[ad_1]
"Once upon a time … in Hollywood," Quentin Taranto's overwhelming footnote for a decade that he was too young to remember, is surprisingly optimistic. Southern California has been so much criticized in the movie – "Sunset Boulevard", "Chinatown", "The Player" – and in books, from Nathaniel West and Raymond Chandler to Jacqueline Susann, that it's refreshing to see somebody remind us why so many people, in reality and in imagination, were drawn there.
In case you have not seen it yet, 'Once Upon A Time …' talks about a former Western TV star (Rick Dalton of Leonardo DiCaprio) who now faces the inconveniences of ''. a career that has never really taken off, and his double stuntman and boyfriend, Cliff Booth. This is Tarantino's tribute to countless actors and stuntmen whose names we have not yet forgotten or who do not know us, who gave us a few minutes of simple diversion before moving on to another channel.
Tarantino's films never depart from the fantasies of his youth. Quentin Tarantino's quintessential moment is in a film he did not make, Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), based on a QT script. Christian Slater's Clarence, whose daily job is running a comic book store, is trying to sell a supply of coke to a Hollywood-based B movie producer played by Saul Rubinek. Clarence reveals his unwavering admiration for the producer's films, including his Vietnamese comic book "Comin 'Home in a Body Bag": "It's a movie." A handful of dollars ", it's a movie." Mad Max " It's a film, not like 'Dr. Zhivago' – unstoppable films made from unreadable books. "
"Clarence," said the producer, "we park our cars in the same garage.
Clarence, a nerd of pop culture, is of course a substitute for Tarantino, which is interesting because most screenwriters look up in their fantastic projections while Tarantino looks down, though he slips a little when he reveals that he is a little more guarded. the culture that he lets pass. Clarence could not know that "Dr. Zhivago" was unreadable unless Tarantino tried to read it.
But who managed to cross "Dr. Zhivago"? You can not park your car in the same garage as Tarantino; a diet of spaghetti westerns and burn movies can leave the brain feeling like a malnourished body. But we are with Clarence and QT in pretense, which is a sin that no one has ever accused.
Tarantino is an alchemist who transforms junk food if not into art, at least into pulp. With the possible exception of the Coen brothers, no other filmmaker's work is greeted with so much expectation.
The critical reception of this film is not entirely positive. In The Observer, Rex Reed (film critic and star of "Myra Breckenridge") maintained his perfect past: he did not understand the work of every visionary American filmmaker of the last fifty years: "Frankly, I find this experience disconcerting, and try to laugh at Manson's murders … embarrassing. "
How does Tarantino laugh at murders by reinventing a story in which they never happened? Reed was delighted when QT changed the story to "Inglourious Basterds" and cremated Hitler and a movie theater filled with his lackeys. Now, when QT rewrites the story to avoid violence, Reed is disappointed that he has not seen the massacre.
No one should ever use the phrase "obscurely regressive," but if they did, they should record it for "Birth of One Nation" or several Clint Eastwood movies, especially "American Sniper" (2014), whom Brody loved. The fact is that Brody thinks that "OUATIH" is "motivated by the cultural nostalgia … of the classic age of Hollywood movies and its makers." This could be true if it has not been contradicted by the evidence of each Tarantino movie. never done.
I would never use the phrase "obscurely regressive," but if I used it, I would keep it for "Birth of a Nation" or several Clint Eastwood movies, especially "American Sniper" (2014), which Brody adored . But it's just me. The fact is that Brody thinks that "OUATIH" is "animated by the cultural nostalgia … of the classical age of Hollywood movies and its makers". This could be true if it was not contradicted by the evidence of each Tarantino movie. never done.
This one takes place in 1969. Most moviegoers would probably qualify the early 1930s to the late 1940s as the classic film era, and others would see the 1970s as the only one. classic era of Coppola's best films, Scorcese, Altman, Woody Allen, Hal Ashby et al. "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), "2001" (1968), and "The Wild Bunch" (1969) ushered in this age, but these films were remarkable in the way they moved away from previous gangster films. westerns and sci-fi movies.
In 1969, old Hollywood with its big studios that controlled the industry was almost extinct. The counterculture changed movies and television, and for the people of the Tarantino universe, counterculture is something that happens in another dimension. (There are three or four references to hippies in "OUATIH", all negative, and the soundtrack contains no evidence of the rock giants that caused such an upheaval at the time: no doors, dead grateful, Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, not even .. Rolling Stones, although there is a pretty cover of the neglected Stones "You're Out of Time", but that's not on the soundtrack.
