Tag: Lena Dunham

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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

About three-quarters of the way through Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, “California Dreaming” floats to the top of the soundtrack. But even though, at this point, we’ve already smoked a joint with Michelle Phillips (Rebecca Rittenhouse), it’s not the version of the song that made the Mamas and the Papas into household names. Instead, it’s José Feliciano’s impassioned, flamenco-inflected cover. The wistful song about homesickness, swaddled in superfluous organ and string, is twisted to add to the mounting sense of dread. This is August 1969, and Charles Manson is about to bring the Swinging ’60s party to an end. “I suppose everything had changed, and nothing had,” wrote Joan Didion of the days that followed the shocking, ritualistic murders of Sharon Tate and six others.

When the Weinstein Company collapsed, and disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein’s most significant discovery announced he was on the market for a new studio with a movie about the Manson Family murders, the creeping dread and sudden, searing violence is what everyone envisioned. I sincerely doubt that the winners of the ensuing bidding war — Harry Potter producer David Heyman and Columbia Pictures/Sony — expected to get a $90-million buddy comedy. And yet, this is what they got, and they should be glad.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is something Tarantino hasn’t been in a long time—fun. If that seems like a strange thing to say about a film centered on the gruesome cult murder of seven people, that’s because it’s not really what the film is about. Or rather, this sprawling work is not solely about Manson, but about the context that produced him. As Family member Leslie Van Houton (Victoria Pedretti) points out, they were the first generation to grow up watching people murder other people on TV for fun.

Leonardo Dicaprio as Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth

Two of the people intimately involved in creating those fake, televised murders are Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton is the former star of Bounty Law, a popular Western series that ran on NBC in the late ’50s, early ’60s. Booth was his stunt double on the show, and now his best friend/retainer. To reference another true crime sensation, he’a kind of a Kato Kaelin figure.

During a meeting with producer Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), Dalton is forced into the crushing realization that his career is on the downswing. Tarantino, with his simultaneous mastery of cinema forms and willingness to remix them, tells the story of Dalton’s career with a combination of voice-over (courtesy of Kurt Russell), flashbacks, and archival clips from fictional shows and movies. You might think a film that was initially billed as Tarantino’s take on Helter Skelter would resemble the director’s only literary adaptation, Jackie Brown, but it feels more like Grindhouse, the 2007 exploitation pastiche he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.

Damon Herriman as Charles Manson

Dalton lives in the Hollywood Hills on Cielo Drive, right next door to Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Polanski, coming off Rosemary’s Baby, is the hottest director in Hollywood. Dalton, part of the older generation New Hollywood types like Polanski are making obsolete, wishes he could get an audition with his new neighbor. But he’s not even on their radar as they power around town in Polanski’s MG roadster on their way to parties with Steve McQueen (Damien Lewis), blissfully unaware they’re living in a doomed world, and the hammer is about to fall.

Tarantino’s post-modernism is, as always, a double-edged sword. Jackie Brown is the director’s most disciplined and most emotionally resonant work. Grindhouse is a carnival funhouse. Both have their place, of course, but the latter is certainly shallower.

Where Once Upon a Time in Hollywood redeems itself is in the depths of the performances. The casting is fantastic. Lena Dunham nails Gypsy, one of the Manson cult leaders. Dakota Fanning plays Squeaky Fromme with ice water in her veins. Nicholas Hammond, a Hollywood journeyman who played one of the Von Trapp kids in The Sound of Music, steals scenes from DiCaprio as a pretentious TV director named Sam Wanamaker. Ten-year-old Julia Butters gives method acting lessons to Dalton in a bravado scene that dances on the fourth wall.

DiCaprio delivers one of the best performances of his career as the washed-up Dalton, all sniffles, limps, and nips from the hip flask. Robbie is radiant as Tate, especially in a sequence where she charms her way into a screening of a Dean Martin movie she’s in and dons giant glasses to watch herself act on the big screen. But it’s Pitt who rises above the rest of the cast in a phenomenally self-aware performance as a guy whose lack of self-awareness is both his greatest asset and biggest handicap. When he picks up a hitchhiker and heads for the Spahn Ranch, where the Family is holed up, Pitt becomes the chill in your spine.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a sprawling mixtape of a movie. It’s long, self-indulgent, and never quite congeals into more than the sum of its parts, at least on first viewing. It could very much use the moderating influence of Pulp Fiction editor Sally Menke, who died in an accident after her Academy Award nomination for Inglourious Basterds But it’s an absolute joy to watch. The production design is impeccable; with the help of legendary special effects designer John Dykstra, Tarantino’s team seamlessly recreates 1969 Los Angeles. It is in turns funny, sad, exhilarating, and horrifying. I’ve called it a comedy, but it really defies genre description. It’s a comedy with a gun to your head, daring you to laugh while you wait for the shot that may or may not come.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

