Once upon a time in Hollywood….

August 23, 2019August 25, 2019 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

..is a fable told by the Homer of modern cinema, Quentin Tarantino. With a pantheon of Hollywood gods, heroes and harpies, he weaves a dreamlike tapestry in vivid, acid-dipped tangerine, chocolate, fuchsia and blue, bringing it home with the blood red signature we have come to expect from all things Tarantinoed.
It’s as perfect a vehicle for Brad and Leo as you’ll see. Two actors, perfectly balanced on either side of a ’66 cream Cadillac. They reel you in, you are totally thrilled that they let you hitch their ride. You are safe with them, they tell a good story.

Brad keeps everything on the road with his cheeky charm and rusty biceps. Leo draws you in, fools you, again, into thinking he was born to play this part and only this part, forget Gilbert Grape, Romeo, The Great Gatsby or Wolf on Wall Street, this is the one. He is the not-so-has-been cowboy actor Rick Dalton, the fictitious star of TV western ‘Bounty’ that Quentin wants him to be. The year is 1969. It’s summertime, “The goddam hippies are everywhere”, and they’re higher and darker than they’ll ever be again…
I watched this, and heard it’s brilliant, Neil Diamond-studded sound-track with my mother, who’s of the right vintage to remember it all, as though the 60 years between were just another LSD trip. She said she was moved, which is as sound a seal of approval as you’ll find, she’s been there, lived that time, time when a cigarette was your index finger and a maraschino 🍒 was the definition of ever so tacky decadence.
If you’ve not seen OUATIH yet, stop now/burn after reading, the next paragraph dramatically spoils the fun, but is a must-read once you’ve seen ‘OUATIH’.

And so we come to Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, the wife of Roman Polanski, is a smiley feet-dangling side-show to Leo and Brad’s shenanigans. She is introduced as the unattainable love-interest, lusted after by blonde gods like Steve McQueen but faithful to her beloved Polanski. We are waiting for her to be brought into the Tarantino action, like a Thurman, to bathe the baddies in blood, but she remains protected, innocent, like a doodle daydream in the margins. Why? Does Leo really get the girl in the end? He’s invited into her house and seems pleased – but maybe it’s just because it brings him closer to getting that Polanski part he’s always dreamed of.
Tarantino has not only cut but changed what really happened in the end. Those of you who are 70, you already know the twist, you know who Sharon Tate was and how she, her unborn child and 4 other house guests were mercilessly murdered by the Manson cult members in what was labelled “the most horrific crime in modern history”, in Polanski’s own house. Why has Tarantino changed this? It feels right, it feels good, to see the evil doers go up in laughable flames, to feel the trauma averted, healed. The hippies are bad, but their evil is left at a superficial level, they are overcome, unlike the truth of the gory Manson murder. Tarantino explains, in his interview with Empire:

“I was just getting ready to do a deep dive, and all of a sudden I was just like, ‘Let me stop before I get started on this – do I really want to let the Manson family into my head, into my psyche? Do I really want to think about where they were all coming from?”
And so he didn’t. I wonder how Polanski feels, in his exile, maybe he is pleased to see the trauma erased, to see what might have happened in a better scenario, see the past rewritten. Or maybe he is angry at the near-farce of Tarantino’s horror, at the uncanny reimagining of his long-lost wife and unborn child.

Tarantino’s offering comes out with a couple of other films to mark the anniversary of Tate’s demonic murder. And for the first time her family have spoken out about it.

As someone going into the film without any idea who she was and how she died, I would have left it none the wiser, were it not for my mother filling me in. Now I do know, I find the absence of her death in the film a fitting memorial, leaving her spirit undisturbed, allowing it peace and safety, if not in reality, at least in the collective consciousness, which must surely be a good thing?

Review of Dunkirk

July 24, 2017 ~ Bagriella ~ Leave a comment

On leaving the cinema, I felt moved and a little seasick after 2 hours in Nolan’s stylishly be-washed version of the Dunkirk evacuation. Looking back, however, I do think he missed quite a few tricks. More sea and sky than man and action. And the dialogue? Sparse, garbled and inaudible. Tom Hardy’s aviator goggles will probably get the Oscar for looking up…Then down…Then up… Perplexed yet calm.

