Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) - Tarantino's Nostalgia Wank

So here's a potentially controversial opening for you all, I think Tarantino is overrated. OK, maybe that isn't a super controversial opinion depending on who you are, but there's certainly at least some small part of the film buff community that seems to worship the ground he walks barefoot on and I've never quite seen eye-to-eye with them.

It's not that I don't like any of his films; on the contrary, I like most of them, and none of them are truly bad films. I'd even consider Inglourious Basterds one of my all-time faves. I just do not understand the pedestal people put him on. I mean, I get why people love his films so much: they're slick, stylish and bathed in gratuitous violence and swearing, appealing to the lizard brain in all us younger film nerds, whilst still being competent enough and packed with references to classic cinema to make us feel like we're watching something worthwhile and of artistic merit.

And there's nothing wrong with that as an auteur style, it clearly appeals and has produced some good films. But come on now, Pulp Fiction's not that good.

Regardless of your thoughts on the Tarantino catalogue, every artist can and does make mistakes, and I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his first true misstep. As mentioned above, Tarantino's work is constantly referencing and calling back to the classic era of Hollywood, so why not cut out the middleman and make a film explicitly set in and concerning the period? Not a bad concept on paper, but when one is in love with the setting to the extent that Tarantino is, it's quite easy to overlook things like plot when you're enthusiastically *ahem* reminiscing about how things used to be.

The biggest issue with the plot is that it's almost non-existent. DiCaprio plays a washed-up actor, with Pitt as his close friend and stunt-double. DiCaprio is the main protagonist and has the most to do, his story ostensibly being the re-birth of his film career after having faded from public perception, trading up the classic TV western for the then-new spaghetti western. There's a hint of conflict with him trying to assimilate back into the world of acting after spending so many years doing nothing but drinking, as well as the realisation that the best years of his career are behind him and he must make way for the new generation, but other than that there's really not much to his story. He pretty much just wants to be in a film, is offered a role, does it well and then he's set. End of arc.

Still, more than Pitt has to do, who basically just bums around doing stuff, most notably getting involved with a bunch of young girls living in a sort of commune on the outskirts of LA. And while this sequence has some nice horror-movie-esque tension to it, it doesn't really have much to do with anything, and the rest of Pitt's scenes are equally inconsequential, if not more so.

The last character of note, though I hesitate to call her a protagonist, is Margot Robbie playing real-life film star Sharon Tate, a fact I did not realise until researching the film afterwards. Not that it matters too much though, since the only thing she really does is watch a film she's in at the cinema, and every time we cut back to her, she's just sitting there, grinning and enjoying herself. But then that's it: nothing else happens, and there's no payoff to her character whatsoever despite just simply establishing her existence for the sake of the ending. We'll get to that.

And that's really about it in terms of plot, it's just a load of characters doing stuff in 60's Hollywood, there's no real overarching story or conflict, it's a surprisingly sedate movie for Tarantino, playing out like a romanticised stroll down memory lane. There's nothing wrong with slow cinema, but there's got to be something driving it and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood just feels like someone stalling for time until they can think of a story that never comes to them.

Then, (Spoiler time!) just past the two-hour mark, as what passes as the story is wrapping itself up, with DiCaprio enjoying his newfound success and everything feeling like it's coming to a close, Tarantino smacks himself in the head and shouts "Shit! I forgot the gratuitous violence!" And so the last sequence of the film becomes a home invasion sequence, where drugged up DiCaprio and Pitt viciously defend themselves against a group of murderers. At the time, this felt incredibly out of the blue, but having since done my research, it turns out that this is Basterds-esque historic revisionism, in reference to Sharon Tate's murder by followers of Charles Manson. So that at least checks out, but what it doesn't fix, and the more pressing of the issues, is that this is an incredibly jarring tonal shift. From the relatively calm and laid-back atmosphere the film had been going for, we suddenly jump to A Clockwork Orange as envisioned by Nicolas Winding Refn. And while the gore is handled as tongue-in-cheek and cathartically as usual for a Tarantino picture, it still feels like we've just watched two entirely different films.

