The Film Thread

Jordan Cole

White Lodge
Sep 22, 2022
725
1,132
Every time I watch it, I feel it more deeply and tear up within the last few minutes, as all that the film represents and mourns creeps up and suddenly overwhelms me (that's how the film is meticulously built, in my experience): the senseless death of human beings, the premature end of an era, the eternal what-if of how things might have been different, and the power of storytelling--particularly cinema in a film about cinema with a bittersweet title that evokes both classic Leone films and fairy tale lore--to resurrect the past and evoke all of this at once.

Oh, this reminded me. I also tear up when Tate goes to see herself at the movie theater, which of course connects to all these themes. Jesus this is an emotional scene. How can anyone not feel something here? Granted, it wasn't until the second and third time that I kind of "got" what was going as opposed to the usual Tarantino first-time experience, "!! where's this going ??! !!"

I mean there's a lot of layers here. Fictional Tate is seeing the real version of her in a movie and lovingly watching it with an appreciative (but small) audience, in a film about the real Tate that fictionalizes her murder to have never happened at all. Tarantino makes my head spin. I only wish others experienced this when seeing some of his films. Those that dismissed this as "just another revenge film"...I get it, but try to dig a little deeper. There's so much more heart to this one.

The end of the novel he wrote also made me cry. It's so grateful and personal and vulnerable about him and his entire life and career. It stunned me.
 

LateReg

Glastonbury Grove
Apr 12, 2022
139
376
Yes. The other thing about the Tate theater scene that is worth noting is that it plays best in a movie theater...it is made to be seen as projected in a theater, or at least must be imagined to be seen that way for what I see as its intended effect. The light of the projector that streams from over our heads onto the screen, which then produces the illusion of a continuous beam of light from our world into the movie's world, continuing to project the real Sharon Tate onto the screen that Margot Robbie's fictional Tate is watching, links spectators throughout time, cinema throughout time, and the layered merger of history and fiction, via one continuous beam of light. It's also just a really sweet, innocent, beautiful and moving moment.
 

mtwentz

RR Diner
Apr 12, 2022
34
30
Have you seen Inglourious Basterds?

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood?

(I'm not saying these are the only two thought-provoking works, but they stand out to me as particularly layered.)
Inglourisous Basterds, yes, but didn't give that film a second thought
Have you seen Inglourious Basterds?

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood?

(I'm not saying these are the only two thought-provoking works, but they stand out to me as particularly layered.)
I saw Basterds but don't remember it much. Have been meaning to see Hollywood, but was chased away by my co-worker who said he and his wife walked out on it.

I will make a point to see Hollywood at some point. I understand it is very different from his other work.
 

mtwentz

RR Diner
Apr 12, 2022
34
30
Yes. The other thing about the Tate theater scene that is worth noting is that it plays best in a movie theater...it is made to be seen as projected in a theater, or at least must be imagined to be seen that way for what I see as its intended effect. The light of the projector that streams from over our heads onto the screen, which then produces the illusion of a continuous beam of light from our world into the movie's world, continuing to project the real Sharon Tate onto the screen that Margot Robbie's fictional Tate is watching, links spectators throughout time, cinema throughout time, and the layered merger of history and fiction, via one continuous beam of light. It's also just a really sweet, innocent, beautiful and moving moment.
Hey LateReg, long time no talk! And AXX°N N. too! And Reindeer and Agent Earle!
 

Cappy

White Lodge
Aug 4, 2022
545
539
The most emotional or moving scene in a Tarantino film, in my opinion, is the final shot of Jackie Brown, where Max Cherry (Robert Forster) watches Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) drive away.

There’s just so much longing in his face, coupled with a mature acceptance of his own limitations as a person.

I’ve not seen Robert Forster in much, only this, Peaks, Breaking Bad, and Alligator, but I’ve always thought he was an amazing performer based on this one moment.
 

mtwentz

RR Diner
Apr 12, 2022
34
30
The most emotional or moving scene in a Tarantino film, in my opinion, is the final shot of Jackie Brown, where Max Cherry (Robert Forster) watches Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) drive away.

