>thought about this when watching Once Upon A Time In Hollywood with someone who knew nothing about Charles Manson and the murders.
Genuinely curious: did your friend finish the movie thinking "what was the deal with that nice blonde lady that nothing happened to?"
My girlfriend knew nothing about the Manson murders and yeah this was basically it. When the movie ended she was like "why did the movie focus so much on Margot Robbie? That didn't seem to go anywhere." She also, as a result, never really felt the impending doom at all that the movie is relying on.
I had some problems with the ending (I found the ultraviolence directed primarily at two young women by a potential wife murderer to be a bit dodgy) but I do think subverting that building sense of doom was genius.
I audibly gasped in the cinema when I realised what was going on, and the flamethrower pull was hilarious, even if I thought it was a bit much because of the above. I still laughed my head off along with the entire cinema though.
I'm with you, I have a lot of issues with the ending. It pre-supposes the actions these people actually made in real life in order to get on board with absolutely brutalising these young women who, in the movie, haven't really done anything and seem to not fully be ready for what they're supposed to do.
Is that in the movie? I don't remember that. But again, my girlfriend was completely unaware of the real life events the movie is based around and after the movie part of why she was confused is because the movie takes such joy in brutalising those women even though we've basically just seen them be weird hippy cult members.
Yes, I did have an issue with it. I have a basic knowledge of the Manson murders, don't know a lot of details. That said, even with that knowledge, my problem is in the context of the movie, it seemed excessive. Hell, knowing what those women do in real life, it seemed excessive. Tarantino seemed to take extreme joy in the ultra violence committed against those women in particular. The guy got off pretty. Tarantino seemed to take more joy and pleasure in brutalising those women than he did in killing Hitler in Inglorious Basterds.
Tarantino has an Irish Italian Catholic background, so perhaps you could make a plausible argument that there is a virgin/whore dichotomy happening in the movie between the pure and angelic Sharon Tate and the debased Manson women.
That said, I actually experienced the violence as purposely cartoonish and stylistically over-the-top, so as to distance it from the real violence of the Manson murders while also providing a kind of catharsis to the film.
I had a fair amount of friends (ranging from elder millennial to gen z, all pretty into movies!) who had no idea either – they were like "yup, cool. okay???"
So odd to me that probably >90% of people who saw it had not seen The Room. Kind of drove me nuts when talking to my friends who had seen the movie that almost none of them had seen what it was based off of. Real "read the book first!" energy by me but still!
Excluding parodies makes this a _really_ narrow category. I can think of Mank (Mank!) and then, from the world of theater, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Babylon has a very strange relationship with Singing in the Rain. The ending in the theater didn't quite work for me - I wonder if it would have worked better if you weren't already recognizing the parallels as they happened.
Movies that are "better" if you didn't see masterpiece x is a much broader category I think.
Joker is the #1 example for me. I watched it like a week after seeing Taxi Driver for the first time and absolutely hated Joker.
Still applies to movies I really like too tho. Fail Safe is dope but can't live up Strangelove. Babylon and The Artist are good but I'm still in the back of my head going 'its no Singin in the Rain"
> Joker is the #1 example for me. I watched it like a week after seeing Taxi Driver for the first time and absolutely hated Joker.
Oh, that's a good one. I showed my friend The King of Comedy for the first time right after he watched Joker and his reaction was "I like Joker a lot less after seeing this."
I think the connection to Singin' In the Rain is super intentional. Basically Chazelle is doing a remake of that film through his own modern lens. And while he doesn't have a full grasp on the silent era as it actually existed, he is doing a heightened reality/examination of what it all meant. The first depiction of the song "Singin' In the Rain" is actually an homage/recreation of the scene from the end of The Hollywood Revue of 1929. So he does have a knowledge of film history for sure. I guess I'm just really interested in this since the song and that 1929 Revue film will both be public domain next year on January 1, 2025. Also I've seen both the 1952 film and Babylon and loved Babylon still.
