#whats the point just say no more vintage cars just throw em away cause we got bad air and well only be punishing cars and not doing anythin

[szczek]

haha now to have your car have yellow plates aka be a vintage car it has to be 30 yo so fuck my life i guess

[avanneman]

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: not entirely the all-out misogynistic gore-fest I had been expecting!

When Quentin Tarantino was a young man, he had dreams, as young men do. These are among the things that Quentin Tarantino dreamed:

That he would kick Bruce Lee’s ass;

That he would save Sharon Tate’s ass;

That he would have a pitbull that would bite people on the ass (also the nuts);

That he would share a “moment”—an extended one, actually—with an insanely precocious eight-year-old girl, like that Eloise of the Plaza girl or maybe that Esmé girl in that Salinger story;1

That he would have maybe murdered someone (like his wife, just for example);

That he would beat the crap out of some dames; and

That he would be a bottom.

Tarantino reveals his dreams in a meticulously tricked out mélange of fake reality, real reality, fake dreams and reals ones, all basking in the warm California sun that shines over the capital of dreams, fake and real, Hollywood, California, the place that makes Oz seem normal. Tarantino subjects us to an elaborate collage of fake and real film clips, fake ads for fake tv shows, fake promos for fake tv shows, fake versions of real tv shows, fake movies, real movies, even fantasy versions of real films, in the service of four separate story lines, all set, naturally, to a carefully honed and seriously swinging sixties soundtrack, much of it heard on car radios, complete with “period’ DJs, jingles, and ads.2 But despite all the artifice, once the narrative gets going, the whole story is very simple, despite all the detours, which generally come off as self-indulgent and sentimental, since Tarantino is self-indulgent and sentimental—except when it comes to dames.

I’m sure that the idea for Once Upon A Time must have been kicking around in Tarantino’s head for years, if not decades, but the film’s basic vibe still seems heavily influenced by James Franco’s recent semi-classic The Disaster Artist, the now-legendary tale of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero,3 two star-struck shaggy-dog scooby-doo dudes adrift and a-dreamin’ in the LA LA Land shark tank who escape eating only because they aren’t worth the consumption. Tarantino’s leads, Leonardo DiCaprio as “Rick Dalton” and Brad Pitt as “Cliff Booth”, are a little bit further up the food chain. Once upon a time, Rick was a star, with a big house and the whole schmear, the star of the TV western Bounty Law that finished its run in 1963. Six years later, he’s still got the big house, but the career is flagging. In fact, he’s so down on his luck his posse consists exclusively of his main man/stunt man Cliff, who chauffeurs Rick around (because, of course, Rick lost his license), listens to his frequent tales of woe, and tries, ever so gently, to keep him on the straight and narrow, while always assuring him that he’s still the Man, and always will be.

We first pick up on Rick and Cliff, the first two strands of our story, via what strikes me as an, well, insanely unnecessary device—a black and white TV “featurette” on Bounty Law when the show was still running, featuring both men, in which Rick explains to the folks at home just what a stunt man is and why they’re so necessary—as if audiences in 2019 need to know this. The Bounty Law stuff is intercut with the third thread—a Pan Am jet arriving in LAX bearing a pair of obvious big shots, a short dude and a tall blonde who stride through the place surrounded by a crowd of paparazzi before transferring to a cute little vintage MG TF, whose 1250 cc engine bellows like a Ferrari 12 cylinder sans muffler4 when they hit the freeway.

After the black and white clip ends we catch up with Rick and Cliff in real life as Cliff drives Rick to a lunch meeting with agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino, actin’ all Jewish on our ass and clearly having a ball), both Rick and Cliff enjoying lushly photographed mixed drinks in the grand tradition of Hollywood eye-openers while they wait for Marvin to show. When Marvin does, Rick introduces him to Cliff, “explaining” that his car is in the shop, so Cliff is filling in as his wheel man. “A good friend!” exclaims Marvin. “I try,” says Cliff.

Marvin and Rick have a sitdown and Marvin does a lot of talking, his spiel giving us more backstory on Rick, and it ain’t pretty. After Bounty Law died, Rick made a few movies (Tarantino naturally shows us some clips, including one of Rick incinerating some Nazis with a flamethrower) that died at the box office, and we even see a “kinescope” of Rick singing a fifties oldie, “The Green Door”, on Hullabaloo.5 Now he’s reduced to appearing as a “guest star” on other TV westerns, the villain du jour whose job is to be plugged by the real leading man. “Face it, Rick,” Schwarz tells him. “You’re in the rear-view mirror in this town, fading to black. Italy’s the place, and spaghetti westerns are the future! Give me the word and I’ll make it happen! But give me your decision soon, ‘cause I ain’t getting’ any younger, and, more to the point, neither are you!”5

Rick staggers out into a California sun that ain’t so much warm as scalding, throwing himself bodily into Cliff’s arms. I’m fucked, motherfucker! Fucked! I’m a fucked-up fucking former cowboy star who ain’t worth a damn! Italy, for Christ’s sake! Italy! Fuckin’ Italy! That’s all I’m goddamn good for any more! Goddamn fucking Italy!

Gently, Cliff talks him down, as he clearly does once or twice a week. Take it easy, big guy. You’re still the man. You’re still the man! And so they head out in Rick’s Caddy, Cliff at the wheel, a classic case of LA co-dependency, a West Coast version of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, two guys chasin’ that dream, that dream that don’t seem to be getting all that closer, but, well, when you’re headin’ down La Cienega6 in a sweet Caddy, rockin’ those sweet sixties tunes, it still seems like it could come true.

As they pass down La Cienega, or wherever they are, they pass a bunch of dumpster-divin’ hippie chicks, setting up what will be the fourth strand of the story. After that, well, it seems that time passes, because all of a sudden it’s gettin’ dark, and Cliff takes the Caddy up a winding private drive, dropping Rick off at his big house, giving Rick a chance to fill us in on some more exposition. You know the secret of LA? Real estate, my man, real estate! Own, don’t rent! Then you belong here. Right on cue, the MG we saw earlier rumbles up the drive. It’s Rick’s neighbor, who, unlike Rick, has a gated entrance. See what I mean! You know who that is? Roman fucking Polanski, that’s all! Hottest director in Hollywood! What did I just say? What did I just say? In this town, you’re just one pool party away from the big time!. Cliff nods, as if he hasn’t heard all this a dozen times before, and then lectures Rick on the need for punctuality, for like tomorrow— “7:15! 7:15 out the door! 7:15 in the car”—before taking off in his sweet ride, a Karmann Ghia, which, by the sound, also seems to have had a Ferrari implant, replacing its stock four-cylinder VW mill with a V-12.7

Cliff blasts down the mountain-side in total LA bad boy mode, top down, hair ripplin’ in the wind, and heavy tunes blastin’ on the radio. Fuckin’ LA, man, fuckin’ LA! This is how we roll!

Well, this is how Cliff rolls until he gets out of the car, because LA is all about the wheels. Cliff doesn’t live in the canyon. He lives in the serious low-rent district (that is to say, Van Nuys), in a trailer, with both a pumping oil well and a drive-in movie theater to create a little noise pollution, which he combats, once he’s inside, with a black and white tv featuring Bob Goulet belting out “MacArthur Park”! The horror, man, the goddamn horror!

But he does have some company, in the form of “Brandy”, perhaps the world’s best-trained pitbull.8 To let us know that we’re watching a Quentin Tarantino movie—we were starting to wonder—Quentin ups the grossisity level considerably by having Cliff feed Brandy “Wolf Tooth” dog food (“raccoon” and “rat flavor”, no less), which looks exactly like shit, letting the slop drop plop in the bowl from about waist level. Two cans of the slop, plus a pound or two of kibble, make quite a mess, but real men ain’t neat. Cliff makes himself a saucepan of mac and cheese, pops open a beer, and plops in front of the tv. Life is good!

