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Quentin Tarantino Comes Home in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD ★★★½

It’s been almost 30 years since Quentin Tarantino first hit the indie scene like a neutron bomb with his debut feature Reservoir Dogs (1992) and since then he’s made many names for himself. To some he’s a genius and enfant terrible, to others he’s a misogynist pervert and cinematic counterfeiter. But the sheer cultural impact of his career has been undeniable as he’s bounced from genre to genre, bringing his obscure knowledge of cinematic ephemera into public consciousness with a style and panache one could argue either saved or ruined American filmmaking for a generation. His filmography has been an extended love letter to the films of his youth, from the French noir films of Melville to the Spaghetti Westerns of Leone, from Japanese chanbara to China wuxia, from blaxploitation to Nazisploitation and every kind of -sploitation in-between. His work revealed a nervous restlessness, as if he feared staying in one genre or time period too long would cause him to go stale. It’s only now, after eight feature films—depending on how you count the Kill Bill diptych—that he’s traded in his passport and returned home. The place: Los Angeles. The time: the late Sixties.

It’s here in his ninth film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that we finally get a glimpse of Tarantino the person, not Tarantino the persona: here are his memories as a young boy growing up in South Bay with his divorced mother. Here are the streets he walked as he scurried off to double and triple features of foreign gore films and shoot-em-ups while still in grade school. Here are the young hippies rooting for food in garbage bins, and here the Vietnam vets self-medicating with weed and booze. There are the radio commercials for Ray Bradbury books, the theater marquees for Dean Martin movies and the late-night searchlights for dirty movie premiers. The glare of the sun on Burbank, the solitary roadside Mexican restaurants, the skyline untouched by the Aon Center or Two California Plaza. This is the Los Angeles of Tarantino’s youth, but not as it was. Instead, we see here Los Angeles as Tarantino the adult wishes it could’ve been.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the third of Tarantino’s “historical corrective” films, an impromptu trilogy set in the past where his eccentric characters confront and correct historical injustices. His first, the World War Two men-on-a-mission thriller Inglourious Basterds (2009), saw a ragtag group of American GIs and French Resistance fighters rewrite history by murdering Adolf Hitler and ending World War II several years early. His second, the cathartic Spaghetti Western love letter Django Unchained (2012), saw the beginning of a slave insurrection led by a slave-turned-bounty hunter. If Basterds confronted a global scourge and Django a national one, then Hollywood turns its gaze towards a distinctly Angeleno one: the August 8-9, 1969 Tate murders. An abominable crime where five people—most notably the eight and a half months pregnant Sharon Tate, actress and wife of director Roman Polanski—were brutally murdered in their home by members of the Manson Family intent on sparking a race war, the killings have ingrained themselves in our national zeitgeist as shorthand for all things blasphemous and evil. One can imagine a six-year old Quentin realizing for the first time that the carnage on the TV and movie screens could happen in real life  – that evil was truly real.

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Samurai Marathon ★★½

The New York Asian Film Festival returns for its eighteenth year, kicking off its annual celebration of some of the strangest, weirdest, and most eclectic filmmaking throughout Asia. The opening night

The New York Asian Film Festival returns for its eighteenth year, kicking off its annual celebration of some of the strangest, weirdest, and most eclectic filmmaking throughout Asia. The opening night film was the North American premiere of Bernard Rose’s Samurai Marathon which debuted earlier this February in Japan. Based on screenwriter Akihiro Dobashi’s 2014 novel, this jidaigeki (“period film”) examines one of the more unusual native reactions to the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his “black ships” in 1853 which forcibly ended Japan’s era of sakoku (“closed country”) wherein the Tokugawa shogunate largely cut the country off from the outside world. Convinced that these strange foreigners intended invasion, Lord Itakura (Hiroki Hasegawa) of the Annaka clan which ruled over modern day Gunma Prefecture announced a compulsory 30-mile marathon for all men under the age of 50 so as to test their mettle. Additionally, he proclaimed that whoever came in first would be granted a single boon of their choice. This footrace would inspire the modern day Japanese Marathon and has entered the realm of folklore. However Dobashi and Rose take their story well off the beaten path of strict historicity in favor of a sprawling epic rich in political intrigue and fantastical violence.