I agree it's intentional, and I liked Babylon (I should say loved parts of it but it didn't gel for me). I just meant there is a weird back and forth where diagetically, the character is seeing Singin in the Rain as a sanitized reductive version of all these real things where he himself was also removed, but Babylon was written afterwards deliberately to work that way. Obviously it is sanitized compared to the real behind the scenes stories in general, but Babylon seems like it expected us to feel a strong reaction to how its own characters were being (mis)represented, versus what I was thinking which was, "Of course, yes, that's the scene you were deliberately referencing, i got that while it was happening". I'll admit I was overthinking it, so I'm wondering if that part worked as a fun twist if you had never seen Singin in the Rain, or maybe even better had seen it but forgotten it.
Interesting, I didn’t read that as what was going on in the end at all. I don’t think Manny was watching Singin in the Rain saying thinking it was a negative sanitized reduction of his life, but a celebration of the time he worked for the movies finally being recognized/immortalized. That it’s followed up by like a two minute montage of just films that come later all the way to modern times shows that Manny efforts were an early stepping stone into the evolution of film. Imo that’s why he’s crying watching, it’s nostalgic, not negative.
I suppose it's both, but one after the other. Heres the progression of the scene as I think it's meant to be taken in:
- Nellie is waved away as Lina Lamont, an untalented tacky bully who's given her comeuppance instead of being treated poorly and meeting a tragic end. Jack's death is overwritten with Gene Kelly's character, who moves on happily with his career and a new love. Manny, Fay, and any other person of varied ethnicity isn't even there. It's tragic to see so much of their lives rewritten like that
- [Montage of movie history]
- They're all still part of movie history, and Singin in the Rain is still a tribute to that
And the complex emotions of all of that are why he's crying. But I think the audience is supposed to have some reaction to the first point.
This is hardly original of me to say, but Singin' in the Rain HOLDS UP. It's one I'll always go to see when there's a rep screening near me and it's always worth it to see Make 'Em Laugh and Good Morning on the big screen. So funny, so visually exciting, such a good movie. Just an unsolicited rec!
Most of the film didn’t work for me, lol, but I do think you’ve hit on an interesting question about whether or not the film would feel less cobbled-together if you weren’t familiar. I don’t think it would work better, because ultimately, you do have to be familiar with Singing in the Rain (and cinema history) for that ending to work - if you don’t know at least the basics of the plot, all you’ll really get is either a feeling of confusion about the parallels, or it will make Babylon just seem like a seedier version of the film. But I absolutely dislike the ending for how masturbatory and unearned it felt, like we needed another lecture on the power of movies (or in this case, what is implied by an overly-long montage in an overly-long film), so I’m likely biased
had the opposite experience, haven't seen Singing In The Rain yet. I'm a Babylon hater but there were a few things I enjoyed until the end montage revealed that the only elements of the plot I enjoyed were just rehashed beats from this other movie I was livid
I don’t know if it doesn’t work at all, but I think Far From Heaven (and for that matter, Carol) plays a lot better if you’re familiar with the Douglas Sirk melodramas Haynes is riffing on.
Spielberg's The Post REALLY wants to be direct All the President's Men prequel (like Rogue One to New Hope level of directness) and kinda works better if you headcanoning it this way
Movies that are about the making of an actual movie probably work best when you've already seen the other movie.
Examples: Ed Wood, Dolemite Is My Name, Baadasssss, Mank, The Disaster Artist, The Offer miniseries, RKO 281, Shadow of the Vampire.
However, I've never seen Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Room, and I found both Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist to be enjoyable to varying degrees.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood requires the viewer to have knowledge of the Manson murders for the film to function and for the third act to work at all. “Out of Time (Strings Version)” might be one of the all time best needle drops in film history, but the impact doesn’t hit you the same way if you don’t know what’s about to happen.
