filM

Cult fiction

The ninth movie from Quentin Tarantino is a dreamy doozy, his most unapologetically Tarantinian film yet. History and conventionality be damned, for QT is behind the camera, and he favors mayhem and a little thing called artistic license.

Set in 1969, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood captures the ’60s film scene and culture as they are dying, and they most certainly die hard. Through the Tarantino storytelling lens, they also die in mysterious and hallucinogenic ways.

Making a run at Newman and Redford, we get Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as insecure, hasbeen actor Rick Dalton and his trusty stuntman, Cliff Booth, respectively. Dalton’s career has devolved into playing the bad guys on TV’s The F.B.I. while past-his-prime and blackballed Booth is relegated to driving him around and being his confidante.

The setup allows Tarantino to go hog wild with the ’60s visuals and soundtrack. Hollywood is a monumental achievement on the art and sound direction fronts. Some of Tarantino’s soon-to-be most famous shots are in this movie, including a crane shot over a drive-in screen that dropped my jaw. The soundtrack pops with the likes of Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, Jose Feliciano and Paul Revere & the Raiders.

The looks and sounds are so authentic that you might wonder if Dalton and Booth were real people. They were not, but they’re based on folks like Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood and Hal Needham.

The most notable “real person” character is Manson Family murder victim Sharon Tate, played beautifully by Margot Robbie. She’s the luminous center of the movie, with Tarantino and Robbie taking this opportunity to show Tate as the beautiful, promising person and star Tate was rather than the footnote she’s become in the annals of Charles Manson’s crazed bloody history.

The Manson Family plays a big part in Tarantino’s twisted fairy tale. The fictional Dalton happens to live next to Sharon Tate and husband Roman Polanski, and Booth pays a visit to the Spahn Ranch. The Spahn Ranch is where the Manson Family squatted, and Booth has a sit down with Spahn himself (played by super craggy Bruce Dern). Unlike recent movies that almost provide the Manson family with some strange level of grace (Charlie Says), Tarantino shows them as bumbling, idiotic and pathetic. It’s a solid choice.

DiCaprio, in his first role since taking home his much deserved Oscar for The Revenant—and his second teaming with Tarantino after Django Unchained—will probably find himself in the running again. He’s a nervous, hilarious mess as Dalton, a man prone to crying in public over his career, but still capable of blowing up a TV set with tremendous guest star acting fireworks. He has a trailer rant and a hostage-taking bad guy speech that now stand as two of his finest ever acting moments.

In what is also his second teaming with Tarantino (after Inglourious Basterds), Pitt is forever funny as a man just coasting through life with little care in the world. He’ll face off with Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) just to shush his big mouth, or buy an acid-dipped cigarette for kicks. And when he smokes that cigarette, very strange things happen, and the wonderful Pitt laugh is put to its best use since he played Tyler Durden in Fight Club.

The end of the ’60s was bona fide nutty times, and this is a nutty movie. It also manages to be quite heartfelt and moving. Tarantino says he might only have one more movie in him after this one. I’m curious to see if he can top himself one more time, or if he just does that rumored Star Trek movie and calls it a day. Ω

“i know we’ve gotta shoot the movie, but i figured i could kill two birds and pose for my Calvin Klein ad.”

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4The Art of Self-Defense Machismo and sanctioned violence of any kind get a sinister, satiric, roundhouse kick to the face in The Art of SelfDefense, the new dark comedy from writerdirector Riley Stearns. Meek accountant Casey (a totally on-point Jesse Eisenberg) is a nerdy wimp on all fronts. He runs out of dog food for his adorable dachshund and must take the long, lonely walk to the local grocer in the dark of night. A motorcyclist with a rider on back stops, asks if he has a gun, then rides away. On his way back from the store, that same motorcycle gang kicks the unholy shit out of him. Seeking help, Casey visits a dojo where he encounters Sensei, played by veteran actor Allessandro Nivola in a star turn that might perhaps get him the sort of outstanding notices he’s always deserved. Sensei is at times helpful in Casey’s quest to become more self-assured, but Sensei also has an evil side. Be wary of the night classes, where he has no problem breaking a man’s arm in two to demonstrate one of his twisted rules for the martial arts. The humor in Stearn’s script is drier than burnt toast left out in the middle of the desert with a magnifying glass perched over it. The actors don’t get laughs by telling jokes. They more or less get the laughs by being so hilariously awful you can’t believe it, especially Nivola. Teeth getting knocked out of somebody’s face have never been this funny.

