‘The Irishman’ review: Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci triumph

By Johnny Oleksinski
https://nypost.com/2019/09/27/the-irishman-review-scorsese-de-niro-and-pesci-triumph/
September 27, 2019

Martin Scorsese needs to de-age me now that I’ve seen “The Irishman,” his epic that had its world premiere Friday at the New York Film Festival.

At 3 ¹/₂ hours, the Frank Sheeran-Jimmy Hoffa biopic is not only the longest film of Scorsese’s career, but the longest studio movie of the decade.

Well, chug a 5-hour Energy, because the terrific “Irishman” deserves your full, un-fatigued attention.

The buzz around the movie until now has not been about how this is Scorsese’s first collaboration with Al Pacino, or that it’s the director’s grand return to the mafia genre after 1995’s “Casino.” What the people are going crazy over are the digital face-lifts. That’s right — Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Pacino are given the Joan Rivers treatment with the help of CGI.

We watch Sheeran (De Niro), a truck-driver-turned-mob-fixer age back-and-forth from his 30s to his 80s and many years in between. The pricey special effect is cool, if occasionally creepy. In the youthful scenes, De Niro looks less 30 and more Gumby, with expressionless eyes and face only a Martian could love. But as the actors move closer to their natural ages, the subtle, computerized wrinkle cream works wonders.

The first part of the movie is a lot like “Goodfellas.” There’s voiceover narration provided by Sheeran from a retirement home and a nostalgic origin story set to “In the Still of the Night.” He starts off in the 1950s as a union driver and soon winds up doing favors for the Philly-based Bufalino crime family, headed by Russell Bufalino (Pesci).

Pesci’s iconic turns are so rammed in our minds that it’s easy to forget he retired and hasn’t made a movie in almost a decade. But in this genre, Pesci’s the Most Valuable Paisan. The 76-year-old actor brings all his scrappy idiosyncrasies, but is also more tender and introspective than usual.

“The Irishman” breaks from the mobster flick formula when Hoffa (Pacino) enters the picture in the 1960s. A pal of the Bufalinos, the powerful union boss needs protection, so they enlist Sheeran. The pair become friends, and the fixer’s questions of loyalty, love and family intensify.

This has a different tone than your average gangster film. Plenty of marks are shot in the forehead, yes, and a lot of wine is poured in the corner booths of dimly lit Italian restaurants, but it’s also knock-down, drag-out-into-the-river funny. The best line belongs to De Niro: “Usually three people can keep a secret,” he says. “When two of them are dead.” And Pacino is a ham as Hoffa, wildly gesturing like a coked-up cheerleader and bickering with everybody.

Speaking of Jimmy, the movie is based on the 2004 biography of Sheeran called “I Heard You Paint Houses,” and so we see his version of what happened to Hoffa, who went missing in 1975 and was never found. I won’t tell you what that story is, but it sure ain’t vague.

Five decades is a lot of history to hold together, and it could have easily crumbled. Remember “Gotti”? But Scorsese is at the top of his game here. His film is never boring, and it explores some unexpectedly deep themes for mafiosos. Witness De Niro coming alive as his character crawls toward death: friendless, ailing and with only a priest to talk to.

The director’s mindset has, thankfully, not been de-aged. When Scorsese was 47, he made a movie in which his main character said he “always wanted to be a gangster.” At 76, Scorsese would rather focus on a guy who just wants his daughter to call back.

‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Review: Sylvester Stallone Tells a Vital Truth the Media Won’t

By John Nolte
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/09/20/rambo-last-blood-sylvester-stallone-tells-truth-media-wont/
September 20. 2019

When history looks back at the abominable behavior of the establishment news media in the first two decades of the 21st century, there will of course be condemnations for the breathtaking lies and a full-blown coup attempt against a sitting president. But let’s not forget the media’s unforgivable sins of omission, especially their ongoing cover up of the ravages that come with our wide-open southern border.

The media themselves are not harmed by these ravages. Illegal reporters are not flooding the country to take media jobs,  and those who control the media live in high-rise apartments and will never feel the effects of the crime spawned by an open border.

No, the only people who feel these ravages are the people the media most hate: everyday Americans. Yes, the flood of cheap labor depresses their wages and steals their jobs, but it’s the violence — my God, the violence.

