The main issue I have with Rob Garver’s documentary about Pauline Kael, arguably the most influential film critic ever to write about movies, is that it’s too reverential of its subject. In Garver’s film, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, we do get the warts, but they’ve been airbrushed, even if only slightly. The film also tries to pack an entire lifetime into its 100 minutes, which often gives the feeling of rushing through the major events of Kael’s life.
Those few reservations aside, What She Said is a consistently entertaining and enlightening look at Kael. Every person – this writer most certainly included – wrestling with their movie obsession, as well as the movies themselves, owes her a great debt.
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Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (OUaTiH) is Tarantino’s re-creation of and loving, yet gleefully revisionist, tribute to this fractious period in Hollywood’s history. Without giving too much away, this film is a spiritual cousin to Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. That movie incensed more than a few people with its shockingly gory climax that reimagined the end of World War II.
The same will probably be true for OUaTiH. Tarantino puts his unique spin on the bloody, unspeakable events that closed the 1960s. When creating works of art, I have no need for the artist to feel constrained by the facts when representing real events. A big part of art is reimagining the world in new, different, and interesting ways. A possible exception is documentaries, but even those have exceptions to the rule. Mainly, the purpose Tarantino’s divergence from truth serves in OUaTiH, at least for me, was one of catharsis. Just like in Inglourious Basterds, we get to see good triumph over evil, in the bloodiest, most outrageous way possible…
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As if we needed any more confirmation, director Quentin Tarantino has proven again that he is a singular talent. There’s a real irony in what makes his films unique, because his art depends so heavily on referencing other movies. The man is like a cinematic blender; he fills himself with his favorite genres, and he violently liquefies them all into a wholly new product. The product this time is The Hateful Eight, a western that mines such distinct storytelling approaches as both an Agatha Christie drawing room murder mystery and John Carpenter’s The Thing, with more gallons of blood than Brian de Palma’s Carrie.
As big and loud and nauseating and hilarious as the movie is, it’s essentially a small chamber piece with a handful of characters talking to – and sometimes merely at – each other in a room for almost three hours. It could easily (and fascinatingly) be staged as a play. In fact, Tarantino first produced it as a staged reading with cast members like Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern already on board. It’s Glengarry Glen Ross by way of a grindhouse double feature. This eighth film by Tarantino is a blood soaked yarn that is by turns thrilling, disturbing, and troubling, but it further cements the director as a visual stylist and screenwriter who is unrivaled at his craft. The director’s attention to detail, and his loving devotion to the films of the past, is evident from frame one of The Hateful Eight, with an opening shot – filmed in beautiful 70mm Panavision – that is an incredibly slow pan of a gorgeous snow swept landscape.
Westerns are getting the treatment in this movie that he gave to exploitation movies in Grindhouse. If his last film, 2012’s Django Unchained, was an homage to the askew sensibilities of the Spaghetti Western, The Hateful Eight is honoring the classical Hollywood version of the same genre. This is The Alamo if it had been co-directed by Sam Peckinpah and Lucio Fulci. The “roadshow” cut of the film, which is the version I was able to see, even begins with a musical overture in the style of that Western classic. Supplying the overture and the rest of the score is legendary composer Ennio Morricone, whose music is deeply haunting and rich with atmosphere. The man who scored classics like Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West a half-century ago has only gotten better, if that’s even possible. Morricone didn’t have time to provide an entire score, so he gave Tarantino permission to license unused tracks that he previously wrote for John Carpenter’s aforementioned The Thing.
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