The film features a large ensemble cast, the key to them being Jinnai Karasawa (Takeru Satoh), a low-level servant of Lord Itakura who’s secretly a member of a ninja clan serving as spies for the shogun. For hundreds of years Jinnai’s family watched the prefecture for signs of rebellion or resistance, and his lord’s sudden summoning of all his combat-ready men to his palace was too much for him to ignore. He sends a covert message to the capital warning of possible insurrection. By the time Jinnai realizes his mistake, it’s too late—the message has been received and the shogun’s assassins are en route to quell a rebellion that doesn’t actually exist. The result is a bizarre hybrid of sports film and ticking clock thriller.

Meeting the standard beats of the sports genre, Rose assembles a hodgepodge of eclectic characters all with their own motivations for winning the race: Hironoshin Uesugi (Shota Sometani), a kind-hearted commoner with dreams of becoming a samurai;  Heikuro Tsujimura (Mirai Moriyama), one of Lord Itakura’s retainers who wants his daughter Princess Yuki’s (Nana Komatsu) hand in marriage; the avuncular Mataemon Kurita (Naoto Takenaka), a retired guard who wants to prove his worth in his old age; the lion-hearted Isuke Fukumoto (Ruka Wakabayahi), a young boy who wants to support his widowed mother. Even the aforementioned Princess Yuki makes an appearance dressed as a boy after running away from her father after being forbidden from traveling to the capital to study Western art and science. There are shenanigans aplenty as the contestants struggle and cheat their way through the route, some being as harmless as one runner forcing his servants to carry him part of the way on a litter to the deadly, as one runner ends up throwing his compatriots into a gorge.

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It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Show ★★★½

Since the dawn of Peak TV, television has had perhaps the most cultural sway and power in Western society since its postwar nascence in the late 40s and early 50s. American prestige epics and comedies, British dramas and sci-fi, Hispanic telenovela, and Japanese anime dominate chatter on social media and around water coolers at work. Yet despite it all, live-action Asian television has largely been relegated to meme status here in the West. We’ve heard the stereotypes ad nauseam through viral youtube clips or twitter gifs: Japanese game shows are insane; South Korean soaps are ridiculous; Thai commercials are heartbreaking. Here abroad, these national industries are frequently regarded as little more than jokes, all of which insults the shows themselves, the networks that produce them, the fans who love them, and the tireless creatives and craftspeople who make them. So there’s a sense of almost righteous indignation towards those who would degrade Asian television throughout Hsieh Nien Tsu’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Show, a hyperactive yet heartfelt Taiwanese film whose earnest veneration of its subject matter is so pure and unfiltered it’s borderline disorienting.

The plot can best be described as Jay Levey’s Weird Al Yankovic vehicle UHF (1989) by way of Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967): the unscrupulous Mr. Lo, owner of struggling Taipei television station Crazy TV, seeks to secretly drive the value of his channel down as far as possible so he can sell it to a gangster in exchange for a generous kickback. To do this, he fires all the staff save a skeleton crew headed by tireless producer Yeh Tzu-chiang and orders them to improvise original programming. Yeh, a young go-getter with no clue towards Mr. Lo’s true intentions, takes up the task with unexpected gusto, drafting his best friend Abi, an immigrant Malaysian woman with dreams of stardom named Diva, and a small army of unpaid interns to help him make the best TV possible.

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Phil ★★

One must tread carefully with suicide; it’s a subject that demands delicacy and nuance. When handled sloppily it can tear open old wounds from those who’ve lost loved ones that way. Or, even worse, it can inspire imitators, something Netflix learned the hard way after the release of their sensationalist teen suicide drama 13 Reasons Why (2017) which reportedly resulted in at least one copycat self-killing. Comedy, by its very nature, is none of these things: it’s confrontational and abrasive, uncomfortable and shocking, even at its most subtle and understated.