Life is good because Cliff is really happy that Rick is a loser. If Rick were a star, a real star, he wouldn’t need Rick. He’d use him, because that’s what stars do, but he wouldn’t need him. And Cliff needs to be needed.

Rick, meanwhile, is slurpin’ whiskey sours and learning his lines for the morrow’s shoot, the pilot for a new show called Lancer, while floating in his elegant, kidney-shaped pool, which, remarkably enough, has a killer view,9 as Tarantino’s elegant camera work will elegantly reveal.

Next door, things are a bit more lively. Roman and Sharon (she isn’t named, but of course we figure it out) slip on their glad rags and head for just the hippest place in town, the Playboy Mansion! Which didn’t actually exist yet in 1969, but whatever. One could wish—a little—that poor old Hugh Hefner were still alive (alive and, well, sentient) to see his old haunt pictured as the place where all the cool kids hung out back in the day.10 For whatever reason, Tarantino actually labels some of the big shots present so we’ll know who’s who, including Steve McQueen and Michelle Phillips and “Mama Cass” Elliot,11 the female singers of the sixties group The Mamas and the Papas.12

The shindig at the Mansion turns out to be the most carefully choreographed shindig I’ve ever seen. Everyone can dance—even the folks in the pool—and everyone’s in perfect time! It’s also the most chaste Playboy Mansion shindig I’ve ever seen—not a nipple in sight. But, even more strangely, we get a sour disquisition from wallflower Steve McQueen, no less, staring at Sharon’s sweet, swingin bod and moaning strangely about her strange taste in men, that leaves him shit out of luck. Hey, lighten up, Steve, and join the party! Why Tarantino thought we needed to know all this is beyond me. (Whether Steve really did have the hots for Sharon is also beyond me.)

The next morning, Roman is up, bright and early—at around 7:15, as a matter of fact—enjoying an outdoor French press while Sharon still slumbers—slumbers and snores, actually, because when you get up close, all chicks are just a little gross.13

Rick actually is up at 7:15 as well and heads off to the shoot with Cliff, though he clearly feels, if he does not exactly look, like shit, bent over double with one coughing fit after another and hacking up so much phlegm we figure he doesn’t have to worry about lung cancer because he won’t live long enough to get it. He tells Cliff that, no, he won’t be needed on the set—and he knows damn well why—so he might as well go back to Rick’s place and fix Rick’s tv antenna, because it needs fixin’. Cliff nods and takes off.

Rick stumbles through the set of Lancer looking for wardrobe. When he finds it he soaks his face in ice water—gotta tighten the damn pores, after all. Any star knows that. Plus it might help him remember his name, or even his lines. While Rick is still no more than half conscious, director Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond) bursts in, maybe not gay, but seriously exquisite. “Rick Dalton! Have I got plans for you! This is going to be amazing!”

Sam rattles and prattles on in a fit of aesthetic ecstasy, while Rick stares in semi-conscious horror. He doesn’t need this much enthusiasm. He’s here for a paycheck and this dude is talkin’ about “zeitgeists”, whatever the fuck they are. Seriously! Zeitgeists! And it’s waaayyyy too early for fuckin’ zeitgeists!

While Rick suffers, Cliff heads back to the canyon, running into the hippie chicks once more before reaching Rick’s place. It what seems like a parody of gay porno, he straps on a tool belt, and then leaps to the top of first one wall and then another until he’s up on the roof, much like a cat and not at all like the 40-year-old man he’s supposed to be. Then he pulls off his shirt, lights a cigarette and dons a pair of work gloves. Ready for action? Hell, yeah!

But before he starts to work Cliff has time for an extended reverie on just why he isn’t welcome on the Lancer set. Earlier, he had a job as Rick’s stunt man in an (imaginary) tv series starring Bruce Lee. Bruce, played by Mike Moh, comes off as a pretentious asshole, prompting Cliff to give him some serious sass. In real life, one suspects, sassing a star would get you not merely booted off the set but out of Hollywood forever, but instead Bruce and Rick agree to a genteel face-off, no punches to the head, just knock the other fellow down, best two out of three. Cliff goes down the first time, but then throws Bruce bodily against the side of a Lincoln Continental, causing a dent that looks like it was made by a 500-pound wrecking ball rather than a 130-pound Asian. That’s what you get for stealing our jobs, hot shot!14

But that isn’t the only reason why Cliff isn’t welcome on the set: there’s this crazy rumor that he killed his wife, which Tarantino encourages us to believe is true by showing us a flashback—whether Cliff “remembering” or Tarantino showing us “the truth” isn’t clear—of Cliff in skin diver gear on a boat listening to his bikini-clad wife bitching her head off about what a loser he is and Cliff maybe pointing his spear gun at her. Uh, so what is the point of all this? It has no payoff in the rest of the movie, leaving us to feel that Tarantino sort of wishes that people, especially women, would be afraid of him. You know that guy, Quentin Tarantino? Oh, yeah, he looks harmless, but I hear he killed his wife! Seriously!

Once Cliff finishes his reverie, he has a glimpse of the future instead of the past: a weird, hippie-lookin’ dude at the Polanski place asking about the previous tenant. We aren’t clued in, but if you know your back story you know this is Charles Manson.

While all this is going on in and out of Cliff’s head, Rick is having multiple adventures on the Lancer set. The whole Lancer episode is a curious mish-mash of fact and fancy. The “real” Sam Wanamaker did direct the pilot of Lancer. Whether Sam was as exquisite as portrayed seems a pretty open question. The actual Lancer series was a short-lived rip-off of Bonanza, which Tarantino sort of follows and sort of not, and sometimes it seems that Rick’s character “Caleb” is the good guy and the Lancers are the bad guys, and sometimes the other way around. We see several large chunks of the show, presented to us as the audience would see them—no crew or equipment visible—and in fact what we see is not at all what a sixties tv series would look like but rather a sort of ideal spaghetti western that Tarantino probably dreamed of making back in the day.

Before we even get there, however, Rick, dressed in character as “Caleb” has several “pregnant” conversations, the first with the stunningly precocious (and precociously PC) “actor” “Trudi Fraser” (Julia Butters), already in character as “Maribella”. Rick can’t eat lunch because of his makeup and “Maribella” likes to stay lean and hungry before a shoot. “We aim for 100% efficiency. We never achieve it, of course. But it’s the pursuit that counts.”

Rick, conveniently hocking up another loogie, looks like there’s nothing he’d like to pursue other than a whiskey sour or two and maybe a nap, but he takes a seat next to her to read his paperback western—a little surprising since I never saw him as having much appetite for print. Maribella, after correcting Rick’s pronunciation of his character’s last name (it’s not “Dakota”) and generally playing the eight-year-old dominatrix to a tee (though, as an “actor”, she would object to the feminine suffix), asks him what his book is about, and Rick launches into an extended précis: see, there’s this guy, he used to be just the coolest, toughest bronco buster around, but now, well, he’s getting’ old, his back ain’t so good no more, and every day he gets up knowin’ that, every day, he’s less of a man.

Rick tears up/chokes up as he’s delivering this thumbnail—because it’s his fucking story, get it? Maribella, as conveniently obtuse now as she was prescient before, misses the subtext. “It sounds like a really good story!” she exclaims, thinking he’s moved purely by the power of art. “In 15 years you’ll be livin’ it!” Rick gasps, and fortunately she doesn’t get this one either. And so she comforts him, not knowing just how very much he needs her solace. It’s sort of ironic when you think about it. But, you know, touching!