All throughout our country, illegal aliens who should have never gained entry, and many who would have been deported were it not for Democrat-run sanctuary cities, commit the most heinous crimes imaginable, including rape and murder.

What’s more, our open border is also a haven for Mexican drug cartels to traffic their poison and their sex slaves, almost all of them young girls from Mexico, and…

Those young Mexican girls are another group the American media do not care about, a story they dare not tell because it interferes with their desire for the open border that will turn Texas blue. The media’s attitude is, Not gunna let some brown sex slaves get in the way of winning an election!

So here we sit in a country with an open border responsible for atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, and a media that enables those atrocities through a conspiracy of silence.

Enter Sylvester Stallone…

You can laugh at the fact that Last Blood is an 89-minute genre film, the fifth chapter in a nearly 40-year-old franchise starring a geriatric who just turned 73: Oh, this is dumb. It’s just a movie. A disposable throwaway.

Sorry, but that’s not how pop culture works. Movies matter, and Last Blood matters… Untold million will eventually see this, will see The Truth through the most powerful propaganda tool there is: a story — not a news story, not a cable TV segment — but a story-story told with sound and picture.

And Last Blood is a fantastic story, deceptively simple, beautifully structured, thoroughly engrossing, and ridiculously satisfying.

Better still it is a truth told in the most effective way there is, through wish-fulfillment. Rambo is finally doing something about an injustice. It feels good to see something being done, and dammit I want something done!

In the 70s, genre movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish opened our eyes to a criminal justice system that forgot about the victims. On the political flip-side, movies like The China Syndrome and Silkwood opened our eyes to the dangers of nuclear power. And now, in 2019,  Last Blood courageously seeks to open our eyes about the dangers of an open border.

And I say “courageous,” because in modern-day America it takes moral courage to tell a truth when the telling means you will be  slandered as a racist — something that hasalready happened to Stallone.

But I would never tell anyone to see a movie because the politics are “correct,” just as I would never pan a movie for “incorrect” politics. A good movie is a good movie, and Last Blood is more than worth your time and money.

When we last met John Rambo a full 11 years ago (man, those 11 years went fast!), he had finally worked through what he needed to work through enough to return home, stateside to the family farm.

And life was good during those 11 years — what you might call rocking-chair-on-a-porch-good. Rambo still suffers from PTSD, but he “keeps a lid on” with prescription drugs and by fighting a war he hopes will never come. When not training horses, Rambo maintains an endless series of tunnels he dug under his farm, which includes a workshop where he forges  — God bless him — weapons of war.

With the help of his old friend Maria (Adrianna Barraza) he’s also raising 17-year-old Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), whose good-for-nothing father took off after her mother died of cancer. But now that Gabrielle knows where her dad is, she wants to see him, and it’s just a short drive from the farm in Arizona to Mexico.

Uncle John tries to explain the facts of life to her, what he knows about the “black hearts of men,” but she’s 17, which means she’s smarter than everyone else, so when no one’s looking, off she goes…

The scenes involving Gabrielle’s sex slavery are unbelievably harrowing. Director Adrian Grunberg and co-writer Stallone refuse to turn away from this truth. Our nose is rubbed in it, as it should be.

Naturally, Rambo throws away his pills and goes to war  — “Cops can’t cross the border, and down there they don’t do shit.” — and let’s just say that when John J. Rambo says he’s going to blow your head off and rip your heart out, that ain’t no figure of speech.

Along the way, Rambo receives courageous help from Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega) an “independent journalist,” because Last Blood wants to remind us that establishment journalists want nothing to do with this truth.

We also get a dispiriting look at our ridiculously inept border fencing, which elicited laughter in the audience, and there’s one brief moment where I thought I caught Rambo smiling — and it was glorious.

“I want revenge. I want them to know death is coming.” And so it does, wrapped in truth.

This one’s for the Angel Moms … on both sides of the border.

P.S. Make sure to sit through the closing montage and then rent Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint. 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here. 

‘Man Who Killed Hitler …’: Exciting sighting of Sam Elliott as Bigfoot hunter

By Richard Roeper
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/2/7/18385586/man-who-killed-hitler-exciting-sighting-of-sam-elliott-as-bigfoot-hunter
February 7, 2019

 

Talk about a spoiler-filled title!

