. If you call yourself a fan of cinema then, although you might find certain things in this a little clumsy in places, you should definitely still take a look... and try to see it in a cinema with a big screen if possible, because it looks quite spectacular. Probably not the best film I’ll see this year but it certainly helps get 2016 off to a good start and definitely one which I might even revisit on Blu Ray in years to come. The Revenant is a stunningly good piece of cinema and, if you want to see some good art, then it’s definitely worth some of your time.