Somewhere about this time we cut to Sharon, who’s finally in motion in a spiffy new Porsche, heading to, where else, a book store! To get a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a gift for Roman!15 Which may be true, or may be the biggest whopper in the movie. Anyway, who would figure Tarantino for a “reader”? Not me!

Once Sharon gets her book, she spots a movie theater showing The Wrecking Crew, one of the “Matt Helms” sixties flicks ripping off James Bond, starring the very tongue in cheek, and semi-over-the-hill Dean Martin, but co-starring, yes, Sharon Tate!16 When she’s inside we see clips of the real film featuring Sharon, first a meet cute with Matt/Dean that features clumsy Sharon falling on her ass and showing us her panties, and later a fight scene between good Sharon and evil Nancy Kwan, with Nancy falling on her ass and showing us her panties! Take that, Asian bitch!

Well, it’s always good to see chicks’ panties, but Sharon’s repeated piano key smiles as the audience conveniently laughs and cheers her on get a little self-congratulatory for my ass. Sharon is clearly depicted as the “new Marilyn,” speaking in the same breathy, little girl voice, utterly stunning and cool, yet innocent and sweet, a combination not often found in the real world.

Rick, meanwhile, is having his second serious sitdown, this time with the budding star of Lancer, Timothy Olyphant as “James Stacy” as gunfighter “Johnny Madrid”, Since James Stacy is supposed to be the new kid on the way up, he might be expected to look younger than Rick, and thus intimidating. In fact, Olyphant is six years older than Leo and pretty much looks it, and Stacy treats Rick with surprising respect. (Surprising to me, at least. Aren’t young actors supposed to be assholes?) But the real point of this is for Jim to ask Rick if it’s true that he was once up for Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape, the film that made Steve a star?17

Rick modestly denies the story, or at least strongly soft-pedals it. Me in Steve’s big part? No, not really. Brief possibility, that’s all. Very brief. But then we see, more or less, “Rick’s dream”—clips from the real Great Escape with Leo/Rick visually dubbed in to replace Steve. It could have been him. He could have had Steve’s career. Bullitt? The Thomas Crown Affair? It could have been him. It could have been him. He coulda had class. He coulda been a contendah.18

The thing is, Rick has never been presented to us this way. He’s been the big, strong, good-looking boy with the big, strong shoulders, who could get on and off a horse without falling on his ass, and that’s it. Rick is the kind of pretty boy who cruises through life as long as everything comes easy and then crashes in middle age, like Erik Estrada, not the relentless egomaniacal striver who never takes no for an answer no matter how many times he gets it, like William Shatner.

In the meantime, finally, Cliff makes actual contact with one of the hippie chicks, the cute ‘n wanton Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), swinging her tight little butt around like she owns the world. The thing is, she probably does.19 He agrees to give her a lift, but won’t let her give him a blowjob, “explaining” that he doesn’t want to go to jail, although we can tell that the real reason is that he’s a gentlemen. Cliff has the definite vibe of the old-fashioned B-movie cowboy hero that I grew up watching on tv, utterly chaste and emotionally devoted only to his horse (Cliff has Brandy, of course), too complete in himself to even consider sharing his essence with anything as, well, as common, as a woman.

Cliff gets a jolt when he learns that Pussycat is living at the “Spahn movie ranch”, where Cliff and Rick used to film Bounty Law. He explains to her that he used to be a stunt man there, allowing her to explain to us that stunt men are the real heroes, because what they do is real, they aren’t phonies like actors. Just in case we couldn’t figure that part out for ourselves.

Well, back to Rick now, I think, and get to see an actual chunk of Lancer, filmed far more extravagantly, and elegantly, than any tv western would have been, yet with a pretty much standard script, though with some pretty spectacular behind the back shooting from Johnny Madrid, putting an uppity “businessman” in his place. Better stick to your ledgers, pencilneck!

The bit rumbles on, with plenty of moody, “intense” attitude from Rick, a seen it all, done it all, existential cowpoke who might remind some us of another Rick, the one who ran Rick's Café Américain down Casablanca way. But midway through the scene he starts blowing his lines and ends up stalking back to his trailer (but would he really have one?) to explode at himself in a predicable yet enjoyable scene. You goddamned asshole! You’re going to quit drinking, you hear me, you goddamned alcoholic! God damn it!

Well, back to Cliff, I think, in what is easily the most impressive section of the film, the visit to the Spahn ranch to see Charlie’s angels. The girls are beautifully creepy, staring at the intruder like so many marmosets, Dakota Fanning particularly memorable as ruthless boss lady Squeaky Fromme, who in real life was not involved directly in any of the murders but became notorious as the “spokeswoman” for the Manson family during his trial, and more notorious several years later when she tried to assassinate President Ford.

Squeaky sends a girl to fetch “Tex”, Charles Watson, played by Austin Butler, who played the lead role in the Sharon Tate murders, to check out the new guy. Tex arrives on horseback, suitably enough, and, in some serious dick measuring, Cliff reminisces about his visit to Houston, where he spent two weeks on a chain gang. “That was the last time I broke a policeman’s jaw, I can tell you that!” Although I expect that if you broke a policeman’s jaw in Houston, Texas back in the fifties you probably wouldn’t live to talk about it.

Pussycat really digs guys who break cops’ jaws, and it must sound good to Tex as well, so he rides off, getting back to his job as guide for dudes who want to visit the mountains. But once he’s gone, Cliff starts to get a little pushy. Is old George Spahn still around? Sure would like to visit old George and see how he’s doing. The girls all tell him no, clearly infuriated by his decision to penetrate beneath the surface of their groupthink. Word gets back to Squeaky, holed up in what Cliff knows is George’s old house, so she sends all the girls away and tries to face down Cliff, but he faces her down instead and finally has a thoroughly creepy conversation with old George (Bruce Dern), blind and helpless and utterly dependent on the girls.

Cliff, utterly frustrated by George’s utter dependence—he can’t be “saved” because he doesn’t want to be—strides out to meet the glaring, feral eyes of the assembled family. As he passes, Pussycat leaps onto the hood of a car and screams “George isn’t blind! You’re the one who’s blind!”

Cliff keeps on walking, only to find out that Rick’s Caddy has a flat, thanks to a giggly, half-naked Jesus clone with hillbilly teeth. Definitely time to kick some goddamn hippie ass! Something Tarantino clearly digs almost as much as smelling chick’s feet.

Cliff grabs the punk by the hair and pummels him half to death. That’ll teach you! Now fix the goddamn flat! “Gypsy” (Lena Dunham) sends one of the girls off on a horse to get Tex—something she might have thought of earlier—and Tex comes riding up in an excellent display of horsemanship, that is as gratuitous as the beatdown Cliff gives the Jesus dude,20 because by the time he gets back Cliff is gone.

Finally (I guess), we cut back to Rick, headed back on the set for one last shot at redemption. Spaghetti western “bullfighter/showdown” music blares operatically on the soundtrack, as Rick walks through the soundstage for the final showdown, the one between Rick Dalton and ... Rick Dalton! Can he cut it, or is he history?

In Rick’s big scene, he’s kidnapped Maribella, holding her on his lap with his six-shooter pointed at her head while he holds forth in a swaggering conversation with “Scott Lancer” (Luke Perry in his last role, as the actor Wayne Maunder). Since Rick/Caleb clearly has the upper hand, fancy-pants Scott (he apparently went to Harvard) can do nothing other than listen to Caleb’s trash talk, which Caleb concludes by throwing Maribella violently to the floor in a display of his ruthlessness. Cut! Cut! Rick made it all the way through the scene! In flying colors!

