Showing posts with label BRAVEHEART. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BRAVEHEART. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Excerpt from podcast episode about Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (2021)

 “And I'm sure there's a few people like that that are multiple viewers of Quentin's audience that probably, you know, laugh straight up at the Mexican remark that Brad Pitt makes out in the back parking lot of Musso and Frank's, and probably laugh at the Bruce Lee sequence without thinking anything like, well, maybe I shouldn't be laughing at this because it's basically, I'm endorsing Brad Pitt's Cliff being a jackass. And I don't know. It's, I'm sure the other appeal of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, if you're seeing it over and over and over and over and over, is the mourning (a form of primal scream/moose bellowing) over, especially Leo's character, obsolescence and that working conditions get worse and jobs are harder to find, and you have to go into Europe, because you're an American name, you can at least make movies, even though you know in the back of your mind, you're not likely to have a career balance like Clint Eastwood, or even Eli Wallach, or Lee Van Cleef did.


And I'm sure that there's a lot of people, me included, who like the sequence, where Leo and Brad just sit and talk movies that restaurant in Sherman Oaks, and probably would love to see like an hour of them riffing, and then you hear Quentin's voice from off camera, encouraging them to keep going.


Quentin does kind of recognize on some level that there's a kind of narrowness about the lower rungs of the industry, where people love to talk about movies (mostly old ones) and I've bonded with some of them, and sometimes the price of bonding is you get a heavy dose of very right-wing politics and or outright racism or sexism, and then you have to think very, very hard, is it worth the stress because you're around people that are, you know, really, really stunted and backward looking when you know the world is and should be bigger and more inclusive. 


You  can't really do a depiction of 1969 without, you know, showing people. being narrow and unenlightened.  The question is whether or not the filmmaker is depicting without endorsement or is he or she cuing  the audience to laugh a la Mel Gibson directing BRAVEHEART with Patrick McGoohan throwing his son to his death from a castle window.


From Reviews And Otherwise: BONUS EPISODE: SOME MILD HERESY REGARDING QUENTIN TARANTINO AND ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, Jun 28, 2021

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reviews-and-otherwise/id1570012238?i=1000527088313&r=1553

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

60s TV icon Patrick McGoohan and 70s TV icon Ricardo Montalban: RIP.

Here's an obit from AOL: http://www.popeater.com/television/article/prisoner-star-patrick-mcgoohan-dies/306288

Some additions to the above:
DANGER MAN was known in the U.S. as SECRET AGENT--inspiring the Johnny Rivers hit "Secret Agent Man."
THE PRISONER is being remade as a cable series with Jim Caviezel (in McGoohan's role) and Sir Ian McKellan.

And here's a preliminary obit for Ricardo Montalban, known as an MGM contract player in the 1950s and a key supporting actor in episodes of the STAR TREK/PLANET OF THE APES/SPY KIDS theatrical film series: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-mew-montalban15-2009jan15,0,7457363.story. Montalban is probably best known for playing Mr. Roarke on the long-running ABC series FANTASY ISLAND.

Also, Montalban played a key role in the advancement of Latino theatre in Los Angeles.