Perhaps not since “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” have we had such a long and descriptive and spoiler-laden title …

Or do we? Does “The Man” in this movie really kill Hitler and then Bigfoot?

And wait — there’s a Bigfoot?

I’ll leave it to you to discover the answers in this strange and original and at times surprisingly lovely bit of folklore from writer-director Robert D. Krzykowski, which benefits greatly from the magnificent presence of the gravel-voiced Sam Elliott, who exudes effortless charisma as the title character.

No, not Hitler. No, not Bigfoot. He’s “The Man.”

With a timeline that hops back and forth between WWII and many decades later, and a tone that shifts from B-movie adventure to an almost indie-style, melancholic rumination on the passage of time and the lingering pangs of great love lost, “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot” is a perfect vehicle for Elliott’s legendary persona as the guy with the growling delivery and the don’t-mess-with-me aura who just might have a warm heart beating beneath all the machismo.

Elliott is Calvin Barr, a quiet loner in a small Northeast town along the Canadian border. He has two friends: his dog Ralph and his younger brother, a barber named Ed (the comedian Larry Miller, doing fine dramatic work).

One late night as Calvin exits his neighborhood bar, three young toughs surround him and say they’re taking his car.

Big mistake, young toughs. Huge. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the callback to Larry Miller as the salesman in “Pretty Woman.”)

The manner in which Calvin dispenses with the would-be carjackers is our first indication there’s more to this guy than walking his dog and having a few drinks while playing out the string.

Cue the flashback sequences, where young Calvin (played by the Irish actor Adian Turner) is an American soldier and skilled linguist who has been assigned to infiltrate Nazi Germany and get close enough to Hitler to assassinate him at close range.

We also learn just before Calvin went off to war, he had fallen in love with a schoolteacher (Caitlin Fitzgerald). (The scene in which they part ways on the night before Calvin ships out is beautifully rendered.)

To this point our story seems pretty conventional and traditional — and then along comes the Bigfoot factor.

In the more recent timeline, an FBI agent (Ron Livingston) and Canadian Royal Mounted Police official (Rizwan Manji) show up on Calvin’s doorstep and tell him a story straight out of a horror movie.

Turns out Bigfoot is real and on the loose — AND is carrying a deadly virus that kills every creature in its vicinity. If the big guy isn’t stopped, the nightmare plague could spread to every corner of the Earth and wipe out the human race.

Ah, but Calvin in one of the few humans on the planet with an apparent immunity to the virus. Also, he has legendary tracking skills, dating all the way back to his time in the service. Despite his advanced age, Calvin might be the only human on the planet who can actually find and kill Bigfoot!

How about that.

Dropped into the Canadian wilderness and armed with a shotgun and a hunting knife, the weary Calvin sets off on one last mission.

What happens next is chilling, creepy, disturbing, sad — and not what you might expect.

Kudos to writer-director Krzykowski and the production, special effects and set design teams for creating plausible backdrops for a pulpy World War II thriller, a character study and a sci-fi adventure.

As for Sam Elliott, a star is well-worn — but still has plenty of mileage left in him.

‘The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then Bigfoot’

★★★

RLJE Films presents a film written and directed by Robert D. Krzykowski. No MPAA rating. Running time: 98 minutes. 

The unbearable wokeness of Tarantino’s critics

by Andrew Doyle
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/27/the-unbearable-wokeness-of-tarantinos-critics/
August 27, 2019

72nd Cannes Film Festival – Screening of the film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” in competition – Red Carpet Arrivals – Cannes, France, May 21, 2019. Director Quentin Tarantino and cast members Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie pose. Photo: Reuters

If anybody is still uncertain about the extent to which woke identity politics has corroded the arts, one need look no further than the mainstream critical response to Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I have argued elsewhere on spiked that good criticism is characterised by a balance of individuality and objectivity. Of course, we expect critics’ interpretations to be informed by their own temperaments and tastes. But we also need them to stop their ideological leanings from overwhelming their critical faculties.

I am always most attracted to work that divides audiences and reviewers, and I would be keen to read an intelligent critique of Tarantino’s latest tour de force. But for all my efforts, I have yet to find a single negative review that doesn’t favour tedious moralising over meaningful analysis. Richard Brody in the New Yorker complains that the film is ‘obscenely regressive’, ‘ridiculously white’, and ‘celebrates white-male stardom’. Matthew Rozsa in Salon dismisses it as ‘sexist historical revisionism’. Writing for the Observer, Wendy Ide mars an otherwise insightful review by expressing frustration at ‘the positioning of middle-aged white males as the real victims’.