“I didn’t hurt you, did I, darlin’?” Rick asks.

“I’m fine,” Maribella reassures him, popping up to show him her arm. “See, I have padding!”

Sam Wanamaker (Sam the director) rushes up.

“Rick, you were fabulous! Exactly what I wanted! Evil, sexy Hamlet!”

Rick sits there, a little stunned by the outpouring of passion he’s achieved.

“Rick, Rick, your adlibs were amazing! ‘Beaner bronco-buster’?21 Why, that’s triple alliteration! And throwing the little girl on the floor! Beautiful!”

Yeah, but, uh, if the toss was an adlib, why was Maribella wearing padding?22 Anyway, tossing an eight-year-old around like a ping-pong ball as an adlib sounds a little dubious to me. Good thing her parents weren’t around!

But Tarantino isn’t done gilding the lily. Trudi/Maribella, whose dedication to her craft makes Stanislavski look like a slacker, tells him “that’s the best acting I’ve ever seen!”

Which is all a little silly, because no one, but no one has ever suggested that he had any real talent as an actor, and he’s never expressed any interest in his “craft”, other than not looking like an asshole and not losing his paycheck. But Tarantino somehow can’t resist violating Rick’s real character in order to make him look heroic, a goddamn Laurence Olivier in chaps!

After all this, we have a grotesquely awkward “transition”, narrated by Kurt Russell, about Rick and Cliff’s excellent Italian adventure, which one can very easily believe was originally intended to take up a good chunk of the film, probably extending its running time to something close to three and half hours, but, for whatever reason, that doesn’t happen. Instead, we get a few cutesy movie posters, and a few little anti-PC snickers directed at American Indians, who seem to rub Quentin the wrong way for whatever reason, and also Rick gets married to this Italian broad, who snores a lot, just like Sharon. As for “acting”—evil, sexy Hamlet and all that—well, Quentin seems to have forgotten all about it, and Rick is back in character as the self-indulgent bad boy who loafs through life, traveling first class thanks to his broad shoulders and pretty face, while devoted Cliff sits in coach and chugs Bloody Marys, because, it seems, Rick’s cutting him loose. Can’t afford a wife and a bottom at the same time!

Once Rick and “Francesca” (Lorenza Izzo) are installed in Rick’s old place, Russell continues his tiresome narration, setting up that fateful night when all four story lines will coincide. Rick and Cliff head out for one last celebratory drunk and then head back, Russell constantly stressing to us, for some reason, that Rick and Cliff are like totally blind, stinking drunk, even though they don’t really act that way. Francesca’s already in bed (she stayed home, naturally), Rick’s mixing margheritas, and Cliff’s taking Brandy for a walk. S/He’s there, for some reason (really, of course, for plot reasons). Cliff decides he’ll smoke this LSD-soaked cigarette that Pussycat sold him, even though, the web informs me, “smoking” LSD destroys its hallucinogenic power (because the heat causes it to break down chemically).

While Cliff’s gone, Tex and three of the Manson girls—Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison), Patricia Krenwinkle (Madisen Beaty), and Linda Kasabian (Maya Hawke)—arrive to do the Polanski household in, pulling up in a noisy, busted muffler car. Rick stumbles out with his carafe full of margheritas to tell those goddamn hippies to get off his goddamn private drive and smoke their goddamn pot someplace else. Tex, apparently not wanting to have to kill this guy, backs the car down the drive, while Rick takes his margheritas out to one of his favorite retreats, the chair floating in his kidney-shaped pool.

The hippies reconnoiter. “You know who that was? Rick Dalton!” “Rick Dalton? Rick fucking Dalton?” “Rick Fucking Dalton!” “Fuck! You know what? Guys like that, they taught us to murder. I say, let’s murder the murderers!”

As it turns out, Kasabian bails, driving away in the car,23 but Tex, with a six-shooter shoved in his pants, and Patricia and Susan, armed with knives, head up the drive.

Cliff, by this time, is back inside the house, fixing Brandy dinner when the kids show up. After some cutesy, high on LSD antics, the action finally starts, Tex pointing his six-shooter at Cliff’s head. Brandy, flying through the air, disarms him and then fixes her teeth in his balls while Cliff brains Atkins with a can of Wolf’s Tooth. Krenwinkle stabs Cliff in the thigh, causing him to grab her by the hair and smash her face into a variety of unyielding surfaces, which starts to look a little sadistic on Tarantino’s part after the third or fourth smash. Somewhere along the line Brandy switches from Tex to Atkins, dragging her around the room like the shark in the beginning of Jaws. Tex stumbles to his feet and tries to stab Cliff, but gets stabbed instead, then gets knocked down and then (I think) Cliff breaks his neck. But then Atkins gets hold of Tex’s gun and shoots Cliff, causing him to fall over as though he were dead. The girl staggers to her feet, her face covered in blood and screaming like a maniac, and stumbles out to the pool, waving Tex’s gun and firing off a round or two, finally catching Rick’s attention. Guess what, headphones!

Atkins crashes into the pool, still firing the gun. Rick sobers up quickly and, finding his trusty flamethrower—you didn’t see that coming? Amateur!—roasts the bitch.

The police arrive to figure things out. Guess what? Cliff ain’t dead! Sounding awfully coherent for a guy who’s drunk, high on LSD, stabbed in the thigh, and shot, he tells Rick not to come to the hospital with him but tend to his lady. Because greater love hath no bottom than to give up his life, not for his top, but for his top’s lady!

“You’re a good friend, Cliff,” Rick tells him.

“I try,” says Cliff.

Hey! Didn’t we hear that line before?

But the good news isn’t over yet! Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), one of Sharon’s houseguests, hears the commotion and asks Rick what’s happening. Rick fills him in and, one way or another, Sharon hears their conversation and calls down on the intercom to invite Rick up for a drink. And so the gates to the magic kingdom—the magic kingdom of A-listers and Playboy Mansion attenders—open for Rick. Let the pool parties begin!

Afterwords I Movie Violence

When I first heard that Tarantino was making a movie about “old” Hollywood starring Leo and Brad I was intrigued. When I learned that Leo would be living next door to Sharon Tate, not so much. I hated Tarantino’s chef d'œuvre Pulp Fiction, and I detested Kill Bill Volume I, and one thing I did not want to see was Tarantino’s take on the Tate/Manson murders. When I learned that Quentin was rewriting history—in tune, really, with my own squeamish predilections—I thought I would take a chance. In any event, there are lots of violent films that I do like, including Bonnie & Clyde and Terminator 2. What’s the difference between “good violence” and “bad violence” other than the eye of the beholder?

Well, not much, obviously. The “sword blade through the milk carton and the mouth and out the back of the head” shot from Terminator 2 is “classic”,24 but you wouldn’t like it if someone did that to you, would you?

Much of the violence in Once Upon A Time is gratuitous in that it’s clearly wish fulfillment on Tarantino’s part, but there’s little that I found outright sadistic, which is what I really object to. It’s notably less sadistic than the coming features that I saw advertised with the film—It Chapter 2, Hide and Seek, and Joker. Obviously, audiences like sadistic.

Afterwords II Helter Skelter Despite the “massive” sixties soundtrack, in one sense the silence is deafening, because there is, unsurprisingly, nothing from the “White Album”. Like several million other people, Charles Manson thought the Beatles recorded this famous double album just for him, and that every song had a particular meaning. “Helter Skelter” (in Great Britain, an amusement park ride) was for Manson the signal for the start of a race war in America, which would some how allow him to seize power, in some manner. The Tate murders were intended, more or less, to provoke that war because the police were intended to believe that black revolutionaries had committed them. Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Manson and the others, wrote a book, with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter, about the case, which was later turned into a television mini-series.