Tarantino's films have nothing to do with nostalgia: all the music, film and television that he absorbed in his youth are still available to those who surf on television and the Internet or who turn on their car radio. 1969 is not nostalgic for him because, at the age of six, he hardly remembered that. Cuisinart of American pop culture. QT instinctively understands what Nabokov meant in his postscript of "Lolita": "There is nothing more exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity".
You can call Tarantino of limited scope and you will be right. He never did comedy, and although he knows his classic rock and roll, he has never tried a musical. "Inglorious Basterds" takes place in WWlI, although it's a second world war from the Tarantino universe, making it a war movie like "The Hateful Eight" is a western. He does not have the vision of Coppola and the visceral punch of Scorcese exceeds him. In fact, if the gangsters of his films were walking around the country of Scorcese, they would be spanked and sent home. And he paints in primary colors far too bright to suggest the enigmatic quality of his idol, David Lynch.
There are so many things that Tarantino can not do that it's easy to neglect what he's doing. In 2003, in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn, in all his pompous voice, sniffed out "The lack of any sense of intellectual process or judgment that characterizes the approach of Tarantino … allows for". explain the ultimate vacant quality of his work, as intelligent as it is. it's often … And yet, when I saw them [‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘Jackie Brown,’ ‘Reservoir Dogs’] recently, I was surprised to find myself bored by the three. In the end, they feel totally disposable – they really are not part of the elements that make them up (crime, guilt, race, violence, even other films), and you realize that Tarantino does not belong to them. do not have any. no idea about them either. He just thinks that these are interesting things to build a movie. "
Stanley Crouch, in a chapter of his book titled "The White Man," asks in response, "Does any of these days make films that weave these elements together? If yes, who?
Tarantino, writes Crouch, "is probably the most brilliant student of American popular culture, good and bad, of his cinematic generation." In addition, Crouch, perhaps the blackest cultural critic of his generation, defends Tarantino against Spike Lee and other critics. his use of racial slurs, especially the word: "The mastery of American discourse by Tarantino reveals an epic debris of consciously drawn ethnic characters – no types – that we almost never meet in our American fiction: Whites of the working class, "White Trash", highly placed Italian-American gangsters and their henchmen, pimps, drug traffickers; cops who talk slang of the forces of order and slang of their prisoners; Jewish film actors and aspiring Jewish producers. "
It is true that Tarantino sees all his characters through the lens of genres, but as Crouch says, he "removes the pink pop glasses."
* * *
There is another area in which QT surpasses almost all other current American directors: it discovers, resurrects and throws actors better than anyone else. For example, Samuel L. Jackson, who appeared in several Spike Lee films – including an acclaimed performance in "Jungle Fever" – but did not attain icon status until Tarantino released him in "Pulp Fiction" (1994). (He also appeared two years earlier in "True Romance.")
Steve Buscemi stood out in small roles in "Billy Bathgate" and "Miller's Crossing", but "Reservoir Dogs" earned him recognizable co-star status two years before "Fargo" of the Coen brothers did it. propels to the top.
Before Patricia Arquette played Alabama in "True Romance", her most visible role was "Nightmare on Elm Street 3." Without Tarantino's scenario, she may never have achieved the status of " Boyhood ", which earned him Oscar in 2014.
Cristoph Waltz was unknown to the American public before Tarnatino chose him for the SS detective in "Inglourious Basterds". He has now won two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress in QT movies.
Add to that the careers that Tarantino has resurrected.
Where was John Travolta's career in the 1990s? You can sum it up in three words: "Look who's talking." He directed three films about talking babies. Travolta was in a deep rut and seemed about to return to the sitcom world on TV, from where he came out when QT brought him to appear overweight with the worst hair in the film since Eraserhead and playing a little hood too stupid to remember to take his gun with him when he went to the bathroom. He went from "Pulp Fiction" to his best performance in "Get Shorty" a year later.
After a long career as a child actor and then lead actor, Tarantino saw the actor in Kurt Russell and cast him as a roughly psychotic murderer in "Death Proof," the only actor in the world. one of the segments of "Grindhouse" (2007), and now as the main stuntman in "Once upon a time in Hollywood".
Bruce Willis was far from unknown when he played in Pulp Fiction, the abandoned fighter adventurer of the mafia boss of Ving Rhames, but his career was deadlocked. In both his role as an actor and in his career, "Pulp Fiction" was a picture of B12 for him.