Those critics who have become subsumed into the cult of wokeness can rarely lay claim to individuality in their analysis. The cumulative effect feels like the product of a hive mind, one that is less concerned with artistic merit than with matters of diversity, inclusivity and representation. Just as the BBC rated Game of Thrones episodes based on the proportion of dialogue assigned to female characters, Time magazine published an article entitled ‘We Counted Every Line in Every Quentin Tarantino Film to See How Often Women Talk’. And yes, the exercise is as fatuous as it sounds.

Brody’s New Yorker review is particularly egregious. It’s a well-written piece that is rendered incompetent by a myopic devotion toidentity politics. ‘It’s far more revealing about Tarantino than about Hollywood itself,’ Brody remarks. One would hope so, given that Tarantino is an auteur rather than documentary filmmaker. Needless to say, Brody’s criticism would be best levelled elsewhere. His review says far more about him than the movie it purports to assess.

One of Brody’s many bugbears is the representation of Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh, who is humiliated in a scuffle with stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) on the set of The Green Hornet. Shannon Lee (Bruce Lee’s daughter) has described the portrayal as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘belittling’. Former basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbarconsiders it ‘somewhat racist’. Lee biographer Matthew Polly calls it ‘inaccurate’. In reality, the scene in question is a strong comedic set piece with an impressive performance from Moh, which also happens to serve an important function in the narrative. A screen idol like Bruce Lee hardly needs to be protected from caricature, and it is surely demeaning to his legacy to suggest otherwise.

As to the question of whether or not Cliff could have bested Lee in a fight, Tarantino has this to say: ‘If you ask me the question, “Who would win in a fight: Bruce Lee or Dracula?”, it’s the same question. It’s a fictional character. If I say Cliff can beat Bruce Lee up, he’s a fictional character so he could beat Bruce Lee up.’ Unlike his woke critics, Tarantino understands the difference between art and reality.

It’s not a distinction that troubles film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh. Writing for The Times, she attacks Tarantino’s ‘sadistically violent, casually racist and misogynistic fantasies, which, he insists, are just movies, not real life’. She identifies a number of supposedly offensive instances of violence against women in Tarantino’s back catalogue, which not only reveals her ongoing struggle with the concept of fiction, but also conveniently neglects the fact that his male characters tend to fare even worse.

The most ludicrous response to the film has come, perhaps predictably, from the Guardian. Indulging in the most spurious cod-psychoanalysis, Caspar Salmon claims that ‘Tarantino’s filmography reveals a director in search of increasingly gruesome settings to validate his revenge fantasies and confer legitimacy on his bloodthirst’. Again, the charge of misogyny is made on the grounds that Tarantino depicts ‘morally repellent’ violence against women. Identity politics has turned contemporary film critics into prissy, sermonising Mary Whitehouses, determined to see artists as moral educators for those poor, suggestible plebeians who might be exposed to dangerous work.

Much of the opprobrium in the press has centred around Tarantino’s depiction of Sharon Tate (played by the brilliant Margot Robbie). Tate was an actress and the wife of director Roman Polanski. Her murder at the hands of members of the Charles Manson ‘family’, along with her three houseguests and her unborn child, provides the backdrop to the fictional story of TV and film actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman Cliff. Dalton lives on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills, next door to Polanski and Tate’s residence where the murders took place on 8 August 1969. Many have since romanticised this date as marking the sunset of the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood, and there is little doubt that Tarantino’s affection for this era is the film’s driving force.

Sharon Tate was on the cusp of stardom when Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel – acting on the instructions of their cult leader Manson – invaded her home and butchered the occupants. Tate had appeared in Polanski’s film The Fearless Vampire Killers(1967) and had been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in Valley of the Dolls (1967). Young, talented and beautiful, she had all the makings of a screen icon. Her death looms large throughout Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Much like the audience in a Greek tragedy, we know what is coming. Tarantino allows us glimpses of her day-to-day life. She dances to Paul Revere records in her home, goes to a party at the Playboy Mansion, buys her husband a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (another woman whose life is unjustly cut short). The inevitability of her murder adds potency to these snapshots. As Tarantino himself put it, ‘She has been defined by the tragedy of her ending. So I thought there was something special about just seeing her live life.’