Esmé was thirteen. Making “Trudi Fraser” eight seems really a stretch to me. ↩︎

Did Tarantino invent “fake” sixties tunes as well? Not impossible, but it seems unlikely. ↩︎

Word can spell “Sestero” but not “Wiseau”? Tommy won’t like that! Greg’s book, The Disaster Artist, which he co-wrote with Tom Bissell, revealed to the world the bizarre backstory behind Wiseau’s cult classic di tutti cult classics, The Room, and is definitely superior to Franco’s film, which derives half its considerable charm by simply recreating classic scenes from Wiseau’s ineffable creation. ↩︎

Dunno if Tarantino just wanted the car to sound cool or if he was parodying this frequent device as used by other directors. Anyone who knows anything about cars knows that tiny, underpowered English sports cars do not sound like this. As dubious car enthusiast Mort Sahl put it, “MGs are great if you don’t mind being blown off by housewives in Plymouth station wagons.” Jews are into cars? ↩︎

Marvin says “kinescope” rather than “tape” because consumer videotape machines didn’t exist in 1969. The networks used tape, but Marvin would have needed a film version, a “kinescope”, which is what the networks used before the development of videotape, to view using a projector. *Once Upon A Time” is filled with anachronisms, but film buff Tarantino gets this one right. However, the “Hullabaloo” clip is filmed in wide-screen, which of course is totally inaccurate. Leo’s performance looks as though it were based on the persona of fifties super-square Pat Boone. ↩︎ ↩︎

I have no grasp of LA geography, so I have no idea of where Rick and Cliff are. ↩︎

The Karmann Ghia was simply an Italian-bodied Volkswagen bug. If Cliff had the “big” engine (presumably, he did), he could hit 90. If not, 75 was probably the top. ↩︎

Brad addresses Brandy as “man” in this scene even though the actual dog, "Sayuri", is a female and is referred to as such in the final scenes. ↩︎

A place like Rick’s would of course require constant upkeep to avoid turning into a mess, but, as is so often the case in film, the place somehow cleans itself. ↩︎

Jay Leno described his one Mansion visit as “a lot of middle-aged men hitting on a lot of young women.” ↩︎

Cass Elliot grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, which is next to Falls Church, where I grew up. On the M&Ps’ cover of the Martha and the Vandellas hit “Dancin’ in the Street”, the M&Ps fade out the song with the list of the cities where they’re, you know, dancing in the street—“Baltimore and DC now”—with the following barely audible dialogue: “Alexandria?” “In Virginia, Virginia.” “Falls Church?” “Never heard of it.” Both are suburbs of Washington, DC. Falls Church is supposedly the setting for at least two tv shows, JAG and The Americans. ↩︎

Three of their songs are heard on the soundtrack, though they only sing one of them—“Twelve Thirty”. Both “Twelve Thirty” and “Straight Shooter” are explicitly about heroin addiction, while the third and most famous, “California Dreamin’”, strongly hints at it. The sheet music for “Straight Shooter” was found on a piano at the scene of the actual Manson/Tate murders. ↩︎

“Stella shits!” exclaimed Jonathan Swift regarding Esther Johnson, his life-long obsessive love, whom he first met when she was eight. Quentin seems to hate women yet want to smell their feet. ↩︎

In an interview, Tarantino has “explained” that in “real life” Cliff would kick Bruce Lee’s ass because war hero Cliff was a Green Beret. Since Cliff, like Rick, is supposed to be pushing 40, he would have to have been a “war hero” in Korea. Combat operations in Korea ended with the 1954 armistice. Special forces troops never wore the green beret until 1955, and it was almost immediately discontinued until revived in 1961. They received enormous publicity in the sixties. I don’t know why they’ve been supplanted by the Seals as the ultimate bad asses. ↩︎

Anyone who likes books likes first editions, but I very much dislike the use of first editions as a way to make books expensive status symbols. Go Kindle! (And, in any event, if I had a copy of a 90-year-old first edition, I wouldn’t carry it unprotected in my sweaty little hand, as Sharon does.) ↩︎

I rented one of Matt’s/Dean’s films for some purpose—I can’t remember why—and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t The Wrecking Crew, but it was so slow-paced and boring that I couldn’t watch it, il Dino wandering around like he’d had more whiskey sours than Rick Dalton. ↩︎

McQueen started out in tv as the star of Wanted Dead or Alive, the very obvious “inspiration” for Bounty Law. McQueen, a very big star in 1969, thanks to Bullit and Crown Affair, which were in fact his only two films to be remembered, was supposedly “targeted” by Manson as part of his plan to cause the U.S. to erupt in a race war. Which may be why he’s such a presence in this film. Or not. ↩︎

“Instead of a bum, which is what I am”—Marlon Brando’s lines from On the Waterfront, once among the most quoted in American film, bitterly complaining to his brother, played by Rod Steiger, that his career as a boxer was ruined when he was forced, by his brother, to throw a fight. ↩︎

Qualley, who has had extensive ballet training, is probably the best dancer in the whole film. ↩︎

It would also likely leave the horse exhausted for the rest of the day. Horse races only last a mile or so because horses can’t gallop for much longer than that. ↩︎

Not exactly that, probably, anyway, three “b’s”. ↩︎

Also, the camera backs up to keep Maribella in the shot, which it wouldn’t have done if Cliff’s action had been an adlib. ↩︎

In “real life”, Kasabian did not drive away but remained behind as a lookout. Kasabian was involved—always as a bystander, she claimed—in many of the murders committed by Manson and his followers, but was able to avoid prison time by serving as the key witness against the others. ↩︎

“God damn it! How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t drink out of the carton?” It’s “nice” that the T-1000 stays in character as the past her limit housewife as “she” pulls her blade/hand from the dumb shit’s head. ↩︎

[eloquenceassassinated]

This just in: MARVEL fangirl weighs in on Wonder Woman

I still can’t be sure how many people actually see my blog, but hey! To anyone who cares, sorry about the long wait. I’ve been on vacation the past few days and hardly had the time to breathe, much less post. Ironic, isn’t it?

So anyway, I said I’d give my thoughts on Wonder Woman as the Marvel fangirl who wants to like DC, so let’s jump right in!

Let’s start with what the movie isn’t, shall we? It’s not a “woohoo, girls rule, boys drool!” propaganda mud-fest in which all of the guy characters are either useless, evil, or gross to make the girls look competent by comparison (sly look at you, Frozen). Nor is it a testosterone-filled smash-‘em-up that only has a female lead because eye candy and reasons. Nor is it a Marvel movie. It doesn’t have the rapid humor, quirky villains, and sensation of history in even the most minor characters that I’m used to, and it tries to tackle deeper themes far more obviously than Marvel’s subtler undertones. It’s not an epic war movie like Lord of the Rings, and it’s not a grand, universe-spanning adventure either.

What it is, is an origins story. And a pretty dang good one at that.

Let’s go chronologically because otherwise I’m going to get lost and go on a tangent. Spoiler warning as we proceed. Act One is spent on Diana’s birthplace and also the most gorgeous set in this entire movie, the hidden island of Themyscira. If you thought the stunties in LotR were good, you haven’t seen the Amazon warriors slide out of their saddles and fire a bow while riding the horse sideways. We meet Diana as a joyful little girl who wants nothing more than to join the adults she sees around her and become a warrior herself. There’s always the inherent problem with child actors, but they couldn’t have gotten much better for young Diana. She’s a joy to see, and you get invested in her wide-eyed fantasies of heroism really quick. Who doesn’t want to be a hero?

