MovieChat Forums > Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood (2019) Discussion > So Quentin's go-to recipe when he's out ...

So Quentin's go-to recipe when he's out of ideas...


...is to just take a piece of history that went a certain way, and make it go a different way, with some added fourth-wall breaking worldly revenge. IB, Django, and this. It reeks of laziness. It was already done much better and brought to its peak in Inglourious Basterds for instance, and I didn't need to see it again.

"Jews get revenge on Hitler! Black people get revenge on white people! And everybody (especially Hollywood cronies though) get revenge on the Manson family!"

How about a new unique idea?

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I wouldnt categorize Django as being the same degree of historical fiction as IB or Hollywood.

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I wouldn't say Django falls into this camp. There are no historical characters in that one so he could basically do whatever he wanted.

Otherwise, QT doing an alternate history movie twice isn’t that big of a deal.

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Tarantino himself described it in the same way: “This [rewritten history theme] begs a trilogy, it begs to have a third movie on this theme.” “I haven’t decided about what yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/11/quentin-tarantino-rewritten-history-trilogy

And it certainly fits with the historical revenge I was describing in my original post.

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That’s still weird to call Django rewritten history unless there were some historical figures in that movie I’m unaware of. Hateful Eight rewrote history just as much, as did pretty much every movie set in the past.

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I think the change in vision you're noticing is what happened after Quentin's film editor, Sally Menke, died tragically after Inglorious Basterds.

Sally knew how to reel-in QT's indulgent tendencies and edited his movies in a style that displayed character arcs with more resilience and not just cause-and-effect platitudes.

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Although I'm not sure Sally's death contributed to his lazy reuse of themes, she was absolutely fundamental in the brilliance of his earlier films. They have not had the same luster since.

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I thought much the same thing, and I have to admit, I thought this movie was in a certain sense the most self-indulgent, Walter Mitty sort of thing I'd ever seen. In Tarantino's take on an alternate history where the Manson murders never happen, it's not the police or anyone you'd normally expect to thwart a crime that does it, it's movie people,/i> -- Tarantino's own crowd, in other words --who serve the Manson family their comeuppance.

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Exactly how I feel. Revisionist history and aping B-grade films from his youth is all he has in the tank.

A talented filmmaker for sure, but I guess he only had one Pulp Fiction in him. Even moments of that film wear thin (mostly his scenes), but still a classic.

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Pulp Fiction is very good, and he never reached that peak again even though some other great films were produced. His films have become more and more self-indulgent over time, and they also lack the sharpness that was exhibited with Sally Menke as editor.

For a person who claims to be directing only 10 films, it's pretty ridiculous that he committed multiple to more revisionist stuff, with each getting progressively worse. I'd like to see him try his hand at something very different, but there's no real opportunity for that now if he's actually quitting at 10... besides venturing into TV, where there's already a ridiculous overabundance of shows currently.

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