There’s just so much longing in his face, coupled with a mature acceptance of his own limitations as a person.

I’ve not seen Robert Forster in much, only this, Peaks, Breaking Bad, and Alligator, but I’ve always thought he was an amazing performer based on this one moment.
The scenes that stuck out for me in Jackie Brown were Samuel L. Jackson shooting the guy in the trunk of the car, and then Robert DeNiro shooting Bridget Fonda in the parking lot.

And that kind of scene of shocking violence plus very excellent black comedy dialogue are what summarizes Tarantino for me. That's what I like about his films.

I just don't necessarily see layers of depth in his characters, or themes that make me ponder larger issues, and that's perfectly okay.

But I really do need to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Since college football season doesn't start until September, I'll make a plan...
 

Jordan Cole

White Lodge
Sep 22, 2022
725
1,132
Inglourisous Basterds, yes, but didn't give that film a second thought
I just don't necessarily see layers of depth in his characters, or themes that make me ponder larger issues, and that's perfectly okay.

Please enjoy this blog by a friend of mine about the many second, third and even fourth thoughts one might have upon seeing Inglourious Basterds:


Here is a preview, relevant to this thread:

All of Tarantino's films have been about the way identity is little but accumulation of stories about ourselves: the stories we tell about (and to) ourselves, the stories we tell about each other, the stories the world tells about us, the stories that are us. Reservoir Dogs is about scumbags and weasels playing at being men of honor and lions. Natural Born Killers and True Romance play out as mirrored halves (and were, in long ago drafts, likely retrograde counterpoints). In True Romance Clarence and Alabama bluff their way into legend, pretend to be Bonnie and Clyde until it comes true, while in Natural Born Killers Mickey and Mallory abandon all civilization for primal violent impulse, and marvel as the media inflates their atrocities into the American myth of individual freedom and integrity; the same thing happens to both couples, but inside-out. You can't help but end up a story. Jackie Brown is endless circles of everyone duping one other, which, naturally, involves nigh constant subterfuge and reading of other players' strategies. In Kill Bill everyone truly is the badass world-shaking giant they appear to be, but also rifle through indices of identity until they find the person they need to be. Vol. 1 establishes their legends, Vol. 2 deconstructs them, the vital layer being that the story The Bride tells herself of a mission of revenge melts away to reveal the story of Beatrix Kiddo's rebirth and redemption. Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds alike reconfigure and take hard looks at the purpose and meaning of exploitation film iconography. And in Pulp Fiction everyone is telling stories all the time, projecting and revealing themselves, bulding the world with talk, rumor, joke and anecdote, their constant chatter a meticulous network of meaning.

Espionage and fugitive drama being Inglourious Basterds' orders of the day, everyone is lying, acting, or hiding something, every character both themselves and a story about themselves. It is a film very much about mythmaking and performance. In the schematic marvel of the La Louisiane sequence, multiple layers of playacting converge and quarrel as a frivolous bar game variant on What's My Line? endangers the deadly serious acting of undercover agents impersonating German officers attempting to rendezvous with a double agent -- herself an actress and the scene's fulcrum of teetering make-believe.


And this bit here always rings true to me, but please read the full essay for context:

There are only two setpieces in Inglourious Basterds focused on the violent destruction of Nazis, and both are complicated, designed to be more felt on a phenomenal level than understood intellectually. Because here it is: What Inglourious Basterds does spectacularly well is imbue its adrenalized violence with a feeling that is utterly weird. It is uncanny. Something feels panicked and wrong and it is difficult to pinpoint what or why. Tarantino's last two films periodically shifted into similar discordant tones, and such sustained irrational dread is only matched onscreen by Dario Argento's heyday run of films from 1975-1985 and David Lynch whenever he feels like working.