It’s easy to see where Diana’s later self-righteousness and one-track mind come in when we see the simplistic world in which she was raised. The world has a fairy-tale flavor to it for Diana—humans good, some gods good, some gods evil, Amazons defeat evil, the end—which makes her utter confusion and disillusionment at the sight of real-life WWI all the more believable later on. Even the exposition dragging down the first twenty minutes seems to be coddling us as viewers as Diana is being coddled. As much as I wish the Amazons got better lines (their characters were so cool, they deserved it!), it does a lot to set up the tone-shift later in the movie.

We’re also introduced to my personal favorite character, Antiope—Diana’s hardcore aunt who secretly teaches her fighting stuff. She’s just all-around cool: rugged, weathered, with awesome battle scars, and an air of kindness and concern underneath all that warrior stuff. While Diana’s mom Hippolyta looks soft on the outside and is hard inside, Antiope is hard on the outside and soft on the inside, which is my favorite kind of character.

So yeah, good stuff and we’re hardly twenty minutes in. We watch Diana grow up, we see that she can cause small explosions by crossing her gauntlets, it’s hinted at that she is something more than meets the eye, and then the interesting stuff happens. An Allied pilot with an American accent (who for some reason is working for the British) crashes his plane into the ocean outside Themyscira. Diana pulls an Ariel and fishes him out of the water, then stares at him when he wakes up on the beach. (I literally sang “Part of Your World” under my breath when I first saw this scene, to the infinite amusement of none but me.) And then it turns out he’s being followed by the Germans. Again with the simplistic flavor, really. What’s more classic bad guy than Germans?

Fight scene on the beach, yadda yadda, spoilers, my favorite dies and so do a heck ton of Nazis. Interesting note: Diana hardly joins this fight. This is a nice detail, especially since we’ve seen how powerful she is before. It brings her down to earth that she’s nervous in her first fight and senses that she’s not safe anymore. At least her aunt wouldn’t kill her in training sessions, but these outsiders wouldn’t think twice. So she hides. The fact that I could pick that up on first viewing is a testament to the writing and the acting. Nice touch.

Then the Amazons hold a congress to see what they should do with the pilot, whose name is Steve Trevor. Nice little note from a writer’s standpoint: no one character has a casting vote in the course of action. This is a dynamic I saw first in the new Voltron cartoon, and it’s stuck with me as a tiny, genius little writing trick for world immersion. If Cap or Tony says “we’re going to Leipzig”, everybody packs up and goes to Leipzig, but even Queen Hipolyta is reasoned out of her initial plan (to kill the pilot) by other characters like the unnamed Amazon senator. Main characters get input from lesser characters throughout the movie, which is much like conversations in real life. Since when did one person call all the shots un-challenged? They don’t in this movie.

We’re also introduced to the iconic lasso, which is apparently not Diana’s to begin with, just a thing the Amazons have lying around that happens to be useful for vetting folks. They also give it a pretentious name like “Lasso of Something” that completely slipped my mind and probably freaked Steve Trevor out. He gives the Amazons the skinny on WWI—the Great War, at this point—and Diana is confused. Get used to that. It will be her default for the rest of the movie.

They decide not to kill him, Diana insists that they need to go kill Ares and shut down the war, and Hippolyta is like “no way hon” and that’s the end of the conversation. Also, get used to the whole “gotta kill Ares” thing. Also going to be her default. Like I said, one-track mind.

Then comes the part of the show where we make awkward sexual jokes and innuendos because Diana is a grown woman who has read all about but never seen a man. Steve Trevor is bathing in a pool thing that actually looks pretty sweet, and Diana walks in on him and doesn’t leave because of course, and she forces him to form an escape plan with her basically. There’s this bit where he awkwardly segways from talking about physical differences to talking about the watch he left on the edge of the tub, and it’s just so out of the blue that it’s gotta be setting up an ironic echo or something. Then Diana leaves and suits up, which involves this really cool scene in which she scales the outside of a tower to grab a sword and freaks out a cow in the process, and by the time she gets back, Steve is dressed. Then they head to the dock to steal a ship.

Now comes my least favorite scene, followed closely by the dumb thing with the watch. Hippolyta rides down to the dock to tell Diana “don’t do this”, and Diana is like “i’m gonna do this”, and Hippolyta is like “fine have the hat of your dead aunt who was much cooler than me, don’t forget that you suck for this, bye felicia” and then she rides away. I guess there’s something deep there about parents letting their children out of the nest when the time comes or something like that, but I just kind of hate this scene, so whatever.

One boat ride later and they’re in London. Diana calls it “hideous”. I laughed. They did a lot to get you into the mood of the era, from soldiers enjoying their last day before shipping out to the front (CA:TFA flashbacks here) to the pollution from smoke-stacks to the vintage cars rumbling around the place. It always astounds me when movies find period set-pieces like that and make them look like they sprang straight out of yesterday. Maybe I just don’t know enough about the process of getting vehicles for props, but it’s still impressive.

More awkwardness ensues because Diana’s signature outfit is not modest to WWI-era Brits. Steve’s red-headed secretary, Emma Candy, makes an appearance for some comic relief. We get the sense that Steve is falling for Diana because of course he is. Then there’s this great scene in an alleyway where Diana stops a bullet with her gauntlets and beats the ever-loving crap out of a few German spies who were dumb enough to apprehend Steve in London and still use their German accents. Diana can now handle combat with under a half-dozen opponents at once! Yay! And Steve gets the last punch in.

Oh, forgot to mention that? Back in exposition central, we learned that Steve stole a notebook with a formula for a new German hydrogen gas. The Germans have had it out for him ever since. Steve tries to get that notebook to his superiors, but that fails epically and Diana’s presence alone disrupts a war conference. (Hidden Figures flashbacks here.) And that’s before she opens her mouth and calls the generals asinine cowards! There’s a little bit of tactical mumbo-jumbo thrown around that makes you think that maybe this will turn into a political thriller/espionage film, but sadly, it doesn’t. Diana’s hard-headed determination to end the war by smashing pretty much prevents that.

But she’s also dissing the entire Allied war effort and telling the commanders how much they suck, so we get the sense that maybe she’s got a bad idea of how to handle this whole thing after all. Steve certainly thinks so, and they both start butting heads over a plan of action right about here.

Diana yells a lot when she gets riled up. This is also a problem in Britain.

The one thing they do agree on is that peace needs to be the end result, so they get the support of Sir Patrick Morgan and go to a bar to recruit Steve’s buddies Charlie and Sameer. (CA:TFA flashbacks again.) Okay, around this point I just started seeing a lot of Captain America parallels. 

Dumb kid is stubborn enough to think he/she has to go out to war.

Dumb kid throws him/herself straight into it.

Dumb kid butts heads with superiors.

Dumb kid goes to a bar to form a team. 

Dumb Kid and Co. go out and do badass stuff.

But that’s where the parallels end for now. In this case, there’s no bromantic banter that will haunt me “'til the end of the line”, and it’s not a montage of epicness as much as a slow burn.

We first head out into the wilderness to meet Chief, Steve’s other friend who can get them across the front lines. (I don’t have a GIF for him, sadly.) Chief, a Native American smuggler, explains to Diana that he’s living out in the European wilderness because it’s the one place he can be free—“in danger is better than being a slave”. 

