For the week of December 9th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing Quentin Tarantino's genre-bending masterpiece Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Blu-ray. I find something ineffably wonderful about this, Tarantino's ninth film (if you count Kill Bill as one movie, which I do), and that's saying something considering the quality of QT's output. In an interview on the Pure Cinema Podcast, Tarantino mentions that he considers the New Beverly Cinema to be his "Quentin Museum," and I thought about that a lot while watching the film. By setting the film in Los Angeles, circa 1969 - pretty much the inflection point between Old and New Hollywood - Tarantino structures what feels like a curated tour through every obsession, love, and fear he's ever had. His two leads (Leonardo DiCaprio's TV star-turned-flailing feature lead Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt's unflappable stuntman Cliff Booth) don't know how they fare in a media landscape that favors Method naturalism and counter-culture malaise over two-fisted genre heroics, and you sense Tarantino wrestling with similar questions. But he's also looking back, and in that regard, I'd put Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in conversation with movies like Roma or Dazed and Confused; Tarantino is using his not-inconsiderable creative gifts (and the might of American studio financing - against all odds, this is a $100-million memory piece) to recreate his past, to try and beat against the current. There are so many scenes of people driving and listening to music and ignoring commercials and drifting through pop culture ephemera. It's a bold move, structuring our movie experience around watching people watch/listen to other media, but I found myself damn near moved to tears. Tarantino suffuses all these beats with longing, like if he spends enough time and money on set, he'll be able to punch a hole through time itself and go back to 1969. And if that's possible, why not meddle a little bit, especially with regard to DiCaprio's neighbor, the doomed film starlet Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie, giving a lovely performance, high-word-count be dammed)? More than that, I should not say, although if you guessed that Tarantino engages in a little historical revisionism, I wouldn't correct you. But what separates the revisionism for me here from, say, Inglourious Basterds (which is a film I like but defiantly do not love), is that Tarantino treats his more fantastical elements with more melancholy than I'm used to seeing from him. That final title card sucks the air out of the room, the "Once Upon a Time..." reminding us we're just watching a bedtime story, and not the actual nightmare that haunted Los Angeles on August 8th and 9th, 1969. Furthermore, Tarantino is trying to change more than just history. He wants to give a second life to actors like Vince Edwards and Fabian (other not-quite-stars in the Rick Dalton vein), to Westerns and Hollywood glamour, to give the Golden Age a few more years before the tarnish of Manson and the full maturation of the American New Wave would make anachronisms of everything before it. Tarantino has always been a filmmaker out of step, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sees him acknowledge that fact, that he's not in sync with the ways Hollywood makes movies, that he might not have a place in a realm where Disney owns everything and superheroes reign supreme. And we have to reconcile that truth with Rick and Cliff's "last stand." They've won, but we know they've already lost. The movie is a boisterous elegy. I hope Tarantino never makes another film.
On the other end of the spectrum? The horror hit It: Chapter Two, which arrives courtesy of New Line and Warner Home Entertainment. I was a bit too hard on its predecessor, It: Chapter One; yes, it's not my imagined version of the Stephen King novel, but it's a thoroughly enjoyable pop entertainment all the same, one that styles itself as The Goonies with a flesh-eating monster. That said, many of Chapter One's strengths came from the Cary Fukunaga and Chase Palmer script, which director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman largely preserved through production. Chapter Two would find Muschietti and Dauberman left to their own devices, and...well, it ain't pretty, folks. Chapter Two is perplexingly, deeply terrible. At times, this plays like the Batman v Superman of horror sequels (in that someone decided to force a franchise into existence without laying any of the proper groundwork); at times, it proves all too willing to indulge in Stephen King's worst ideas (the alien mythology and big giant spider make grand entrances, and whoo boy, you can smell fish coming off them) without any of his storytelling virtuosity. This movie has no forward momentum. For one, it follows the same narrative beats as the first: split up the Losers (now plated by James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, James Ransone, Isaiah Mustafa, Andy Bean, and a terrible Jay Ryan, who is definitely a model-slash-actor, and not the other way around) so Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård, naturally) can torment them, only this time we see our heroes reliving major incidents from the first movie that they oh-so conveniently forgot. And then each of those scenes gets effectively bifurcated since Muschietti and Dauberman want to cut to the kid cast as often as possible. It's a fatal decision. With one exception, we don't spend enough time with the adults as we need to, and the de-aging CGI on the kids is so uncanny valley and gross that it gave me Superman's Vanished Mustache PTSD. And all of this exists in service of...what? Having the Losers sit in a circle, indulge in some faintly racist Pennywise expulsion ceremony, and then dodge a bit of CGI flubber that looks like Bill Skarsgård? Almost none of it works, and even less of it is scary. The cold open is disturbing, but only because it exploits a homophobic hate crime for horror-movie shocks (in fairness, King's novel made the same mistake), and as good as Skarsgård is, he only gets one scene that captures the skittery menace of the first movie, an encounter with a brave little girl under some bleachers that starts tender and ends brutally. But Bill Hader is brilliant. As adult Richie, he mimics Finn Wolfhard's stream-of-consciousness banter, except it didn't bother me - Hader looks so terrified that you realize his jokes are a defense mechanism. Whenever the film becomes a B.S. cartoon, Hader manages to ground it. There's a full-scale Thing rip-off that Hader saves through sheer force of will, and when he has to deliver an irritating one-liner after killing a guy in a library ("Well, that was overdue"), Hader immediately deflates it by vomiting all over himself in fear. Best of all is the end when the Losers are reminiscing about a fallen member. It's all overwrought sentimentality from the likes of James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain, and then we cut to Hader, who just starts ugly crying. He doesn't say a word. But he breaks your heart when the movie cannot.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that he's "not completely sure that the unabashed star power this second installment offers in terms of some of its adult players actually helps things, though performances are generally quite well realized, if often on the probably unavoidably mopey side a lot of the time. The kids continue to impress rather handily, though, and some of the most touching scenes in the film offer adult versions kind of experiencing their memories as full fledged realities in front of their eyes. Skarsgård once again manages to bring a kind of snarky impudence combined with an almost childlike and naive quality to Pennywise. The film's over the top climax is probably too CGI laden and ultimately silly, perhaps so much so that it will provoke laughter instead of gasps of horror, but the film moves on to a rather sweet coda that does offer some real emotion."