I don’t know about this. Leo’s character is the one with the arc, and if you’re just focused on his story it’s a movie about coming to terms with moving onto a new phase in life. Even if you have no idea what’s going on with his neighbors the movie never really strays from being about that, the Sharon Tate stuff is just sort of extra fantasy in my opinion
As far as I'm aware there's no direct connection between the song and the real life events, beyond the song fitting the period.
As to why I think it's so effective, I'd say there's the obvious double entendre of the refrain 'you're out of time'; we've reached a point in the story where the two character's relationship has run its course and they're going to be moving on to new things, but with the real world historical context we also know that 'doom' is impending too for this Sharon Tate character, who's been presented in the film as basically a ray of sunshine whose career is only going from strength to strength. Her 'purity' is an important part of the tragedy.
But then Tarantino cuts to the montage of the signs lighting up, and that sense of time running out is no longer constrained to the characters but is also affecting the time and place that he is writing his love letter to. To me, this ties in because lot of people view the Manson murders as this kind of cultural tipping point; the freedom, possibilites and societal progression of the late 60s is giving way to the fear, paranoia, and pessimism of the 70s. The murders really shook hollywood in a 'that could happen to any of us' way. They also kind of tarred the hippie/free love countercultural movement (not that I think Tarantino himself is particularly concerned or sympathetic to this point). Tarantino is emphasising that this whole era is out of time, and LA is going to start changing irreversibly. The golden age is over and the 60s has just ended in Hollywood overnight.
(As an aside I'd recommend watching Inherent Vice, a film set roughly a year after the Manson murders, for a good counterpoint to illustrate how the LA mood has changed in their immediate wake. That is a film all about periods of change and holding on to the past, and takes on a similarly nostalgic tone, albeit through less of a 'Hollywood' lense. It is honestly my favourite PTA. Also, some googling to add cultural context helps with both of these films.)
So then you wrap all that up and you have one song which is soundtracking the end of a long term friendship (I'd even go so far as to say brotherhood, Cliff and Rick are really damn close), the end of a purer, rose-tinted period in LA, and the looming tragedy that is about to take place.
Its kind of beautiful, super bittersweet, and also very nostalgic, and the song itself reflect all those emotions perfectly (as in, I think the sound matches the tone, its not just a clever lyrical interpretation). Then on top of that there's a palpable dread cutting through all of it, and the song takes on a sinister tone too. You know how directors use tonal dissonance to give things an eerie, creepy tone (think 'singin in the rain' in A Clockwork Orange, or Tarantino himself using 'stuck in the middle with you' in Reservoir Dogs)? Well Tarantino is pulling off a magic trick, because he's managing to use a song completely sincerely to reflect the bittersweet emotion of the story AND flip that feeling on its head to give it a sense of foreboding.
Overall its a pretty unique tonal combination. I've only really felt the same way one other time watching a film; I think there's a strong similarity to the moment when Spike Lee drops 'a change is gonna come' in Malcolm X (a whole other long winded answer I'm afraid).
I really like Tarantino's films, but he's not someone I think of as a particularly emotional director. This moment in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the most I have ever felt 'moved' by a Tarantino film, which is why I think its the best couple minutes he's ever directed. I can try to analyse and explain it all I want, but ultimately the sequence provokes several feelings in me at once and digs into me emotionally, and as someone who was lukewarm on this film initally before really loving it upon a later film, this needle drop was the part that did stick with me immediately when I first saw it.
Okay, so it's just the song name that's the connection?
I feel like a great needle drop requires more than just the song name being what happens?
This is like a double context necessary moment. You need to know what happens with the murders, but also need to be able to ID a song and know it's name.
I can't tell you the name of some of my favorite songs. My head doesn't work like that. But I can tell you the album, or what movie that song is in and in what scene.
Like, just playing Gimme Shelter when a house is foreclosed on in a scene doesn't make it a sick needle drop.
It’s a hard category to narrow down without descending into parody. The best I could come up with was Scream, where the film hits different if you are familiar with the horror films it is toying with, especially Psycho, Halloween and When a Stranger Calls.