So when a New York Times reporter at the Cannes Film Festival asked Tarantino why Tate wasn’t assigned more dialogue in the film, he was right to point out the stupidity of the question. The moments when Tate is alone, and therefore unlikely to be speaking, are some of the most powerful in the film. In one key scene, we see Tate attend a screening of The Wrecking Crew (1968), in which she played a minor role. She spends much of the time enjoying the responses of the audience, who laugh along at her performance. Anyone in the creative arts will appreciate the harmless vanity of seeing one’s work appreciated by strangers. It is a simple conceit, made poignant by our knowledge of the future she was to be denied. Ivan-Zadeh dismisses the scene as mere ‘masturbatory fantasy’ because, like all critics with an intersectionalist bent, she is more interested is passing moral judgements on the filmmaker than assessing the merits of his work.

For those who understand that cinema is a quintessentially visual art, and who reject the idea that a character’s impact can be measured by a quick word-count, it is clear that Tarantino’s depiction of Tate is a gesture towards the iconic onscreen status that, in reality, was thwarted by her premature death. The effect is accentuated by her relative silence. We can admire her, catch brief moments of her life and speculate about her private thoughts, but there our relationship ends. So when the Guardian’s Caspar Salmon insists that Tarantino should have spent more time ‘fleshing out the character’, he is spectacularly missing the point. Icons cease to be icons once we know them too well.

The success of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood neither stands nor falls on its putative morality. But if the woke critics are right, and movies ought to be morally pure, there is certainly a case to be made in Tarantino’s favour. In his version of events, Sharon Tate lives on, while her would-be murderers are gruesomely dispatched. For all Salmon’s handwringing about how ‘it’s rancid to stage these killings as entertainment’, the sheer extremity of the violence in the final act pivots the film into laugh-out-loud absurdist territory. It’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, whose excessive brutality is far funnier than many critics have been willing to admit. That the moralists have taken umbrage at a film that punishes the guilty shows the incoherence of their position. In Tarantino’s Hollywood, the golden age does not draw to a close with the screams of the innocent. Instead, Sharon Tate emerges victorious, and Charles Manson’s devotees are degraded to mere stooges of high farce. It’s surely no less than they deserve.

Andrew Doyle is a stand-up comedian and spiked columnist. His book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice (written by his alter-ego Titania McGrath) is available on Amazon.

Get Lost, Charlie

Paul Beston
https://www.city-journal.org/charles-manson-murders
August 16, 2019


Margot Robbie, Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt

If you grew up in the 1970s, it was hard to escape Charles Manson. His gang’s grisly 1969 deeds were already legendary, and they left a lingering dread over middle-class America, to say nothing of Hollywood and other more privileged enclaves. The early and mid-seventies retained some trappings of sixties culture, and the climate that had fostered the Manson Family, or that Manson had used to foster it, seemed still operative. Older Americans, trying to exhale after the sixties’ Olympian paces, found themselves bewildered in a new, hungover decade that made not even a pretense of restoring the old verities.

There would be no getting them back, it turned out, and certainly not with that sense of menace in the air. My street in suburban Chicagoland held an annual block party on Labor Day weekend, with food and drink set out on long tables in a kind of wandering feast from yard to yard. One year, though, some college or older high school boys, not from the area, invited themselves into one of our neighbor’s homes. The street’s houses were open, with people regularly wandering in and out; the interlopers must have seen an easy target. They made their move, probably looking for booze, or maybe more. One of the neighborhood men entered the house and discovered them. They set upon him, he called out for help, and my father rushed in. He slugged one of the boys in the belly, and they all ran off. He seemed embarrassed by the deed in later years, wondering if he really needed to punch the kid. To the rest of us, the justification seemed clear: he had acted to help a friend.

Yet the incident seems hard to separate entirely from those still-fevered times. My father was an inveterate newspaper reader. The era’s cascading outrages must have had some effect on him, and the Manson murders especially so—involving, as they did, home invasion, the loss of sanctuary, and the wanton slaughter of, among other innocents, a nearly nine-months-pregnant woman. By the late 1960s, many Americans had learned to fear stepping out of their homes; Manson made them worry about staying in. It was not a climate conducive to pondering proportional degrees of self-defense.