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“Broad City” and “Girls” Vie For The Voice Of A Generation

Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer of Broad City

It is unfair that Broad City and Girls are so often mentioned in the same breath because the two shows’ differences are many, while their similarities are surface-level. Both are half-hour comedies about white, female friends in their mid-twenties as they navigate sex, jobs and friendship in New York City. Both are written, directed and acted by their female creators. And both are saddled, time and again, with defining Who Young Women Are for the dry sponge of baby-boomer-run media. With both series debuting new seasons this month (Girls on its 5th and Broad City on its 3rd), we should ready ourselves yet again for an endless puddling of comparative lit devoted to the shows, in the mediocre company of which we can count this blog.

Despite their skin-deep similarities, Broad City and Girls are different species. It’s easy to love Broad City and hate Girls. It’s fun to watch Broad City while, at times, it almost physically hurts to watch the self-defeating character machinations of the women and men on Girls. And while Lena Dunham’s sea-change of an HBO show tends to garner criticism for its white, middle class myopia, Broad City gets a critical pass, even a critical hi-five.

Broad City, a Comedy Central production, takes the classic plot approach pitting its odd couple leads against an episode-defining event. One of the show’s inaugural episodes follows Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer as they try to raise money to go to a Lil Wayne concert, navigating everything from Craigslist to the Q Train to make it happen. In its newest episode, Abbi and Ilana struggle to make it to a former roommate’s art opening, encountering rabid warehouse sales, a circus school graduation, and a moving porta potty along the way. The structure is predictable but the take is fresh — the show’s humor is expertly patched together from whatever was on Twitter last week and the fucked up story your friend from college told you about her crush. In this new episode as in the past two seasons, they pull it off.

Formally, Broad City is the “Frogger” episode of Seinfeld taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing ever happens. It doesn’t matter if George Costanza gets Frogger across the street or not. It doesn’t matter if circus school is in session. It is less about the characters, lovable as they are, than it is about the weird fabric of New York City. This bodes well for the series longevity, so long as the writing stays good.

But the by-the-book approach of Broad City also somewhat limits what I cringe at calling the “radical potential” of a show like Broad City, because, at the end of the day, this is a complex portrait of being young and loving weed and hating your job in New York City, but it’s a simple draft of what female friendship looks like.

Allison Williams, Jemina Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet of Girls

Girls— frequently intolerable, unkind to its characters, caricatural, too white, set in New York City but never on the subway (this really annoys me) — nonetheless stakes a more difficult claim. It still seeks, and has always sought, to expand the category of what kinds of female relationships, bodies and emotions can be shown on mainstream television. In its 5th season, we meet Marnie (Allison Williams) on her wedding day, neurotically over-directing her doomed nuptials with chronically selfish boyfriend, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach.) (If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.) Hannah is on hand, acting surly: “She has been so inappropriate and unsupportive of me all day,” Marnie complains to Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), while Jessa (Jemima Kirke) flirts with danger in the form of Hannah’s ex, Adam (Adam Driver). The episode switches lithely between the women’s wedding preparations and the men’s. The writing is good: “This conversation sounds like a fucking E. E. Cummings poem,” rails the series current hero, Ray, when Adam and Hannah’s new boyfriend engage in a long-form, male emotion-grunting session. 

As far as episodes go, the newest is far from the most challenging. Girls cut its teeth on crack, nudity, awkward sex, alcoholism, BDSM and (perhaps most offensive) painfully unlikeable characters. None of that here. The biggest success of the first episode of the 5th season of Girls is that we have the same characters, improbably intact, that we started out with years ago. They have changed the way real people change — subtly. They have not been good friends to each other, but they have not been entirely bad friends to each other. Instead, the quartet of women proves something that is very true but too rarely portrayed, which is that sometimes your best friends are not the people you most like, but the ones you end up with. And that is okay.

Yes: With the start of these new seasons, I still feel some aversion to watching Girls and I like watching Broad City. Both are good shows. Neither offers a good five point summary of what is means to Be Female and In Your Twenties Today (take note, think-piece editors of the world.) They aren’t really even comparable, except that when both premiere new episodes next week, I have to say — despite how much fun Broad City is, I’ll probably watch Girls first. 

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The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.