Branagh and Rylance get their teeth stuck in, no question, but the screenplay doesn’t give them so much as a tin of spam to chew on. Lank grey scenes lap the repetitive sinking-ship action, as each new batch of grey extras topple off the decks. One or two figures form a bond and are distinguished from the crowd with a few close ups, but we’re given little to latch on to.

The rich tapestry of Dunkirk stories that could have populated the shores of both France and Britain, are not here – The tales within and behind the queues for boats, the tales of heroism from the civilian seamen from other side, are carried solely in Mark Rylance’s father-son skiff team, splashes of colour in desperate need of background.

The scale of the recovery feat, termed ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’, the sheer number of men and the relatively small number of tiny boats that ferried them all back, (over 300,000 men in only 700 brave boats, back and forth, in just over a week) did not come across, visually or mentally.

It would be interesting to ask the veteran rescuers if they think Nolan did the scale of their efforts justice. Perhaps they weren’t the focus he was after. But, of all the lenses he could have put over Dunkirk, it seems to me he chose a very obvious one and lost the chance to distinguish Dunkirk from other war films.

What was unique about Dunkirk and why it is now known as ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’ was that it demonstrated human capacity for hope and fearless altruism, en masse, collectively. Not the old story, tired and tested in every war film – man saves men. This one could have been different – hundreds of ordinary people of various ages and both sexes, getting up and going, against all odds, for the greater good, at the last minute, together. Rylance’s civilian voice was good but it could never be broad enough to hold all that water. Nolan needed to scale up the message. It would have been a timely one.

Further reading

That said – Nolan’s Dunkirk has done a good job in whetting my appetite for Dunkirk, or at least what ended up in the editing room floor.

‘Dunkirk, the History behind the motion picture’

‘The Little Ships of Dunkirk’

‘The Little Ships’ (tale for your little ones not lucky enough to be able to sit on great-grand-parents’ knees, told from a girl’s perspective)

Endless Poetry is endlessly poetic

February 1, 2017February 3, 2017 ~ Bagriella ~ 1 Comment

Last Sunday was grey and empty until I found myself in the cinema, in the strange comfort of octogenarian Chilean directing legend Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest film, Endless Poetry.

I had bought my ticket on a whim – All I knew was that it was in Spanish, in Chile and might be a little weird and poetic, as the title suggested. What I got was the most eye-opening, jaw-dropping two hours and 8 minutes of 2017 so far, unless Jodorowsky’s sequel comes out this year…

And I’m so pleased, in these unsavoury times, that there are 4 more delicious courses I’ve yet to eat, that Endless Poetry is the second in a 5 part film cycle, that there’s The Dance of Reality and soon the other 4 will be ready…

Meantime, instead of giving away the menu of his surreal feast of a film, I’m going to list the thoughts that have fed me (not without a little indigestion) ever since…

…It doesn’t matter if it’s written on a wall or floorboard and no one but the poet will ever read it, everything disappears eventually; prayers are like poems, they are never seen but always needed by the prayer…

…Everything is beautiful, even and especially the mutations of normality…

…Anyone can walk in a straight line to anywhere they want to go; obstacles are illusions we can erase…

…Also, alongside linear there is cyclical, since maths is inexplicable; life is a cycle, returning to where it came from and filled with returns all along a direct way…

…Meantime Death is always there; suicide is blindness…

…Through misguided fear, we hide and make ourselves up like clowns.

… In reality, reality is up for grabs, and so we have nothing to hide and nothing to show…

…The naked soul and body are uplifting and captivating and no less so for being marked and scarred by the passage through life…

…We are all puppeteers and our puppets dance together. When we are holding our puppet-selves, our own identity is unclear and maybe this is because…

…We are connected to each other…

…That we are each exclusively in charge of ourselves is an illusion…

…In reality we are all in the same puppet show together and share manipulation mutually, all our limbs are up for grabs to the nearest puppeteer…

…And with this power, love is not in the keeping, it’s in the letting go, the negation of the urge to manipulate, the diffusion of our fixed idea, it’s acceptance – no interference, no orchestration; just the acknowledgement of a God in the other person, the godliness that is beyond perfection….

…The job of poetry is not to have to say it all like this, in a clumsy list, in so many words, but to say it in fewer and to trigger a response that lasts forever in the consciousness, which is universal, and endless.

The job of this film is to demonstrate poetry, in action, and indeed it accomplishes this almost impossible task, sometimes effortlessly, perhaps endlessly.

Muchas Gracias Mr Jodorowsky!