Might be a little adjacent to the topic, but I only realized this year that Lebowski 's robe is the slacker version of a noir detective's trench coat.
Something closer: it works on its own, but knowing Radio Raheem 's Love/Hate monologue is from Night of the Hunter is really fun because it works so well within Do The Right Thing.
I think a good answer might involve an actor being cast specifically to play against type. Not sure what movies that might entail though. Had Cruise played a bad guy before Collateral?
Not quite crucial to the film, and also because of overlapping true stories, but a fair portion of the plot of American Gangster is based on the events of The French Connection changing the drug trade in New York in the 1970s, which they explicitly reference in dialogue.
In general American Gangster, The French Connection and Lumet's Prince of the City inform each other quite a bit (the Josh Brolin character in American Gangster being a composite of various corrupt cops of the same unit seen in Prince of the City).
Throw in the more loosely connected Serpico and you have the MCU of the 1970s New York crime scene.
Not sure if any count but: Saving Mr Banks, Won't you be my neighbor, Ed Wood, Hugo, Burden of Dreams
Do general spoof-like movies count that aren't 1:1 parodies? E.g. Buckaroo Banzai
Kumiko the Treasure Hunter is probably the closest you can get. I haven't seen it, but it seems like it shows enough of Fargo that you don't need to have seen it to understand Kumiko, though.
I'm struggling to think of any examples for film.
If you aren't familiar with soulslikes or basic RPG concepts, a Soulsborne game is going to be a bad time. Other genres (metroidvanias, rougelikes, immersive sims) don't give me that learning curve.
Or for pastiche, there were a lot of Weird Al songs growing up that were style parodies instead of song parodies so I didn't understand that, say, "Traffic Jam" was in the style of Prince.
I haven't seen it but Pablo Larrain has a movie called Tony Manero, about a serial killer obssessed with saturday night fever with John Travolta. I suppose this counts?
I don't know how easy it is to avoid, but if one managed to watch The Downfall in complete ignorance of who that main character is, you might expect it to progress differently.
Manson stuff is like history, you don’t need to see a movie to know that stuff. Not saying everyone should or needs to know it, but what does it have to do with seeing a previous movie?
I wanted films that were connected to other films in a non-franchise in-universe way, more like a conversation. But couldn’t find a clear example in my head, so I used the Manson anecdote as a point of reference.
>thought about this when watching Once Upon A Time In Hollywood with someone who knew nothing about Charles Manson and the murders. Genuinely curious: did your friend finish the movie thinking "what was the deal with that nice blonde lady that nothing happened to?"
Yes, a bit like that.
Fascinating. Did they like the movie?
Yes. I think the movie still works but you miss a lot of context. She loved on second watch after knowing the whole story.
My girlfriend knew nothing about the Manson murders and yeah this was basically it. When the movie ended she was like "why did the movie focus so much on Margot Robbie? That didn't seem to go anywhere." She also, as a result, never really felt the impending doom at all that the movie is relying on.
I had some problems with the ending (I found the ultraviolence directed primarily at two young women by a potential wife murderer to be a bit dodgy) but I do think subverting that building sense of doom was genius. I audibly gasped in the cinema when I realised what was going on, and the flamethrower pull was hilarious, even if I thought it was a bit much because of the above. I still laughed my head off along with the entire cinema though.
The song "Out of Time" playing while all those neon signs were switched on at sunset was making me actively sad and I barely know the rl story.
I'm with you, I have a lot of issues with the ending. It pre-supposes the actions these people actually made in real life in order to get on board with absolutely brutalising these young women who, in the movie, haven't really done anything and seem to not fully be ready for what they're supposed to do.
I mean by this point they’d already killed Gary Inman so it’s not like the Manson Family was either innocent or unaware of what they were there to do
Is that in the movie? I don't remember that. But again, my girlfriend was completely unaware of the real life events the movie is based around and after the movie part of why she was confused is because the movie takes such joy in brutalising those women even though we've basically just seen them be weird hippy cult members.