Manson was in kids’ heads, too, back then. Born too late to view hippies as harmless and naïve, I saw them as people who wanted to take drugs and slice up my parents. They were all budding Mansons to me. The impression deepened when one of the older boys in our neighborhood acquired a rawhide bullwhip and rode his bike around, trying to lash the younger kids as we fled. The sixties had famously given us the motto, “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” but from where I stood, the only reliable people were 12 and under or 35 and over. Everyone else was out of their tree.

The Manson book, Helter Skelter, circulated in those years. Among my younger crowd, it had a forbidden-fruit quality, like a Playboy that specialized not in nude bodies but dead ones. Published in 1974, it remains one of the top true-crime sellers, an epochal account of the murders and prosecution of the Manson cult by the man who had put most of them away for life, Vincent Bugliosi. The made-for-TV feature by the same name that appeared soon after, in 1976, relied on the Bugliosi account and is creepy in that dreamlike way of 1970s TV movies. Every kid I knew was told he couldn’t watch it. We all watched it.



Steve Railsback as Charles Manson in 'Helter Skelter'

Bugliosi is a clear writer, and he paces his largely procedural narrative in a way that keeps readers on the hook, but his undertone of insistence leaves one wondering, vaguely, if all the pieces really fit together. Ed Sanders didn’t think so: before Bugliosi, he had published the first book on Manson, The Family, which is about as different from Helter Skelter as can be imagined. Writing with the flair of the countercultural figure he was, Sanders nevertheless managed to tell the Manson story with genuine outrage on behalf of the victims and disgust for their victimizers. He had wondered, at the outset, whether Manson and his acolytes were being framed by the government, but he quickly realized that they were murderers of almost unimaginable cruelty, and his contempt for them fired his hipster prose, as when he dubbed them “acidassins” or deflated their spooky talk by interjecting, “Oo-ee-oo.” Even his irreverence serves a purpose. “All was chop,” he writes, as the killers approach their prey—an off-putting phrase, but it gets at the annihilation of taboo that was the Manson Family’s calling card.

The Family asks questions that make Bugliosi’s version seem something less than airtight. Bugliosi had, after all, a huge stake in the official story: he had used it to prosecute Manson, to render historical judgment on the events, and to build his own reputation as an author and commentator. In the last 25 years, more books have come out on the Manson case, some taking new angles, such as Tom O’Neil’s just-published Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. Yet the fundamental physical realities of the case, of who did the killing and who got killed, remain unchallenged, as does the premise that the killers were operating under Manson’s influence, in some degree or another. The rest of it depends on how deep you want to go.

Over the last half century, enough people have wanted to go deeper, resulting not only in more Manson books but also in seemingly endless documentaries and specials, as well as—disturbingly—a cultish sort of fan base. The Manson murders have long been regarded as a 1960s touchstone, and like other major events of that most-analyzed decade, it has been assigned a definitional significance: the murders, we’re told, symbolized the end of the countercultural dream of peace and love.

Fifty years on, though, they might be better seen as an early, bloody shot in a culture war between rationality and irrationality, unity and tribalism, and between incremental, liberal progress and visions of apocalypse. Demythologized at last in Quentin Tarantino’s new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as weak-minded losers, Manson’s followers stand as the opposite number, in every sense, to the Apollo astronauts, who, just weeks earlier, had pulled off the feat that might stand as the last great testament of an older, greater America: the moon landing.

Neil Armstrong’s footprints may be on the moon, but Manson’s footprints (or fingerprints, more aptly) seem more pervasive than do those of the Apollo heroes. American culture gives unprecedented authority today to privatized, subjective reality; the Manson Family didn’t just give it authority, they gave it action. Conspiracy theories are legion, often competing with empirical explanations for acceptance among the general public; Manson was a gifted conspiracist, regardless of whether he believed what he was peddling. And Manson was an unfulfilled artist (a singer/songwriter manqué), whose outrage at failure would eventually lead him to demand—as our mass shooters today demand—that the world pay heed to his importance. When insistence fell on deaf ears, only one solution remained. Then, as now, all was chop.