This sequence is also the closest thing to a resolution for the Sharon Tate 'plotline', in that she's introduced just so we know who she is when she is saved by Pitt and DiCaprio in the end. And since the film effectively wrapped up its main plot prior to the home invasion sequence, the Sharon Tate plot in total becomes utterly superfluous. I get the impression Sharon Tate and her being rescued from the Manson murders may have been Tarantino's main interest in the story, and unfortunately, this somehow got displaced from the focal point of the film as it was produced. Basterds shows that when fully embraced, the ultraviolent historical revisionism can work really well, and I feel if the film had stuck more closely to this concept we would have ended up with a much tighter, focused and generally more entertaining product. As it is, this ending sticks out like a sore thumb, and almost reads like a last-ditch effort to make sure the audience is still awake and that the Tarantino fanboys have gotten their fix of gratuitous violence so they don't throw a hissy fit.

End of Spoilers

Ultimately, I think this is Tarantino's weakest film to date, and once that new film buzz starts to die down, I doubt Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be remembered in the top tier of his work. Not so much a story as an old man aimlessly rambling about the good old days whilst gently masturbating.

Tarantino plans to make one last film before he retires, but with the way this one went, I wonder whether he'll be going out with a bang or a whimper. Odds aren't looking good, but maybe next time he'll at least remember to finish writing his story before shooting it.


Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - 2019 - USA - Quentin Tarantino
Score: 5
Recommendation: Low

Ciné Rambles 5th Anniversary Special - The Lost Aliens Review

Five years ago, I watched Fritz Lang's German classic, M, and was left with a desire to yell my thoughts about the ending at someone or something. After getting it all off of my chest and onto a Word document, rather than, say, write an IMDb review like a normal person, it occurred to me there were actually quite a few films that I could potentially scream my opinion on into the void. So I threw together a Blogger page and decided I was going to start writing on the Internet, as an infant would scrawl their own shit on the wall, maybe under the pretence that this would improve my writing ability.

Well, here we are. Five years later, and I'm still scrawling, and yet have still never covered half the films I originally intended to. And I still haven't rewatched M either, which has been on the frankly daunting list for, well, five years now. I would say my writing ability has improved though, so at least that's a tick.

So how does one commemorate the five year anniversary of a blog? The obvious answer is review my favourite films of all time. But that seems almost too easy an answer, plus I'm honestly not sure what to write about half of them. There are only so many ways you can write "it's good", ya know. Not to mention I'm not even sure where I'd draw the line on favourite films. I certainly couldn't pick one. Would I pick five? Ten? That's the tradition. There's about seventy-odd films I would consider favourites in some capacity, am I going to talk about all of them?

No, I thought. Let's save that for the tenth anniversary (that way I might not even have to do it!)

Instead, let's go back to that whole 'writing' thing. If my writing has improved in the space of five years, let's see what it's done in seven.

A long time ago, I had the idea to start doing movie reviews on my now-dead YouTube channel, starting with one of my favourite films of the time, Alien. You can still watch it to this day. It's utter shit but it's a humble beginning. And while I started work on a review for Aliens, I kinda got bored and figured that me just talking at the viewer all clinically while putting on a slideshow of screencaps from the film wasn't setting the world on fire. And so I canned the project, despite having promised to have it out within the month. But I did at least finish the script.

Digging through some old hard drives recently, I found the original script for the review, last edited 28th April 2012. Yikes. And even then, my reviews were still over the 1000 word mark. Some things never change. So I thought, what better way to commemorate the fifth year of the blog than with a shitty seven-year-old review?

So, I guess I am going to be talking about a favourite film of mine after all. Ladies and gents, please enjoy in all its unedited splendour, my long-awaited review of Aliens! God help you all...

"The original Alien was a great success when it first came out, grossing around $3,527, 88 in the US (for all you Americans out there) and won an Oscar and many other awards. It is still to this day one of the most famous and successful Sci-Fi Horror films of all time. So a sequel was almost inevitable. And sure enough, seven years later, director James Cameron made Aliens in 1986. Originally, Sigourney Weaver was reluctant to star in any sequels, but when she read James Cameron’s script, she agreed to do it. And so, Sigourney Weaver returned to her trademark role of Ellen Ripley. So, on to the plot. But first, spoiler warning. In order for me to explain the plot, I’m going to have to spoil the end of the first movie, Alien. So if you still haven’t seen that yet, click the annotation somewhere on the screen to skip ahead.