Much better is STX and Universal's fall sleeper hit Hustlers. How good is the film, you ask? Maybe one nonessential framing device and a related (and bad) supporting performance (what happened to you, Julia Stiles) away from being one of my three favorite movies of the year. I'm just as surprised as you, but then again, I wasn't expecting to walk into a darkly comic, feminist riff on Magic Mike, The Big Short, and GoodFellas. We open just before the financial crisis with Constance Wu's amateur dancer leading us through the world of exotic dancers. In trying to find her footing (sometimes literally - the movie makes painfully clear the kinds of physical rigors strippers have to perform on a nightly basis), she teams up with Jennifer Lopez's magnetic performer, and for a while, they're raking in cash from horny CEOs and Wall Street bros. This part of the movie is the best; writer/director Lorene Scafaria gives real good Scorsese, and she subverts what could be a problematic romp through the male gaze. For a movie about strippers, the (brief) female nudity feels matter of fact, workaday. Scafaria never leers at any of her actresses (including Keke Palmer and a very funny Lili Reinhart) or objectifies them beyond the demands of the script. Once the market collapses, our heroines have to resort to far more illicit means to stay afloat. This section doesn't have the documentary-esque specificity of the first act, but it's still hugely enjoyable, especially as Lopez becomes more and more unhinged in her pursuit of wealth. Speaking of the Former Jenny from the Block: she has the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in the bag if they campaign her in that category. This is the best performance she's ever given, and I say that as a card-carrying fan of Out of Sight. What Lopez does is uncanny, blending the cool professionalism of Robert De Niro's Jimmy Conway with the wild-card unpredictability of Joe Pesci's Tommy De Vito. It's another reason why Hustlers emerged as such an engaging crowdpleaser. Related: Annapurna helped finance this film, but when that studio started hemorrhaging money, they sold the rights off to STX, assuming, I guess, that a movie about strippers scamming Wall Street bros would underperform just like everything else Annapurna has released in the last five years. Lo and behold, STX actually...what's the word? Oh yeah - advertisedHustlers, and it became a genuine hit. Moral of the story: I love Megan Ellison and the movies she helps make, but maybe she shouldn't run a studio?
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the cast that sells the material. While the story is largely strong enough - though certainly a bit predictable - to stand on its own, stars Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu shine in their roles, embracing the highs and lows and realities and rigors of their lives around the pole and beyond the limits of the law with steady, commendable cadence and depth. Both demonstrate command of characters and a deeper understanding of story and what it means to the girls they play beyond the simple accumulation of wealth. While the material gain is prominent in the characters' maneuverings, the film and the actors do not ignore the price they pay internally. While subtle at first, it's a prominent component in the film's larger arc, and to watch them through the ebbs and flows of the process is as rewarding as the process itself. These are surprisingly deep efforts that warrant attention, even if the material would seem to suggest otherwise."
Finally, from the Criterion Collection comes Wim Wenders' maddening, singular sci-fi odyssey Until the End of the World. Wenders intended this 1991 epic to be his magnum opus. What starts as a postmodern noir - Solveig Dommartin's bored dreamer meets William Hurt's mystery man, who's being pursued by killers and might just hold the key to our technological future - becomes a globe-trotting, surrealist examination of what it means to be alive. Armed with $23 million dollars and the backing of a major studio (Warner Brothers), Wenders whisked his crew to more than eleven countries (sometimes filming illegally - Dommartin had to surreptitiously grab location shots in the Congo after Warner forbade the production from continuing in such an unstable region), blending Robby Müller's gorgeous 35mm photography with then-cutting-edge HD cinematography and layering it all on top of a sonic landscape that includes Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, T Bone Burnett, and U2. Yet for years, what Wenders wanted to achieve seemed constrained by the film itself - Warner demanded that he chop it down from 287 minutes to a more manageable two-and-a-half hours, and that shorter cut always played like a trailer for a more substantial work. But Wenders held onto his preferred cut (in a great bit of slight-of-hand, he submitted a duplicate copy for editing and kept the original negative safely preserved and hidden from WB), and in 2015 he premiered it to most rapturous reviews. Now, all that said, to appreciate Until the End of the World means holding onto two opposing concepts at the same time. To wit: 1) this director's cut is the definitive version of the film and an essential piece of Wenders' canon, and 2) it's also indulgent and often aimless, and far from Wenders' best work (that remains Paris, Texas, from now until time immemorial). What was vague and ill-defined in the 157-minute theatrical release often remains vague and ill-defined in the longer version: there's just a lot more of it, and I confess to feeling impatient when I saw the film at New York's IFC Center (The Irishman feels like Mad Max: Fury Road in comparison to this one). However, Wenders has such a command of tone and image that the film remains watchable even when it makes no sense. If nothing else, the extended Until the End of the World stands alongside New York, New York, 1941, and the director's cut of Sucker Punch as a testament to what glories and crises alike result when a major studio gives an auteur carte blanche and a dump truck full of money. Wenders is always straining past his ambitions here, and even the exertions are spellbinding to watch.