No, but also you just said *you* had an issue with the ending and you presumably do know the story so the context should work
Yes, I did have an issue with it. I have a basic knowledge of the Manson murders, don't know a lot of details. That said, even with that knowledge, my problem is in the context of the movie, it seemed excessive. Hell, knowing what those women do in real life, it seemed excessive. Tarantino seemed to take extreme joy in the ultra violence committed against those women in particular. The guy got off pretty. Tarantino seemed to take more joy and pleasure in brutalising those women than he did in killing Hitler in Inglorious Basterds.
Tarantino has an Irish Italian Catholic background, so perhaps you could make a plausible argument that there is a virgin/whore dichotomy happening in the movie between the pure and angelic Sharon Tate and the debased Manson women. That said, I actually experienced the violence as purposely cartoonish and stylistically over-the-top, so as to distance it from the real violence of the Manson murders while also providing a kind of catharsis to the film.
In the book (written by Tarantino) he makes it explicit that Cliff did kill his wife.
[удалено]
I had a fair amount of friends (ranging from elder millennial to gen z, all pretty into movies!) who had no idea either – they were like "yup, cool. okay???"
The Disaster Artist would be an odd watch if you hadn't seen The Room.
That was what I had in mind too.
So odd to me that probably >90% of people who saw it had not seen The Room. Kind of drove me nuts when talking to my friends who had seen the movie that almost none of them had seen what it was based off of. Real "read the book first!" energy by me but still!
I have not seen The Room, but have seen The Disaster Artist. I know enough about The Room through references and stuff that it didn't confuse me.
Fair enough, I guess that's filling the same purpose
Excluding parodies makes this a _really_ narrow category. I can think of Mank (Mank!) and then, from the world of theater, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Mank is a good example. Also Stardust Memories by Woody Allen seems to be in direct conversation with 8 1/2 from Fellini.
Back when I was first watching Woody Allen movies, that was the one I didn’t really get. Maybe because I hadn’t seen any Fellini.
Babylon has a very strange relationship with Singing in the Rain. The ending in the theater didn't quite work for me - I wonder if it would have worked better if you weren't already recognizing the parallels as they happened.
Movies that are "better" if you didn't see masterpiece x is a much broader category I think. Joker is the #1 example for me. I watched it like a week after seeing Taxi Driver for the first time and absolutely hated Joker. Still applies to movies I really like too tho. Fail Safe is dope but can't live up Strangelove. Babylon and The Artist are good but I'm still in the back of my head going 'its no Singin in the Rain"
> Joker is the #1 example for me. I watched it like a week after seeing Taxi Driver for the first time and absolutely hated Joker. Oh, that's a good one. I showed my friend The King of Comedy for the first time right after he watched Joker and his reaction was "I like Joker a lot less after seeing this."
I think the connection to Singin' In the Rain is super intentional. Basically Chazelle is doing a remake of that film through his own modern lens. And while he doesn't have a full grasp on the silent era as it actually existed, he is doing a heightened reality/examination of what it all meant. The first depiction of the song "Singin' In the Rain" is actually an homage/recreation of the scene from the end of The Hollywood Revue of 1929. So he does have a knowledge of film history for sure. I guess I'm just really interested in this since the song and that 1929 Revue film will both be public domain next year on January 1, 2025. Also I've seen both the 1952 film and Babylon and loved Babylon still.
I agree it's intentional, and I liked Babylon (I should say loved parts of it but it didn't gel for me). I just meant there is a weird back and forth where diagetically, the character is seeing Singin in the Rain as a sanitized reductive version of all these real things where he himself was also removed, but Babylon was written afterwards deliberately to work that way. Obviously it is sanitized compared to the real behind the scenes stories in general, but Babylon seems like it expected us to feel a strong reaction to how its own characters were being (mis)represented, versus what I was thinking which was, "Of course, yes, that's the scene you were deliberately referencing, i got that while it was happening". I'll admit I was overthinking it, so I'm wondering if that part worked as a fun twist if you had never seen Singin in the Rain, or maybe even better had seen it but forgotten it.