At the end of the first movie, Ripley, having successfully flushed the alien into outer space, sets up for hyper sleep and goes into suspended animation. 57 years later, she is picked up by a salvage team who bring her back to ‘the company’ aka Weyland Utani. She is then held responsible for the destruction of the Nostromo. Although she did blow it up, obviously, she explains about the alien and how she had to do it. The company don’t believe her, saying that her description of the alien doesn’t match any life forms they’ve ever encountered and that if there was a crashed ship on LV-426, it would have been discovered by the colony who has settled there. Therefore, Ripley’s pilot license is revoked, making her unable to fly anywhere. The company then lose contact with the colony on LV-426. Suspecting Ripley might be telling the truth, they try to persuade her to go with a bunch of colonial marines as an advisor, even offering her pilot license back. Ripley eventually agrees, wanting to face her fear of the aliens and knowing that the company want to destroy the aliens, not take them back and study them. When the marines and Ripley get to LV-426, they discover the whole complex is over-run with aliens, now known as ‘xenomorphs’. The only human left besides some impregnated people who are stuck to the wall and die very quickly anyway, is a 10 year old girl called Rebecca, or ‘Newt’ as she prefers to be called. Ripley takes her under her care and the rest of the film consists of the marines, Ripley and Newt trying to work out how to kill the xenomorphs, and escape with their lives intact.

Out of all the sequels in the world, Aliens is in that small handful that are actually better than their predecessor, in my opinion at least. There does seem to be a bit of a war over which is better, Alien or Aliens. Personally, I think Aliens is better for its action and fast-pace, but there isn’t a whole lot in it. Either way, both films work perfectly together and complement each other well. The first one is a perfect horror film and the second is a perfect blend of horror and action. It just proves that a sequel that has an almost completely different style to the first one can still be a masterpiece. And that’s the best word to describe Aliens, a masterpiece. There was never a dull moment, not even in the special edition that’s 2 and a half hours long, there’s always something going on to keep you entertained. Even at the start, there’s action as Ripley hallucinates having an alien burst out of her stomach and the film never lets up to take a break for a single moment. And then, by the end, the peaceful music starts playing, you sit back off of the edge of your seat and relax content with what you have just seen. In terms of horror, this film does an equally good job as the first one. There are a couple of jump moments, but otherwise, Aliens goes for something completely different. One of the big contributors are the motion detectors on the side of the guns. Similar to the ones used in the first movie, they track anything that moves, and their rapid beeping, slowly increasing in speed is probably the scariest part of the movie, in one scene near the end, the marines detect a huge amount of aliens moving towards them, they seal themselves in the room and stand back from the door, the motion detector still beeping they then look slowly up at the ceiling and Hicks decides to go check above the ceiling. The pace slows right down to a halt and the tension builds as he slowly pushes up the panel and takes a look. Also, closer to the beginning, the marines have a head mounted camera that links back to the control room thing in the APC. And here, Ripley and Lieutenant Gorman watch what they’re doing through these cameras. These also provide a lot of tension, as you see them being attacked from their perspective and gives a real sense of danger as you just see the bank of TV’s slowly black out. The fore-mentioned action scenes are also incredible. The initial raid on the alien’s den where the aliens first attacked is incredible because it leaves a strong impact on the viewer, to see all these tough soldiers who are the best of the best slowly picked off by the aliens is really quite intriguing to watch. And the previously mentioned scene where they are locked in the room with the aliens coming through the ceiling is brilliant as well. The aliens had cut the power, meaning that the whole room is illuminated by a red backup light and just seeing all the guns blazing and the screeching of aliens and the constant shouts of the marines is so exhilarating to watch.

In short, Aliens is an excellent film and if you love films like The Terminator or Avatar, also by James Cameron, or 80’s action, sci-fi, horror or just good films in general, this is the film for you. It is an incredible film and would go really well with a back-to-back viewing with Alien. The horror and action elements blend perfectly and the fast pace promises not to let up for a second. I know I say this a lot, but you owe it to yourself to see this film. So get some mates round on a Saturday night, really late, turn on the surround sound and prepare to be entertained. I give it a 9.5/10 and a high recommendation. See it now."

Hope you're happy, Andrew.

Hereditary (2018) - The Real vs the Supernatural

Some of you may remember back in December I listed Hereditary in my top 5 films of 2018 but was reluctant to go into any significant detail, as I wanted to save it up for its own post. Some of you may also remember in the second half of my Oscars double bill that I said I would have such a post ready in March or April. If I should be so lucky.