(I have to admit that I’m not a history buff and don’t know a lot about the treatment of Native Americans during the War, but at least one article I’ve read says that while the war effort pinched the land holdings of their reservations (and it’s problematic enough the kind of land on which some of those reservations were built), some Native Americans were actually quite willing to enlist to support America and the Allies. There were tensions and scandals all around, but outright oppression seems to be in short supply. Could Chief have lived in a community where the pinch hit hardest? Could he be mistaken about how bad he really has it? Maybe. In any case, it’s only touched on and then the movie moves on, so we will too.)

Then there’s Charlie. (No GIF for him, either.) Overly Sarcastic Productions on Youtube has pointed out that the fashionable mental disorder to have in fiction nowadays is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Earlier generations used to have alcoholism, but that’s since gone out of vogue. If something tragic happens to a character nowadays, they’re likely to have stress, panic attacks, and all manner of tragic personality changes resulting from the trauma. Cue Takashi Shirogane.

Yeah, the dweeb with the nose scar. I love him.

The problem is—and Shiro is an excellent example—fictional PTSD is a romanticized version that elevates the trauma to a superpower, with Laser-Pointed Amnesia and The Devil Within to get the character a secret advantage in combat through improbably relevant flashbacks and adrenaline-fueled combat moves. (I love TvTropes, sorry.) Their personality will likely remain the same, a likable character who hardly loses control unless it’s helpful (Shiro again), or they’ll be turned into a darker, broodier Troubled But Cute version of themselves with enough potential for hurt/comfort to drag in the fangirls. Cue Bucky Barnes, and, yes, I am one of those fangirls. Bite me.

Charlie just takes all of that and…crushes it. Mercilessly. His disorder makes him have nightmares that cause him to yell and snap at Diana when she tries to help, and then slink off into the woods with his gun. It makes his hands shake when he tries to take a shot with the rifle and snaps him out of focus in the middle of a fight. I mean, if you were stressed all the time, how would you react? Being emotionally, physically, and mentally wound up at all times will bring out the worst in a person before it brings out the best. It’s painfully, scathingly realistic, and I have to give the writers and actor props for making me take a step back and think about my fanfictions and things like that.

As Sameer later explains to Diana, “we’re all dealing with our demons, and that’s his”, but even more interesting is the fact that Diana, who left her home to fix problems, is being introduced to problems that she can’t fix quickly—or can’t even fix at all. That goes on to be the next big conflict in the movie.

(More brief reading confirms my suspicions that PTSD wasn’t a well-understood condition around the time of WWI. While some scholars were making leaps and bounds towards understanding it, the prevalent view of PTSD was that it was simply cowardice in the soldiers, and even the most knowledgeable psychiatrists, who knew that the condition was brought on by the emotional strain of war, thought that PTSD was more likely to develop in soldiers who were “weak” or “cowardly” to begin with. Soldiers were rejected if experts thought they had a predisposition to this “cowardice”. Charlie wouldn’t have been able to reenter active duty after his previous tour even if he tried; Sameer, in this case, would either have to be extremely well-read or extremely compassionate for his time to think of Charlie as anything other than a troubled coward. Again, however, the movie touches on this and then moves on, and so will we.)

This is the part where Diana sees problems she can’t fix, from wounded soldiers awaiting an amputation to civilians hurried from place to place who have lost homes and loved ones because of the war. It’s all thrown together in one heart-breaking scene that parallels the nausea I felt in seeing the aftermath of the plane crash in the first episode of Lost. So many hurting, screaming people, and Diana wants to help them all, but Steve herds her on because she can’t. Then they’re in the trenches, and it turns out that Steve brought her there because he figured if Diana wanted to fight, she’d fight like all the other soldiers. 

But she doesn’t.

There are few trailer shots which are genuinely awesome in the final movie and lots of shots that get old once you’ve seen the trailer ten million times, but I assure you that the scene of Diana taking the German bullets as she stands in no-man’s land is one of the most compelling things in the whole movie. Not five minutes on the war-front and she is literally taking fire on behalf of the soldiers in the trenches behind her, inspiring them, protecting them, and proving to them that taking back what they’ve lost can be done, and then she charges ahead, flicking the bullets back with her gauntlets and literally clearing the way for the guys behind her while she charges on hell with no hesitation. The score behind this scene is that orchestral, inspiring stuff that makes a girl feel like she’s watching Lord of the Rings again, and you can almost feel the Germans quaking in their boots and wondering who and what the actual heck this person is.

And then the good guys have the bad guys running and they take back the trenches. Everyone is cheering and yelling and all feels really, really good.

But it’s not done yet. They still have to take back the town and free civilians. That’s when the Howling Com—I mean Diana and the Crew have their moment to shine. It’s adrenaline-filled combat from then on out, and I don’t remember it well enough to let you know what happened, but I remember that it was great, Diana threw a tank, and the part with the lasso was absolutely sick. Everybody should have a big, stupid grin when they watch a superhero battle, and this was The Big Stupid Grin Battle. It’s at this moment you feel, “Yeah—she knows what she’s doing now.” They bring out Diana’s electric guitar theme from BvS for the battle you’ve seen in the trailers, and it’s okay. I’m not much for the riff myself, but it doesn’t stick around long enough to grate. Then Diana kicks a guy through a window and I remember that I laughed in glee. It was great.

The part where Charlie can’t shoot a guy is here. We also see how much Steve pays attention when he uses a trick that he saw Antiope do to launch Diana into a church steeple to take out a sniper. It feels genuinely good when the dust settles, the music fades out, Diana walks out of the rubble and looks down the tower at the civilians on the street below her, and they all start cheering and yelling in Finnish. She saved them! She’s the hero she wanted to be! Life is good. 

The crew celebrates by getting their Squad Pic taken on an old camera and dancing, singing, and drinking a little with the residents of the town.

There’s Sameer, Steve, Diana, Chief, and Charlie, if you wanted to see them.

Then we hear Sameer’s backstory, that his dream is to be an actor, but he can’t pursue it because of his color. I asked Wikipedia, and it turns out that Sameer is a French Moroccan man—thus his prevalent use of French when he’s not speaking English. It’s funny how Sameer at first strikes you as a sleazeball until you get to know him and realize the tight box he’s in that he can’t overcome.

Color-casting is still a thing today (to go back to Voltron, my guy Josh Keaton mostly does voice acting because despite his undeniably photogenic face he is “too ethnic to be white and too white to be Hispanic” according to TvTropes), and what strikes me as funny is that the colors of Bremmer, Taghmaoui, and Brave Rock definitely had an impact on the casting of these characters. So color plays a part in casting roles, but I wouldn’t call that racism outright. It’s pushing “minorities” out of lead roles because of their skin color that I think is where the injustice lies. But movie creators aren’t going to broaden their scope for their casts unless they think an audience will buy a movie with a non-traditional lead. Question for discussion: who else wants to see more non-white leads in movies that don’t explicitly deal with the racial problem? Who else wants to see more female leads in movies that don’t deal with gender dynamics? I know I do. It would be fun to see Hollywood shake it up a little.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the movie! More romance follows because reasons, I guess. And then Steve starts to put a plan together to destroy the gas the Germans are making. He tells the Squad that they can go, but no! They’re bosom buddies now, and they’ll work even without pay! That’s good. We need our secondary characters for a while yet, even if they’re mostly here to bring up relevant social issues. Okay, so I’m a bit salty about that. They’re fine characters, but somehow I walked away feeling like they were there to be mediums by which the creators could bring up social issues rather than characters to suggest a history and deeper personalities.