4Crawl Alligators get their due as nasty reptilian cinematic monsters with Crawl, the biggest surprise so far this summer when it comes to simply having a damn good time at the movies. It puts that other monster reptile movie, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, to shame. Southern Florida is getting walloped by a hurricane, and collegiate swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) hasn’t heard from her dad (Barry Pepper) as the situation grows into a Category 5. Against foreboding radio warnings, Haley drives to her old family home in an attempt to locate her wayward poppa and put other family members’ minds at ease. With the family dog tagging along (of course), Haley ventures into the basement/crawlspace, where dad is unconscious with a suspicious wound. We’re not too far into the movie when the alligator baddies are introduced, and these toothy demons are taking the rising waters as an excuse to swim around and party on human flesh. From the first gator introduction to the final frame, Crawl aims to kick your butt with all out horror thrills, with plenty of hurricane terror mixed in for good measure. The vast majority of the film takes place in the house, and huge credit goes to director Alexandre Aja and his production team for making the basement a fun place for people to get rolled by an alligator. The alligators, mostly CGI, are terrific movie beasties, entirely convincing whether above or below water. Unlike Jaws, Aja doesn’t hide his monsters for most of the movie. They show up early on, and these bastards aren’t going away.

5Midsommar Two films in, and it’s safe to declare writer-director Ari Aster a master of horror. His Midsommar, the sophomore effort following his masterpiece Hereditary, is two and a half hours of nerve-fraying terror staged mostly in broad daylight, and it is a thing of demented beauty. Dani (dynamite Florence Pugh) and Christian (excellent Jack Reynor) are having relationship issues. Dani is super dependent on Christian during a major time of need, as her sister is constantly bombarding her with dark mood swing modern correspondence (translation: toxic emails). Then, tragedy strikes Dani’s family, and it’s time for Christian to step up for his part of this committed relationship. His solution? Take Dani along on what was supposed to be a bro trip to Sweden for a traditional family summer festival. He sort of asks her to go, she sort of says yes, and, before you know it, Dani is on a plane to Sweden with Christian and his friends. Shortly after arrival, Dani and friends ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms. The weirdness kicks in immediately, and the movie comes off as a really bad trip. Pugh, so good in this year’s Fighting with My Family, makes a grand statement with this movie. She’s an acting force that puts her in the upper echelon. She throws everything out on the table, and it all pays off in a performance that will surely be one of the year’s most memorable. One of the pleasures of Aster’s latest is that it’s obvious where things are going. It’s a mystery that puts a ton of clues right in front of your face in vividly visible fashion as the sun shines brightly. While the movie is a deliberately paced slow burn, it’s nearly two and a half hours pass by pretty quickly. Aster never loses the sense of dread, so while you could call his movie predictable in some ways, it’s not even close to being a letdown. It’s a movie that constantly delivers on the dread it promises in every frame.

3Spider-Man: Far from Home Tom Holland cements his status as best-ever Spider-Man with what amounts to the goofiest, but still major fun, Spider-Man movie yet. Jon Watts once again directs as Peter Parker looks to vacation with his friends after the events of Endgame, traveling to Europe and leaving his superhero responsibilities behind. When a strange breed of elemental monsters start striking the planet, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) interrupts Peter’s sojourn and gets him back into the swing of things. Jake Gyllenhaal gets into the shenanigans as Mysterio, a crime fighter from another dimension that slides right into the Tony Stark mentor role. Holland is good fun as Spidey, giving him a nice, youthful effervescence to go with his comic timing. Zendaya rules as MJ, Jon Favreau gets a lot more screen time—it’s a good thing!—as Happy, and the film doesn’t have nearly enough Marisa Tomei. It’s a bit lightheaded at times, but it’s the sort of breezy affair that the Marvel universe needed to get things revved up again. Hopefully, this is just the beginning for Holland and he has a bunch of these in his future, because he’s perfect for the role.

1Yesterday Danny Boyle (127 Hours, 28 Days Later) directs the straining saga of Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a wannabe musician working part-time in a grocery store while also busking on street corners and playing small solo gigs with his trusty guitar. Jack’s burgeoning music career is managed by Ellie (Lily James), who is fostering a decades-old crush on Jack while getting him gigs at closing hotels and side tents at music festivals. Riding his bike home from a gig, the world suffers a solar flare and a worldwide power loss, and Jack gets hit by a bus, knocking out a couple of his teeth and sending him to the hospital. Post-accident, Ellie and some friends give Jack a new guitar and suggest he bust out a song for them. He goes with “Yesterday” by the Beatles, and the group is moved, as if hearing the song for the first time. That’s because they are hearing it for the first time. A quick Google check by Jack confirms the impossible: Somehow, someway, Jack now lives in a parallel world where John, Paul, George and Ringo never came together to make music. So what does Jack do? Why, he plagiarizes the entire Beatles catalog, of course. Rather than exploring the dark side of plagiarism in a comedic way, Boyle’s movie begs you to love Jack— and to sympathize with him while he tries to figure out his romantic interest in Ellie. Rather than crafting a film that seriously addresses a world without the Beatles, the movie becomes scared of itself and becomes nothing but a lame rom-com.