Who'd have thought things would actually get quite busy for me during the final months of my university degree, and while I would have loved to work on my blog, my final assessments had to take precedent, as per. On the bright side, this is officially the last time I can ever use this excuse because, as of May, I have officially finished my degree in Film and Television Production! Hurrah! While I've been studying for the past three years, the blog has been lying nearly dormant so now I've got a bit more free time on my hands, I'm hoping to give it a bit of a revival. I can't promise regular posts, but certainly more frequent than they have been.

So, with Ari Aster's new horror film Midsommar releasing this week, now seems like a very appropriate time to look back on his debut from last year. Maybe, one could argue,  more appropriate than if I were to have just randomly reviewed it out of the blue in the middle of spring. So, ultimately, I see this three-month delay as a deliberate rescheduling in the name of theming that I totally had planned from the get-go. Yes, that's the official story and I'll hear no more questions on the matter.

Now, before we get stuck in (but, you know, after my signature long waffly intro), I need to make a quick PSA. Normally, I try to keep spoilers in my posts to an absolute minimum, but for me to even begin to discuss this film to any major degree, I'm basically going to have to spoil everything. So, this entire post is basically going to be non-stop spoilers. For all of its flaws, Hereditary is still very much worth a watch and I highly recommend it, but to experience its full impact you need to know as little about the film as possible going in. Therefore, if you have not seen this film yet, PLEASE stop reading, go give it a watch (it's on Amazon Prime at the moment) and then return here. This is your point of no return.

SPOILERS AHEAD

We all good? Everyone seen it? Ok, let's get to work.

Hereditary could have been, and for the most part was shaping up to be, one of the greatest, most powerful and even dare-I-say revolutionary horror films of the decade, and even a new personal favourite of mine. The film falls down however upon reaching its ending. And by fall down, I mean it trips over the last hurdle so hard that it smashes its face on the ground and shatters its teeth beyond the recovery of even the most skilled of dentists. What I'm trying to say is, it sucks.

It's not impossible for a film to recover from a bad ending, though. Some films like 10 Cloverfield Lane and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are fantastic throughout and then soil themselves in their final ten minutes. However, both of these films still work because there's enough closure before the fuck-up that you could theoretically just switch the film off at the right moment and be satisfied, and merely omit the real ending. The problem with Hereditary and the reason it frustrates me so much is that it does not have such closure.

The best way to really explain what's wrong with it is to pretty much start at the beginning and just explain my way through the film and my reaction to it. Hence the spoilers. So, with that in mind...

The film starts off with some familiar generic horror tropes: we've got a recently deceased grandma who liked to have control over the family, there's a creepy little outcast daughter who's obsessed with the macabre, there's a stressed mother who's hobby is crafting dioramas, including of her own house and family, and just overall there's a vague foreboding sense that some supernatural shit will eventually go down, presumably in an Exorcist kinda direction. So far, so standard. Until...

About thirty minutes into the film, out of absolutely nowhere, the girl gets brutally decapitated in a car crash. And, I have to say, the presentation of this moment was masterfully horrifying. The impact is barely on screen: just flash cuts, a sickening crunch and then quiet. The camera lingers on the driver for what feels like an eternity, the back seat of the car cropped from view as he stares in empty horror. He comes home, he lies on his bed, the same expression on his face, still we are denied the information. Deep down, we know what's happened, but waiting for the confirmation is torture. Then, from out of shot, the mother screams, discovering the girl. We still don't get to see. The shot lingers on the boy just long enough before, finally, we see the head.

It's shocking, it's unexpected, and the build-up to the reveal is deliciously uncomfortable. The generic, supernatural horror plot crashes to a screeching halt and is replaced by genuine, real-world human horror. It's nothing less than an emotional sucker punch that left me feeling completely drained, with a dark pit in my stomach, like no other horror film had ever made me feel before. Hereditary took all the overdone, supernatural jump-scare-ridden bollocks that is currently choking the genre in titles like The Nun and Annabelle and threw it back in our faces, instead turning its dark mirror towards the cruel and unforgiving nature of reality and the seemingly insignificant choices we make and the unpredictable accidents that spiral out from them through the relentless Rube-Goldberg machine of life.

The fears of boogeymen, ghostly occurrences and bumps in the night are all very well, but there's still a certain distance with which we regard them, as however frightened we might get we know it can never really happen to us in real life. The beauty of Hereditary comes from its ability to craft just as scary and unpleasant a horror out of tangible, real-life tragedy that any one of us can and probably even will experience at some point in our lives, confronting us with the idea that we or our loved ones can be taken in an instant, without reason and without mercy, and what's even worse is we can be unknowingly responsible for it.