First thing we need the squad to do is ride horses through the woods and doubt Diana. Well, all but Chief. He thinks Diana may be right, that Ares is behind all of this. Charlie is unconvinced, and Sameer is cautiously hopeful. They all seem to represent the sides of Steve’s mind battling it out, whether to believe Diana’s tall tale and trust her to finish this or not. We’re not told yet what he’s decided, or if he’s decided at all. Get used to this theme of belief, because it’s going to be important.

Emma got them information that the guy they believe is Ares, General Ganondorf, is going to be at a—what? What did I—? Oh, Ludendorf! I meant Ludendorf. He’s going to be at a big bad guy gala with all of the top bad guys. So the Squad is headed there. Diana is back to her pig-headed obstinacy and insists that all that needs to happen is she has to get close enough to kill Ares, while Steve wants to find out where the gas is so that he can destroy it. Chief steals a car and both Sameer and Steve pull out their acting skills to get into the gala, and Diana disappears and steals a rich snitch’s dress.

Steve flirts in a German accent to almost get the gas’ inventor, a psychopath with a cool face mask named Dr. Isabel Maru, to give up the location of the gas. (Side note: Doctor Maru’s nickname of Dr. Poison is the most cheesy thing in the movie, second maybe to Ludendorf for camp, until I read up on the Wonder Woman mythos and found out that Dr. Poison is a classic villain from the franchise. Hey, don’t judge. I’m getting into this via the movies, not the comics. Also, the idea of fictional characters like Red Skull and Dr. Poison alongside real historical figures like Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorf will never not be hilarious.)

Diana’s appearance in the gala almost ruins it for Steve. Ludendorf taunts Diana with like every trick in the book to say “I’m the villain!” without saying he’s the villain, Steve just barely stops Diana from hacking his head off, and then as part of the party festivities the Germans gas the village that Diana just saved.

….Wait, what?! Hell, that’s dark!!

So…yeah. Diana goes to the village to get a look at the devastation and the gas…oddly doesn’t affect her, whereas it makes Steve gag and choke whenever he gets within smelling distance of it. They are very upset with one another at this point, so upset that Diana has a “realization” that Ares has corrupted Steve too, to stop her from killing Ares before this could happen. Sensing that he’s lost her, Steve directs Diana to the Chief’s smoke signal, because he’d asked the Squad to keep tabs on which way Ludendorf had gone while he himself went after Diana. So she takes off, and on top of that, she takes his horse.

She tracks Ludendorf to an airport (because it’s…oddly always been an airport lately), and succeeds in killing him with her sword, the Godkiller, on the roof of a watchtower. All is quiet, and it should be over, right?

Wrong. Faceless goons are still unloading the gas into bomber planes. Diana is distraught because the one thing she thought would work, didn’t. Steve finally catches up with Diana here and tries, one last time, to get her to help him destroy the gas. (In hindsight, I realize that I have no idea how Diana could have helped with that, but I guess Steve must have had some kind of a secret plan.) She refuses. She can’t imagine why they’d go on with this destruction when Ares is dead. I think it’s here that she cites her mother’s warning that “the world of men does not deserve you”, and, in one final moment of desperation, Steve blurts, “Yeah, well, maybe it’s not about deserve! Maybe, it’s about what you believe.” He begs her one last time, saying he has to go, she doesn’t budge, and he reluctantly leaves to join the Squad.

It’s then that the real Ares makes his appearance. Yep, bait and switch! Turns out he was masquerading as Sir Patrick Morgan all along. And that is a shocking twist for all of four seconds because to be honest, I half-called it from the beginning, and it is unhelpfully on the Wikipedia page.

Ares acts in the exact opposite way of how you’d expect the god of war to act, which could either be genius or a let-down and for me was a bit of both. He does the whole “break her by talking” thing instead of fighting her for half the final battle and creeps her out with biblical references when she throws the Lasso of Truth around him. He monologues about how he wanted to show Diana the horrors of war and humanity so that she would join him and destroy all humans because she’s his sister by Zeus and pretty much the only person who could. (Yay, villain exposition! That’s not an old and tired cliché at all!) Also, Hippolyta’s a fat liar. Moving on.

You may have heard that the CGI in the final battle is extremely lacking. I’m here to tell you that it definitely is. Ares’ battle design reminded me of my dad’s pre-internet Doom 2 Dos-Box game (which is not in the GIF above, but I found it and figured it would be appropriate). The ripple effects from the heat definitely didn’t help, and that mustache was a mistaaaaakeee. Ares literally fell from Olympus with that awful caterpillar on his face. Good land, it looks so bad. 

The final battle is mostly bright lights clashing on bright lights, and after the epic armies-clashing-on-armies feel from Themiscyra and the World War’s front to the super-powered hand-to-hand that would make Cap stop and notice, the light beams feel old, tired, and lazy. I think the one time I grinned in the last battle was when Diana did a cool new thing with the lasso. Anytime the lasso came out, it was great, but otherwise—meh.

And then we get to the gut punch. One thing this movie did better than CA:TFA was set up the sacrifice in the plane. I don’t know how Sameer knew the plane was on a timer, but the fact that it was gave Steve Trevor’s decision a lot more credibility than Steve Rogers’, and the Squad’s desperation to stop him when he was just in arm’s reach from them was heartbreaking. At any rate, they had to squeeze in one last CA:TFA parallel before the deal was done. Steve presses his watch into Diana’s hand (told you it’s an ironic echo) and mouths something that she can’t hear, and while Diana is fighting Ares with existential crises, Steve pilots the plane full of gas into the air, pulls out a lighter, takes a deep breath—and blows the whole thing to hell, himself inside.

So…yeah. My second favorite died too. Oops.

Diana understandably loses it. She charges through the German ranks in a slo-mo rage. Ares encourages her, going on about the depravity of humans, and then Ares makes one fatal mistake.

He disses the dearly departed.

Diana will stand for none of that crap and won’t even kill Dr. Isabel Maru when given the chance. She tries to recall Steve’s last words, and in her mind they are “I can save today—you can save the world. I wish we had more time. I love you.” So, faith in humanity restored, she spares Dr. Maru, lightning-blasts Ares to hell with levitation and the gauntlet trick, floats in the air in a crucifixion pose for a sec, and then floats back down to earth. All of the Germans are un-brainwashed suddenly and take off their gas masks, smiling at each other and the Squad, so I guess Diana was right.

Soon afterward, WWI itself ends. Not every problem is resolved. Sameer doesn’t get an acting role, Charlie doesn’t suddenly have pristine mental health, Chief’s people aren’t liberated, and they don’t get Steve back. That’s all a good thing. That’s how the real world works. Diana, Emma, and the remaining Squad are, however, all friends by the end of the movie, and unconditionally accept one another. And as the movie closes, she reminds us that she stays and she fights because it’s not about deserve, it’s about what you believe—and she believes in love.

And that’s all great until you remember that they did the whole World War thing again in about twenty-five years. Jk jk

Hey, don’t be mad! I’m joking!

So what did I think? Personally, I think it was cool. A bit of a change of pace from what I’m used to. I wish they had taken more time to hint at the background of the minor characters and do a bit less philosophizing, but for what the movie set out to do, I feel like they did a good job. The writing was a solid A-, A at best, the score was up to par and even exhilarating in places, the actors and actresses seemed like they had fun, and the stunts, effects, sets, props, and shots could be beautiful and stunning. I enjoyed watching Diana grow and change as a person, and easily got invested in her. I’d like to see her again sometime.

Does it measure up to my Marvel dudes? Personally, nah. Not really. But it’s good. It’s a really, really good movie. I liked it, and I love Diana.

Tl;dr: Wonder Woman isn’t the best movie of all time but it’s still pretty bomb, guys, and you should watch it if you like movies that are fun and kinda pretty and make you think a little.