By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt | Leonardo DiCaprio | Margot Robbie
Country: china, united_kingdom, united_states
Year: 2019
Running time: 161
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7131622
Thom says: “I’m the first to admit it, I just am not a fan of Quentin Tara ntino (the only film of his I’ve really liked [&, yes, I’ve seen all of them] was THE HATEFUL EIGHT). But this shoddy effort is an embarrassment, especially considering that it garnered Academy Award nominations. Hollywood has no business endorsing this mediocrity. But, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t particularly bored as the story moved right along considering its sloppy length, but I kept questioning the enticement of focusing on a D-List actor of questionable talent going through his rounds in a bad, trite cowboy television series, bad films where he always plays the “heavy”, or the Spaghetti Westerns he eventually ends up making in Italy, and his life in the late 60’s Los Angeles, where he spends most of his time with his chauffeur, a failed stunt man and wife-killer, with quite a bit of charm, alertly played by Oscar winner Brad Pitt.
“But besides the mistake of the main character Tarantino has to bring in actual celebrities from the time period with absolutely no regard for what the characters actually were. While Margot Robbie does breathe some life into the charming Sharon Tate, the other real-life characters like Roman Polanski, Bruce Lee, Steve McQueen, Sam Wanamaker, Connie Stevens, Mama Cass, etc. are all dreadful cookie-cutter, cardboard imitations that are played for iconic laughs. Worse still, the villains of the piece, the Manson Girls, are portrayed as stoned-out hippies on a bum trip, that were littering the Hollywood landscape. But, in reality, nothing about the Manson Girls was hippie-like. They were stone-cold sociopaths, with no regard for human life. Also the group living at Spahn Ranch here were far more plentiful than Manson’s actual cult, which didn’t even amount to 10. Worse still, how can you make a film about with the side issue of the Manson Murders and barely have Charles Manson as a character. Maybe he couldn’t find a way to trivialize that Beelzebub horror. I loved the young Julia Butters (so good as Ella in TRANSPARENT) as Trudi Fraser, the wise, young kid star. Individual scenes could be powerful. And if you can stand violence on film the ending sequence is a humdinger. But, Tarantino, who has long promised to flee the scene, might well follow though with that threat after this over-rated monstrosity. Also, trying to alter history, isn’t a very good reason for making a film. 2.5 cats“