It’s difficult to pull off, but the two can in fact co-exist. Hal Ashby’s New Hollywood classic Harold and Maude (1971) was just as much a comedy about killing oneself as it was a romance between an emotionally disturbed teenager and a free-spirited septuagenarian. Likewise, Bobcat Goldthwait’s criminally under-rated World’s Greatest Dad (2009) is a black comedy masterpiece, seeing a brokenhearted father (played by Robin Williams in perhaps his last truly great role) framing his son’s accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation as suicide to help cope with his own grief.

The succinctly titled Phil—the directorial debut of veteran actor Greg Kinnear—will likely never be mentioned alongside these two movies ever again, as it’s a sporadically maudlin, emotionally scattershot comedy destined for VOD obscurity. The film follows Phil (Kinnear), a manically depressed dentist whose life gets turned upside-down following the unexpected suicide of one of his patients, an academic named Michael (Bradley Whitford) with a seemingly perfect life. The suicide throws Phil’s into an existential crisis,  as nothing about his death made sense: he was happy, successful, surrounded by a loving family and a rewarding career. Through a series of misunderstandings, Phil gets mistaken by Michael’s wife Alicia (Emily Mortimer) as Spiros—her husband’s Greek friend from his college days. Seeing this case of mistaken identity as an in to investigate what inspired Michael’s suicide, he ingratiates himself into Alicia’s life, fully adopting the Spiros persona and agreeing to renovate their house’s bathroom to gain access to his office and personal effects.

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For They Know Not What They Do ★★★★

Daniel Karslake’s extraordinary new documentary, named after the final words of Jesus, is a four-part examination of one of the most shameful and contentious parts of modern Christian theology: institutionalized homophobia. Through its 91 minutes, Karslake guides his audience through the most hellish and abominable cesspools of Christian sexual bigotry such as hate-spewing televangelists, funeral-protesting demonstrators, conversion therapy workshops and more. And yet, the film refrains from condemning the faith and instead shows a larger picture of U.S. Christianity as flawed, yet possibly salvageable, finding beauty in its traditions and teachings amid the darkest corners.

There’s a famous story about C. S. Lewis — former Atheist-turned-Anglican, preeminent Christian apologist and beloved children’s author — where a group of comparative religion scholars asked him what unique contribution did Christianity offer among the world’s great faith traditions. According to writer Philip Yancey, Lewis responded simply: “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” In other words, it’s the notion that God’s love is totally unconditional, regardless of whether people “deserve” it, and also unwinnable through sacrifice or lost through disobedience. Few examples of such uncommon grace in Christian scripture compare with the Gospel of Luke 23:34 where Jesus, self-proclaimed messiah of the Jewish people, is dying on the cross after his disciples betrayed him and the imperial powers occupying his homeland crucified him. He looks down on the enemy soldiers surrounding him, the same ones who’d beaten him, and pleads to God: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (KJV)

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Leto ★★★½

When Kirill Serebrennikov’s Leto first premiered last year at Cannes, it was overshadowed by the director’s recent house arrest under accusations of embezzlement against the state. The film world reacted with outraged scorn, seeing his imprisonment as blatant retaliation by the Russian government against an artist known for outspoken opinions on gay rights, the annexation of Crimea, and—perhaps most damningly—Vladimir Putin himself. Indeed, his previous film The Student (2016) about a teenager who starts a cultish movement in his high school can be read as a Putin-era allegory against authoritarianism. And now, months before the debut of Leto, a film charting the rise of the Soviet underground rock scene in pre-perestroika Leningrad, Serebrennikov suddenly gets accused of federal crimes and locked up. Convenient.