But just as another milestone anniversary resurfaces this foul and dreary story, Quentin Tarantino, of all people, comes along to remind us that old virtues remain stout enough to stand down monsters. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a Tarantino opus that contains all his hallmarks, good and bad, along with what seems a new sense of humanity and justice. The movie is being criticized for many reasons, some familiar, some specific to our perpetually aggrieved,bean-counting political tempers. In their myopia, the bean-counters cannot see that Tarantino has allowed us to imagine a way out of at least one old American nightmare. After 50 years, someone finally told the Manson Family to get lost.

Paul Beston is the managing editor of City Journal and author of The Boxing Kings.

‘Apocalypse Now: Final Cut’: Coppola’s Surreal Vietnam Epic Returns

By David Fear
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/apocalypse-now-final-cut-review-coppola-870292/
August 15, 2019

About a mile out, the man says, they’ll put on the music. The kid looks confused: music? Just a classical piece — the boys love it. “Put on ‘PSYWAR OP,’ ” he barks into his headset. “Make it loud.“

The reel-to-reel starts up. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” from the German composer’s Ring of the Nibelung opera, begins playing over loudspeakers. The soldiers look around, confused and bemused. The camera keeps shooting a group of helicopters, already in attack formation, from below — you’d think they were prehistoric birds of prey. The troops staring out from these metal beasts are in profile, stoic and larger-than-life, pure Riefenstahl 101. And from where you’re sitting, the command to “make it loud” seems redundant. It feels deafening, overwhelming. It feels like you’re on the whirlybird when that first missile launches, the bobbleheaded co-pilot bouncing in his seat, guns firing, people on the ground falling, explosions everywhere. Noise seems to be swirling around you, from static-y voices on intercoms to heavy artillery blasts. You’re in the middle of pure chaos.

It’s one of the most famous extended sequences in American filmmaking. John Milius wrote it, based on experiences he’d heard from folks who’d come back from ‘Nam after being in the shit. Gerald B. Greenberg edited it. The legendary Walter Murch designed the soundscapes. Akira Kurosawa allegedly loved it. Francis Ford Coppola says he’s watched it many, many times over the past 40 years, “in various states of dread and fear.” You may have seen these moments on a plane, in a train, on a boat, with a goat. (Just, please, do not say “on your phone.”)

But sitting in a cavernous theater in downtown San Francisco and viewing Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, a 4K restoration-cum-remix of Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War magnum opus, it almost feels as if you are experiencing this attack for the very first time. It goes without saying that most movies are best seen on a big screen, with an audience and in the dark. When you’re talking about this surreal, psychedelic vision of life during wartime, however — a phantasmagoria of gung-ho surfing obsessives, gyrating Playboy bunnies, ghostly French colonialists, and Marlon Brando in greenface — you’re talking about a whole other mind-fuck when its madness is presented in IMAX. Which is all the more reason to catch this rejiggered masterpiece when it gets a brief run in select theaters starting August 15th. (A Blu-Ray release hits shelves, virtual or otherwise, on August 27th.) It is, in terms of storytelling and scope, a completely different trip up the river, through your acid-fried skull, and into the heart of darkness.

So about that “Final Cut” subtitle . . .

Back in early 2017, James Mockoski, the archivist at Coppola’s production company American Zoetrope, approached the director with the idea of doing something special to commemorate the film’s upcoming 40th anniversary. The ’79 negative was in decent though slightly beat-up shape, as was the material used for the expanded 2001 version known as Apocalypse Now Redux; according to mix engineer Colin Guthrie, the “original six-track master audio given to the studio and kept by Zoetrope . . . both were lost.”

They each knew the restoration process would be laborious — “frame by frame, moment by moment,” as Guthrie says — but thanks to advances in digital technology over the past decade or so, not impossible. The two men began examining the elements they had from the various prints and home-entertainment reissues over the years. The idea would be to clean up the images and substantially improve the sonic fidelity, with the goal being a far better-looking and -sounding Apocalypse Now compared to previous rereleases, especially in regard to the audio’s low end. (At Zoetrope’s “mixing barn” in Napa the day after the San Francisco screening, Guthrie plays the newly restored “Operation Arclight” bombing sequence with massive speakers pointed at a couch in the center of the room, and the rumble of the bombing raid makes you feel like you’re seconds away from encountering the mythical brown note firsthand.)