As Operation Kino bursts into bloom, Inglourious Basterds makes its most startling connection. The association is self-critical and self-congratulatory, it's funny and scary, it's honest and false, it's everything Tarantino's critics hate in his work and everything they see missing, it is the surface and it is the core. Adolf Hitler is at the movies, a violence-saturated piece of propaganda about the romantic legend of a tough guy bringing down an abstracted enemy for the audience's satisfaction. Hitler laughs and rollicks and he gets really into it.

Before anyone could reasonably begin processing what this means, that Tarantino has willingly drawn connection between his imagined audience and a theater full of Nazis, and thereby implicated himself, Sgt. Donowitz steps in, grim triumph, revulsion and deep psychosis spilling out of his eyes, and demolishes Hitler's skull with a machine gun. Pulped. Things are complicated, ethical ideologies are diced, stirred, simmered and in the critical moment, a choice is made. A fantasy of vengeance is not the same as a wish for justice, as moral instruction, as poetic justice, as a prescription for behavior. It may be weird, it may not be the voice of our better angels, but it is a real human impulse. Choose your stories wisely.

The final German Night in Paris is a similar brand of unsettling as Carrie's last stand: the phantasmagoric theater of destruction is presided over by Shosanna's manically laughing giant face. She is made of smoke and light, wreathed in flame, a cinematic godhead. She shapes history. She demolishes history. She is producer, screenwriter, actor, director, editor, distributor, exhibitor, projectionist and projection.
 
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Jordan Cole

White Lodge
Sep 22, 2022
725
1,132
Oh, here's another good bit from the blog I linked to above, very relevant to things we were discussing about Tarantino's work:

Tarantino is not without his authorial tics. He punctuates suspense with hyperfocused extreme close-ups of food, feet, arcane detail, peers out of car trunks incessantly, frames characters in doorways and crams metatextual declaration into dialogue. But his technique possesses no faddishness. In an age where most directors flatten their visual field magazine cover thin and alternate between big head TV close-ups and impotent camera flailing, Tarantino composes for the entire frame, constructs screen geography by holding shots as long as possible and, in Basterds in particular, uses deep focus to impart as much information as possible in a shot. Take some time with the scene in which Zoller pesters Shosanna in a cafe. She just wants to smoke, sip coffee and read, but the soldier tries his damnedest to chat her up, fending off her rebukes and disruptions from ardent fans, then recognizes the opportunity to impress the girl with his celebrity. Tarantino places Shosanna by the storefront window and keeps everything mostly in focus from the woman in the foreground to the buildings across the street. Sidewalk pedestrians recognizing Zoller are fully visible as they move from exterior to interior space, and several interlocking stories are being told at once.

Inglourious Basterds luxurates in the pleasures and pains of the movies and meditates on film as a force shaping our lives, interior identities and human history. That second clause is the writer-director's great step forward in his sixth feature, though his concerns have not changed, they are articulated with emphatic force in Basterds. The breadth and depth of reference is impressive by its own right, but less canny filmmakes pull similar, less encyclopedic stunts all the time: naïve accumulation of a hundred years of film cliché may also cause the sensation of a thousand films overlapping on one screen.

A headspace is established for the film: that we are in Movieland, in Movie History where Movie People operate on Movie Rules. This is not the same as saying the film operates with weightless unreality, that situations are not serious in any way. Inglorious Basterds then does a service to all war films -- indeed, all films -- from the earnest propaganda documentary modes of Why We Fight to the studio-slick entertainments of Casablanca. All movies are movies. That Tarantino is not embarrassed to say so does not make his films shallow exceptions to any rule or inherently frivolous, but exceptionally honest, generous, grateful for the cinema, grateful to be of the cinema. The notion does not strip art of importance but return it in kind, separates art from the stifling, impossible, dishonest illusion that its function is/should be/can be to duplicate reality. And of all words in the above that should be bracketed by a good post-modernist's set of quotation marks, it is "reality." When we're at the movies, regardless of how naturalistic the performers or fantastical the scenario, every movie is equally unreal. And every movie is real in and of itself.