But Serebrennikov persisted, getting assistants to shoot incomplete scenes based on his notes and rehearsals while wrapping up post-production work on a computer not connected to the internet. The film was well received at Cannes, competing for the Palme d’Or—it would lose to another highly politicized film about outsiders, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters. Now almost a year later, Leto has finally made it over to the United States, home of the very rock music its characters idolized, only to discover that the cinematic landscape changed. Inured by several years under our own increasingly authoritarian president, American audiences seem exhausted by rabble-rousing agitprop in favor of escapism and reassuring, all-is-well pablum; how else to explain the Academy Award-winning success of Peter Farrelly’s Green Book the same year that Spike Lee got his groove back? In particular, rock music biopics have come into vogue, particularly Bryan Singer’s car crash Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Dexter Fletcher’s upcoming Rocketman. Even Danny Boyle, one of Europe’s great kineticists, looked at the crumbling state of Western democracy and civil rights and dared to ask the question of what if everybody forgot about The Beatles?

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Tolkien ★★½

There’s an inspired moment about halfway through Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien where a young J. R. R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) takes his future wife Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) to tea in a lavish restaurant, one shellacked with the suffocating pomp of late Edwardian splendor. Tolkien, an impoverished orphan, tries to make polite conversation with the woman he’s fallen helplessly in love with. But to no avail; she’s disinterested in polite pleasantries, instead lobbing sugar cubes into the hats of nearby ladies and prodding him about his greatest, most embarrassing eccentricity—his love of creating fictional languages. After sussing out what he considers the most beautiful English word—cellar door—she goads her nervous suitor into creating a story for this mystic sounding word. For what good, Edith reasons, is a word without a meaning? As she pokes and teases Tolkien, he slowly draws into himself, his eyes closing, his hands clasping in deep concentration. And there, in a moment, he weaves a story about a magical place called Celador, a shrine in the middle of an ancient wood where two trees, one black, one white, twist around each other, their saps co-mingling to create a potion which drives all who drink it mad. His eyes snap open and the story is done, but the spell cast upon Edith by their imaginary word remains. They have created a place, a kingdom, out of thin air.

Tolkien the film is likewise interested in the origins of stories, specifically that of Tolkien’s masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings series. To said end, it dissects the man’s youth for all the bits and pieces that led to the writing of his fantasy opus, starting with his idyllic childhood in the pastoral English countryside, one cut short by his father’s unexpected death and his family’s displacement into heavily industrialized Birmingham in search of work. One need not be an expert on symbolism to see the parallels between his countryside childhood and the idyllic, agrarian utopia of the Shire or the fiery, soot-caked Birmingham of his youth and the barren, industrial hellscapes of Isengard and Mordor. Nor does one need be an expert on symbolism when Tolkien falls in with three precocious, fuzzy-headed friends at Oxford who take a vow of fellowship together as a semi-secret drinking club. Nor when he’s followed by a loyal orderly named Sam (Craig Roberts) while trudging through the bloody sludge and mud of the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. But just in case, the film reasons, why not make the connection between creator and creation explicit by having Tolkien have visions of dragons, knights, and wizened, shadowy horrors lurking across No Man’s Land?

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Framing John DeLorean ★★★½

2019 has seen no shortage of documentaries about the rise and self-destruction of so-called American geniuses. Two of the highest profile docs so far this year were Hulu and Netflix’s dueling films about the 2017 Fyre Festival, both of which were just as much about its founder—the notoriously charismatic and sociopathic fraudster Billy McFarland—as they were about the doomed music festival. Likewise, two of the docs premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival are about similar forces of personality who wooed the world with their brilliance before collapsing in on themselves through a mixture of hubris, arrogance, and disastrous business decisions. The first, Frédéric Tcheng’s Halston, is an underwhelming look at the enfant terrible of 70s fashion in America, the eponymous Halston whose minimalistic, chic designs made him the toast of the New York fashion scene before his tyrannical personality and catastrophic choice to design a ready-to-wear franchise for J. C. Penney destroyed his credibility in high fashion and transformed him into a societal pariah before his tragic death of HIV/AIDS in 1990.

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