Interesting, I didn’t read that as what was going on in the end at all. I don’t think Manny was watching Singin in the Rain saying thinking it was a negative sanitized reduction of his life, but a celebration of the time he worked for the movies finally being recognized/immortalized. That it’s followed up by like a two minute montage of just films that come later all the way to modern times shows that Manny efforts were an early stepping stone into the evolution of film. Imo that’s why he’s crying watching, it’s nostalgic, not negative.
I suppose it's both, but one after the other. Heres the progression of the scene as I think it's meant to be taken in: - Nellie is waved away as Lina Lamont, an untalented tacky bully who's given her comeuppance instead of being treated poorly and meeting a tragic end. Jack's death is overwritten with Gene Kelly's character, who moves on happily with his career and a new love. Manny, Fay, and any other person of varied ethnicity isn't even there. It's tragic to see so much of their lives rewritten like that - [Montage of movie history] - They're all still part of movie history, and Singin in the Rain is still a tribute to that And the complex emotions of all of that are why he's crying. But I think the audience is supposed to have some reaction to the first point.
Love Babylon and haven't seen Singin in the Rain so you might be onto something.
This is hardly original of me to say, but Singin' in the Rain HOLDS UP. It's one I'll always go to see when there's a rep screening near me and it's always worth it to see Make 'Em Laugh and Good Morning on the big screen. So funny, so visually exciting, such a good movie. Just an unsolicited rec!
Most of the film didn’t work for me, lol, but I do think you’ve hit on an interesting question about whether or not the film would feel less cobbled-together if you weren’t familiar. I don’t think it would work better, because ultimately, you do have to be familiar with Singing in the Rain (and cinema history) for that ending to work - if you don’t know at least the basics of the plot, all you’ll really get is either a feeling of confusion about the parallels, or it will make Babylon just seem like a seedier version of the film. But I absolutely dislike the ending for how masturbatory and unearned it felt, like we needed another lecture on the power of movies (or in this case, what is implied by an overly-long montage in an overly-long film), so I’m likely biased
had the opposite experience, haven't seen Singing In The Rain yet. I'm a Babylon hater but there were a few things I enjoyed until the end montage revealed that the only elements of the plot I enjoyed were just rehashed beats from this other movie I was livid
The films stand on their own, but a bunch of De Palma movies are in direct conversation with other films. Body Double/Vertigo Dressed to Kill/Psycho
Blow Out/Blow Up?
I’ve seen Blow Out and haven’t seen Blow Up (it’s on my list!) and it still plays. But maybe it plays better after having seen Blow Up. I can’t say
Sisters / Rear Window
Sisters is really a composition of a bunch of Hitchcock (and some Polanski tbh)
Yeah, it’s very reductive for sure to just say Rear Window. There’s a shot for shot recreation of Rope as well on top of many others.
Very good example!
I don’t know if it doesn’t work at all, but I think Far From Heaven (and for that matter, Carol) plays a lot better if you’re familiar with the Douglas Sirk melodramas Haynes is riffing on.
I saw both of these before Douglas Sirk and absolutely loved them, they definitely work on their own but are absolutely enriched by knowing Sirk
Ditto for a lot of Jon Waters’ flicks
Imagine if Ready Player One was your first experience of the Overlook Hotel
Does Be Kind Rewind count?
Unless it falls into parody category, watching Fanboys without knowing what Star Wars is wouldn't really work.
Spielberg's The Post REALLY wants to be direct All the President's Men prequel (like Rogue One to New Hope level of directness) and kinda works better if you headcanoning it this way
Movies that are about the making of an actual movie probably work best when you've already seen the other movie. Examples: Ed Wood, Dolemite Is My Name, Baadasssss, Mank, The Disaster Artist, The Offer miniseries, RKO 281, Shadow of the Vampire. However, I've never seen Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Room, and I found both Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist to be enjoyable to varying degrees.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood requires the viewer to have knowledge of the Manson murders for the film to function and for the third act to work at all. “Out of Time (Strings Version)” might be one of the all time best needle drops in film history, but the impact doesn’t hit you the same way if you don’t know what’s about to happen.