I mean I love this essay, I can quote it from it all day. Sincerely urge others to check it out. He's also written beautiful pieces on Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire that touches similar territory.

Oh, and scroll down to the comments of the blog post, as he continues with more insight into what makes Tarantino's films special, relatable, and powerful. Example:

I've always been frustrated, even alienated, by the way detractors and admirers alike frequently proceed from the assumption that Tarantino's work is both shallow and hollow, and that we all know this, even if they decide shallowness is a legitimate purpose unto itself. I get confused when critics write things like "[Tarantino's movies] are abstract art, not strong stories, not emotional experiences" (and that's Jim Emerson). It means that these people haven't cried at or been haunted by a Tarantino film, possibly not even been fully absorbed by the experience. Their loss, I suppose, but the received wisdom is the bedrock of most writing on the director.

The common accusation that the artist shows no evidence of having lived in the real world with other human beings is kind of offensive but largely baffling. What I see pouring out of Tarantino's films is a great love for people, the arts, stories and life itself. His is a profoundly uncynical cinema; even the artifice is completely sincere. I'm looking at my DVD shelves, trying to think of another filmmaker more in love with people, their speech, their faces, their reasons, and the list is miniscule; Tarantino's films are just so jazzed about spending time with their characters (and his actors) that the screen is crowded with affection.

That said, I feel fairly backed into a corner when trying to write on the director, when the films do a fine job of sticking up for themselves. I do think Tarantino aims for the fences every time out. He's playing the long game, and making films for an audience and discussion 20 years hence. The last two weeks have demonstrated that we're still not done grappling with RESERVOIR DOGS, let alone PULP FICTION.

----
Crying is, of course, a terrible yardstick for these matters. But yeah, I've cried at every Tarantino feature but JACKIE BROWN. I do feel Tarantino believes his characters and their stories down to the guts. It's not really about liking or sympathizing with characters but being interested and invested in them as make-believe people and recognizing, empathizing with the core emotion in inflated circumstances. So the huge beats -- Jules' conversion, that moment he closes his eyes and makes the choice in the Hawthorne Grill, Mr. Orange's dying confession to the moaning Mr. White, Beatrix weeping with joy and horror on the bathroom floor -- are big Movie stuff, stories well told, cinema well rendered, but emotional crises so perilous and enlarged they are not of my (our) experience. I can't say I relate on a one-to-one basis, but I smell the happy stink of humanity, which is approximately what I'd say about RICHARD III and OTHELLO. I don't know an O-Ren Ishii, but I know women who had tough lives and responded by turning into bad motherfuckers, and in any case, I recognize the person in that supervillain. I get her. And I almost don't want to overstate this, because a lot of what's going on is characters dealing with movie universe abstracts with real responses; PULP FICTION doesn't tell me anything about the numbed psyche that must come with being a hitman, or BASTERDS about the daily ethical confusion of living in an occupied nation, but the characters react to outrageous extremes in otherwise very real ways.

See, at the same time, Tarantino's films are loaded and made of experiences I've gone through, relate to, recognize, scenes and feelings not often portrayed in the genres being mashed-up. A personal favorite scene in PULP FICTION is of Vincent Vega in the Wallace bathroom after his not-a-date with Mia. It obviously turned into a date, and our ethically-challanged protagonist gives himself a pep talk in the mirror: do not sleep with this woman. You want to (will), can (will) but it's a terrible idea, and if you do, you are failing a moral test (that you made up for yourself). And I know that bathroom debate, even if the stakes were not life-and-death. And I know Jimmie Dimmick's situation, as friends call in an improbably inconvenient favor and you know you'll relent but not without pushing those friends' buttons and whining the whole time. And Hattori Hanzo turning over the finest sword he ever made: I promised my God/myself I would never do this ever again, but here I am doing it. And Bill and Beatrix: hey, we aren't supposed to be together, but you're the best and I want you to be okay and I want you to give you closure. And Jungle Julia buoyant-to-disappointed text message mini-romance, hooray, aw, shit. Shossanna trying to drink coffee, smoke and chill out while a blowhard keeps flirting with her. Whether we've lived this stuff or not, most all of Tarantino's characters are given dimension and shade beyond archetype, quirk-n'-virtue, and film reference.

