I cry every time

I don't cry at it, but I think the movie rather painfully creates "two tracks" of narrative and emotion in the final half hour.

We reach August 8, 1969 and we KNOW(if we know our modern history) that this is the night that Sharon Tate and her friends Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Voytek Frykowski would meet their horrible murders from the guns and(worse) knives of the Manson Family.

So we watch the four of them have dinner at a Mexican restaurant(with Sharon "melancholy from the August heat and her pregnancy), KNOWING they will die, see them at home -- Abigail playing the piano, Voyek watching the "Seymour" horror movie on TV and Sharon in her sexy maternity nightie -- KNOWING they will die And we feel the reality of these final hours in their lives.

...and then the great big wonderful twist arrives -- an "alternate version" in which not only do Cliff(mainly), his dog, and Rick kill off the Mansons, but Sharon and Jay have no idea it might have been their problem instead.

Its a happy ending that turns sad when we remember what REALLY happened. And that gives the movie quite a sting.

And this: the movie presents Sharon Tate pretty much all the way through as a sweet, kind, "younger than her years" presence -- almost always interested simply in dancing and partying -- and one gets the message: the victim of this horrible murder wasn't anybody particularly deep or profound, she was a very pretty Hollywood starlet and party girl. History gave her an importance she probably never intended to have. Me, I figure that Polanski was already cheating on her, there would have been a divorce even with the child, and Roman and Sharon would have met new lovers and spouses for new lives.

Didn't happen.

you must be old and lived in this day & time to be so connected

I was a teenager at the time of the murders, and remember them well. They were the biggest thing on the news every night, for weeks, if not months. Even today, more than half a century later, it's hard to think about those filthy psychopaths torturing and murdering a pregnant woman, and all the others, without feeling emotional and horrified. The fact that the killers and their insane guru weren't executed, and that one of them is now out of prison, is a monstrous injustice.

I so sincerely wish that MV promoted threads like this.

Obviously, I am going to read more of your postings because you seem like one of these sincere members here (I'm sad to say, that oftentimes, I give as good as I get, but still wish MC would clamp down on the negativity here).

Anyway, this has grown to be one of my favorite films because it is such a fantasy-fairy tell that makes us forlornly ask, "ah, what if?"

My kids don't understand its appeal to me and I try to impress upon them how these killings sort of marked a disastrous change in American society that we have never recovered from and probably never will.