And so the film continues, now focusing on the grieving family as they try to cope with the aftermath of their actions. The mother and brother suffer from their intolerable guilt as they try to pass the blame between them, while the father does his best to hold the family together. This culminates in a dinner scene that may be one of the most uncomfortable scenes in all of cinema as the mother and brother viciously argue, topped with a truly gut-wrenching monologue from the mother. Did I mention, the mother is played by Toni Collette? Did I also mention that she deserves a fucking Oscar, for this scene alone, let alone the entire movie?

It was at about this point that I was ready to crown this as my film of the year. One of the most harrowing cinema experiences I'd ever had, not only was the apparent concept of this film so strong and so unlike anything I'd really seen in the horror genre up until that point, but its execution was mesmerising, emanating an oppressive atmosphere of dread that seemed to completely smother me on an emotional level.

I remember the excitement I felt in the cinema as I considered all of this, that thrill you feel when you know you've found something really special. I remember thinking about composing this very review, what I would say, how I would say it, and genuinely got excited by the prospect of telling the world how great this film was. I repeatedly thought to myself  'they just have to get the ending right'...

The warning signs started to appear when the supernatural shit started to creep back into the picture. The mother starts looking into séance and has a couple of mild supernatural experiences, nothing above magic-show level. She even tries to get her family involved, but the father and brother try to convince her that it's all in her head.

I actually don't mind this section at all, as it still nicely fits the theme of grief and refusing to move past death, and especially with the denying of the other family members, the supernatural results can be chalked up to the mother's deteriorating mental state. 'Great,' I thought, 'another point in the film's favour. I wonder how they're going to end it.'

'I really had you for a minute there,' the film seems to crow. 'You thought I'd ceremoniously chucked out all the overused generic horror bullshit in exchange for a more unique and powerful story, didn't you? Let's see what I've got here....oh look! It's overused generic horror bullshit!'

The dead grandma, after basically not being mentioned for about ninety minutes, is back all of a sudden with powers from beyond the grave. Out of the blue, corpses float and possessed family members crawl up the walls like spiders, chasing after the brother.
A cult of headless corpses show up, apparently worshipping the girl's severed head as some kind of new queen of the underworld. And then the film just kinda ends, in a sticky clusterfuck of seen-before horror imagery.

I was in shock. I don't think I've ever seen a film subvert it's genre expectations only to unironically revert them at the end, certainly not to this extent. The chilling, genuine horror of loss had been undermined by spoopy ghosts and some ancient mystical evil, so utterly divorced from the reality that the rest of the film's horror seemed to be placed in.

Now, before I get any angry backlash about how I missed something and have completely misinterpreted the film, I am already pretty certain that I have. I'm sure this film is too good and too smart to misjudge an ending that badly. I'm sure when I give this film a rewatch I'll notice things I didn't before and more of it will fall into place and maybe the ending might make more sense.

In the meantime, this post exists as my initial reaction, how I saw things on the first viewing and from that stance, I was disappointed. What worries me most is if this film really is supposed to be about possession and supernatural meddling all the way through, then that leaves us with an accidentally fantastic horror film stuck within a much less interesting one, and frankly, I don't really know what to make of that.

If that is the case, that does at least leave the criticism that the supernatural element takes way too much of a backseat during the second act. Maybe the horror film I thought I saw and loved never really existed there in the first place: a subjective analysis that picked up on and ignored elements I wasn't supposed to.

Ultimately, I guess that's kinda the beauty of cinema, that different audiences can have such wildly different experiences with a film and find their own meanings within the work, even if they weren't necessarily supposed to be there. Intentional or not, this film certainly had some effect on me, and quite a strong one at that, so does that really make this interpretation any less valid?

END SPOILERS

At the end of the day, Hereditary has some truly outstanding sequences of horror, however intentional they may have been, and Aster and his crew demonstrate a wealth of talent and potential. Even if this didn't entirely come together, it's still one hell of a debut and blows most other horror films out of the water.

Midsommar already seems to be receiving a lot of praise, even so early into its cinema run, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing it this weekend. While I try my best not to get too hyped before going to see any film, I'd be lying if I said I don't expect Midsommar to be one of the standout films of the year. We just have to hope that Aster can stick the landing.

Hereditary - 2018 - Ari Aster - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High