Lawrence Tierney. The novelist and critic Barry Gifford in "The Devil Thumbs A Tour and Other Unforgettable Movies" on Tierney playing another of his classic nasty roles in "Born To Kill" (1947): "… there is no decency in the face of Lawrence Tierney, the most cruelly beautiful face on the film. contrary to [Robert] Mitchum's face does not leave a trace, a man unable to compromise. "Why did it take a 29-year-old intelligent nerd making his first feature film to remember that Tierney was such a big and imposing screen presence?
"The empress of Blax-mining films" is idolized by the small white roles of "Pulp Fiction" that talk about Foxy Brown, the heroine of Pam Grier's film, but QT has centered Grier on the actress in "Jackie Brown" (adapted from "Rum Punch"). by one of QT's favorite writers, Elmore Leonard). Michael Keaton, star of "Batman", was also co-starring with Ray Nicolette, FBI's cynical agent in Jackie Brown, before embarking on an Oscar, in a brilliant use of A-lister. (Keaton liked the role so much that he replayed it, uncredited the following year in "Out of Sight," taken from another Leonard novel.)
* * *
And then there is Leo and Brad.
DiCaprio is the biggest movie star in the world – perhaps the biggest star in the history of cinema. And all without the help of Twitter or Instagram and the artificial boost of free movies.
No one else has done such a great job and has maintained its popularity for so long. It's been almost a quarter of a century since he gave a remarkable (though not very visible) performance as Rimbaud to Paul Verlaine of David Thewlis in Agnieszka Holland. He had played in a movie called "Total Eclipse". Life "), an autistic boy (" What does Gilbert Grape eat? "), A punk shooter (" The Quick and the Dead ") and a junkie (" The Basketball Diaries ").
No other actor could have played all these roles. Add Frank Abignale, Mercurial's scammer in "Catch Me If You Can" and, no matter what you think of Baz Luhrman's movie, an epic performance as the most intriguing character in modern American literature, Jay Gatsby . As Gene Seymour wrote in Newsday: "He's too good actor to be a star."
In "Once upon a time … in Hollywood", he lives in the soul of a loser, a dangerously mature actor, who strives to keep his name within sight of List B.
Brad Pitt is not as big as Leo, but he is close and, like Leo, does not use social media and avoids franchise movies (unless you want to count the "Oceans" movies). Pitt's rise to critical acceptance was longer and more difficult than DiCaprio's. For example, in 2008, David Denby, who wrote in Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading, wrote that Pitt "exaggerated a cheerful slaughter program, snapping his fingers, signaling us, in the long tradition of mediocre actors, that he should not be confused with the character that he plays. This was unfair for many reasons, but mostly because, early in his career, Pitt had established that he was a character actor in the body of a prominent man.
There was his comic relief cameo as a stoner in "True Romance," and "12 Monkeys" earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In his perhaps most bizarre role, he was hysterically incomprehensible as a fist-fighter fighting the Irish traveler in Guy Ritchie's "Snatch".
DiCaprio, too, has the talents of a great actor: all the merit of Christoph Waltz in "Django Unchained" is the performance of Leo as the owner of demonic slave slaves who should have won the Oscar . In "Once Upon a Time", when a child actress, played by Julia Butters with a strange skill, told Rick "It's the best acting game I've ever seen. never seen ", Rick, surprised, tears. It may be the best game Leo has ever seen.
DiCaprio has already participated in 28 feature films, including 48 in Pitt. In this film, both roles are the best of their career, and it's probably not a coincidence that they play in opposition. In fact, they play both sides of the same character, Steve McQueen, whose image, seen early in "Once Upon A Time" at a party, played by British actor Damian Lewis, haunts the film. McQueen, a passionate biker who has done many of his stunts, played the lead, like Rick, in a televised bounty hunter's western.
When another actor asks Rick when he almost had the role of McQueen in "The Great Escape," one of the coolest stuff Tarantino has ever shot, we are seeing the fantasy of Rick from a famous scene of "The Great Escape" with him. CGIed in for McQueen.
Another ghost haunts "Once Upon A Time …", the man at whom QT had learned so much about the slam poetry of violence and the economics of the language: Elmore Leonard. Sometimes Rick and Cliff, the in-line eater, seem to be characters in Leonard's "Get Shorty" Hollywood novel. A long moving sequence in which Cliff stumbles over the Manson family on an old movie set takes place as a scene of Leonard Pitt's "Justified" replacing Marshal Raylen Givens of Timothy Olyphant. Against all odds, Rick and Cliff appear as the real heroes they have seen in movies for years and save heroin, Sharon Tate by Margot Robbie, the brilliant golden presence in the center of the story.
This is Tarantino's first film with a heartfelt heart, and the first to succeed this fairy tale title, "Once Upon A Time".
[ad_2]
Source link