As for the potential of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS as a morality play, and what is going on in Operation Kino and in Rachtman's last stand... We're outside the real life "what would I do" problem and inside it at the same time. It is a story about storytelling. I am loathe to quote artists on their own work as a means of prying open the text, but I came independently to the same conclusion as Tarantino when he enthuses "... At some point those Nazi uniforms went away and they were people being burned alive. I think that’s part of the thing that fucks with the catharsis. And that’s a good thing." A juvenile way of putting it, perhaps, and not a complete statement of artistic purpose. There aren't answers here, but the question is certainly being weighed: is this an "okay" fantasy, or too soul-polluting to serve a cleansing function? Can this make us feel better, or is even the imaginary act of turning Nazi atrocities against them too mad and debasing? There aren't answers, but INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS takes care to remind us in pivotal moments what is exceptional about these villains (the Nazis are "humanized" a little -- they were/are humans after all, and that's what's truly frightening, revolting and important to remember -- but in the end they are Nazis), and, however unhealthy we're having this fantasy anyway. That, unto itself, is a kinda pretty, honest and human position for a storyteller to take.
 
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Cappy

White Lodge
Aug 4, 2022
545
539
The sets for the Barbie movie look kind of insane.

I don’t really know what to expect based on the trailers, but I really enjoyed Greta Gerwig’s other films.
 

MasterMastermnd

Waiting Room
Apr 12, 2022
370
531
Listen here

Figured I'd share this podcast on Southland Tales I recently recorded with Joel at Lost in the Movies. He's done such great work on Peaks over the years and is just a great critic all around
 

secretlettermkr

Waiting Room
Apr 12, 2022
315
438
it is, I highly recommend it. Its not "lynchean" but it has certainly aestethic points of coincidence.
EXOTICA (1994) is the other film of his I liked, I saw that one like 20 years ago perhaps, on VHS, I rented the tape.
Recently I watched CHLOE (2009) I didnt like that
I know I watched another film but cant remember wich, and I think i didnt enjoyed it as much.
 
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LateReg

Glastonbury Grove
Apr 12, 2022
139
376
Strangely, I just revisited it last week! It used to be one of my favorite movies. Definitely has a Lynchian vibe at times, but Egoyan is his own man.

He's also a case study in how a director may fall off and never again attain his past glory. His 1980s films are very interesting, but his run in the 1990s is one of the great modern streaks (The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Felicia's Journey). His first 2000s film Ararat is also pretty good and probably a tad underrated for not being on par with his great films, but from then on he's been almost entirely incapable of making anything of value. I watch every one of them with high hopes even after they get crushed by critics, and I enjoy them all to a certain extent as elements of his particular brand of style and intrigue remain, but its truly baffling how he has seemingly lost his touch. I guess he was a sort of perfect fit for the 1990s, with his fragmented narrative structures.
 

Agent Earle

Great Northern Hotel
Apr 12, 2022
78
133
I haven't watched anything else by the man but The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey (thanks for reminding me of them) are reasons enough for him to be accepted into the pantheon of The Greatest, as far as I'm concerned. Both are absolute classics of original, poignant and oh-so-haunting cinema!
 

Jordan Cole

White Lodge
Sep 22, 2022
725
1,132
I liked Bones and All. I liked the road trip vibe. Me and my wife saw that and M3GHAN in one night, but I have to say M3GHAN was the clear winner.
 
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