Viewing entries tagged
Austin Butler
The Bikeriders is, on the whole, enchanted by its subjects’ nihilism. Nichols’s deep curiosity about human behavior and his non-judgmental, empathetic artistic style makes his film about small-scale fascism an engrossing portrait of our endless capacity for love and hate.
The key moment in Baz Luhrmann’s latest cinematic maximalist bacchanal – about the one and only King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley – comes within the picture’s first five or ten minutes. The internet meme culture overlords got it immediately. It’s the scene, which became a viral sensation, of Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker being informed that the voice he’s hearing on the radio, Elvis singing That’s All Right, belongs to a white man. “He’s white…,” Hanks’s Parker says as if in a trance; it’s half-question, half-stunned-declarative-statement.
Col. Tom – who represented Presley from 1956 until the singer’s tragic death in 1977 and helped himself to over half of everything Elvis earned – is our (not so) humble narrator. He acknowledges that some will consider him “the villain of this here story.” Luhrmann let’s Col. Tom have his say, but he also uses his strong directorial hand to make sure we see the one-time carnie’s legacy of selfish and cruel behavior and the role it played in Elvis’s descent into addiction, despair, and, ultimately, death.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (OUaTiH) is Tarantino’s re-creation of and loving, yet gleefully revisionist, tribute to this fractious period in Hollywood’s history. Without giving too much away, this film is a spiritual cousin to Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. That movie incensed more than a few people with its shockingly gory climax that reimagined the end of World War II.
The same will probably be true for OUaTiH. Tarantino puts his unique spin on the bloody, unspeakable events that closed the 1960s. When creating works of art, I have no need for the artist to feel constrained by the facts when representing real events. A big part of art is reimagining the world in new, different, and interesting ways. A possible exception is documentaries, but even those have exceptions to the rule. Mainly, the purpose Tarantino’s divergence from truth serves in OUaTiH, at least for me, was one of catharsis. Just like in Inglourious Basterds, we get to see good triumph over evil, in the bloodiest, most outrageous way possible…