Mockoski and Guthrie figured they could not only get everything into shape but could, in the former’s words, “push things in a different direction . . . into becoming more of an immersive viewing experience using technology that wasn’t around in 1979, especially once Dolby and IMAX  came on board.” (The Final Cut theatrical run will include screenings in the IMAX format, though not exclusively.) The question was whether Coppola was interested in going back into this particular jungle once more. He’d already revisited the film and radically added close to an hour of footage, giving us the second Redux version. Yet the idea of just putting a spruced-up, albeit technically superior, print of the movie out for the anniversary seemed like too much of a nostalgic indulgence. And which cut would he choose for the anniversary, anyway: original recipe or extra-crispy?

“When we were releasing the film in ’79,” Coppola says, sitting in one of his Northern California winery’s large, museum-like spaces above the tasting areas, “we knew it was too long, and too weird. The film was surreal — my feeling was the war was surreal, so anything trying to get to the heart of it was going to be out-there. But distributors kept telling us, ‘Make it shorter, make it less weird.’ So we did. Then, when folks were making my wife’s documentary [1991’s Hearts of Darkness], they had access to all of the hours and hours of footage. And by that point, the mainstream has sort of absorbed what we were doing in Apocalypse, so it didn’t seem quite so weird anymore. Ironically, it was the distributors who came to me and said, ‘Well, you have all this stuff, why not put what you cut back in?’ That’s how Redux happened.

“But I always felt,” he continues, “that the first version was too shortened — not too short, too shortened — and the other version was . . . well, maybe we shouldn’t have put everything back in. A movie is in service to a theme that runs through it, and I always felt that Redux never quite supported the theme of the film as fundamentally as I wanted. So we started with the second version, because that already had the restorations and corrections, and we began to tweak from there. I didn’t intend to make a new version . . . but I felt that this being longer than one and shorter than the other was the perfect blend.”

Thus was born Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, or what some say Coppola has privately referred to as “the Goldilocks edit” of the film — a just-right amalgamation of both previous iterations, something that seems equally sprawling yet tighter than either of the versions we’ve come to know. Some 14 minutes have been taken out. Several game-changing Redux decisions remain, notably the PBR Street Gang’s water-skiing excursion coming after their Col. Kilgore misadventure rather than before, as it does in the original — a move that makes the boat’s crew seem less gonzo from the get-go and more like guys deservedly blowing off steam. (Laurence Fishburne’s rubber-limbed boogieing to the Stones’ “Satisfaction” naturally steals the scene no matter where you put it.) The second encounter with the Playboy bunnies is gone; the slapstick stolen-surfboard vignette remains. And the controversial French-plantation sequence has been streamlined, though the immortal Jung-and-the-restless line “There are two of you . . . one that kills and one that loves” has, for better or worse, been left intact.

More important, this Apocalypse Now retains the center-can’t-hold insanity of its onscreen journey (and the offscreen legend of behind-the-scenes creative mayhem) that has always made this movie feel like a singular cinematic fever dream. If anything, seeing this New Hollywood landmark/last gasp in such a clean, crisp, larger-than-life state emphasizes the multitudes it still contains. You might notice that, say, when a CIA agent is cutting into a slice of roast beef during the initial meeting between Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard and his military overlords, it mirrors the slaughter of a bull near the end. You may take note of the tenderness that Robert Duvall’s Kilgore — always and forever “a goofy foot” — displays toward children and babies during his siege on a Vietnamese village. You may find yourself really noticing, for the first time, the chorus of crickets that accompanies Col. Kurtz’s final breath. Or you may find yourself identifying with Chef, or Clean, or even Dennis Hopper’s countercultural motormouth instead of Willard this go-round. Viewers never step in the same river twice.

As to whether Apocalypse 3.0 is the “definitive” version of Coppola’s warped war-film vision, the answer may depend on the moviegoer. No one is even sure if “final” is truly applicable either. After premiering this cut at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, he made a few extra trims for its official release; Mockoski notes that the director “never really locks a film, he latches it.” For Coppola, however, this is the end result of decades of thinking about the story he wanted to tell — a three-hour trek into man’s dark side and a nation’s military moral free-fall that has, at long last, come to a conclusion he’s happy with. “Film is an illusion,” he says. “And this was the version where the illusion of Apocalypse Now finally snapped into place for me."