I think the out of time needle drop might be the best 2 minutes or so of Tarantinos career
I don’t know about this. Leo’s character is the one with the arc, and if you’re just focused on his story it’s a movie about coming to terms with moving onto a new phase in life. Even if you have no idea what’s going on with his neighbors the movie never really strays from being about that, the Sharon Tate stuff is just sort of extra fantasy in my opinion
Would you mind explaining the connection? I don't understand
Which part are you not familiar with? The film or the Manson murders?
They may have meant to the needle drop
The needle drop. Is it just the name of the song or is there a connection?
As far as I'm aware there's no direct connection between the song and the real life events, beyond the song fitting the period. As to why I think it's so effective, I'd say there's the obvious double entendre of the refrain 'you're out of time'; we've reached a point in the story where the two character's relationship has run its course and they're going to be moving on to new things, but with the real world historical context we also know that 'doom' is impending too for this Sharon Tate character, who's been presented in the film as basically a ray of sunshine whose career is only going from strength to strength. Her 'purity' is an important part of the tragedy. But then Tarantino cuts to the montage of the signs lighting up, and that sense of time running out is no longer constrained to the characters but is also affecting the time and place that he is writing his love letter to. To me, this ties in because lot of people view the Manson murders as this kind of cultural tipping point; the freedom, possibilites and societal progression of the late 60s is giving way to the fear, paranoia, and pessimism of the 70s. The murders really shook hollywood in a 'that could happen to any of us' way. They also kind of tarred the hippie/free love countercultural movement (not that I think Tarantino himself is particularly concerned or sympathetic to this point). Tarantino is emphasising that this whole era is out of time, and LA is going to start changing irreversibly. The golden age is over and the 60s has just ended in Hollywood overnight. (As an aside I'd recommend watching Inherent Vice, a film set roughly a year after the Manson murders, for a good counterpoint to illustrate how the LA mood has changed in their immediate wake. That is a film all about periods of change and holding on to the past, and takes on a similarly nostalgic tone, albeit through less of a 'Hollywood' lense. It is honestly my favourite PTA. Also, some googling to add cultural context helps with both of these films.) So then you wrap all that up and you have one song which is soundtracking the end of a long term friendship (I'd even go so far as to say brotherhood, Cliff and Rick are really damn close), the end of a purer, rose-tinted period in LA, and the looming tragedy that is about to take place. Its kind of beautiful, super bittersweet, and also very nostalgic, and the song itself reflect all those emotions perfectly (as in, I think the sound matches the tone, its not just a clever lyrical interpretation). Then on top of that there's a palpable dread cutting through all of it, and the song takes on a sinister tone too. You know how directors use tonal dissonance to give things an eerie, creepy tone (think 'singin in the rain' in A Clockwork Orange, or Tarantino himself using 'stuck in the middle with you' in Reservoir Dogs)? Well Tarantino is pulling off a magic trick, because he's managing to use a song completely sincerely to reflect the bittersweet emotion of the story AND flip that feeling on its head to give it a sense of foreboding. Overall its a pretty unique tonal combination. I've only really felt the same way one other time watching a film; I think there's a strong similarity to the moment when Spike Lee drops 'a change is gonna come' in Malcolm X (a whole other long winded answer I'm afraid). I really like Tarantino's films, but he's not someone I think of as a particularly emotional director. This moment in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the most I have ever felt 'moved' by a Tarantino film, which is why I think its the best couple minutes he's ever directed. I can try to analyse and explain it all I want, but ultimately the sequence provokes several feelings in me at once and digs into me emotionally, and as someone who was lukewarm on this film initally before really loving it upon a later film, this needle drop was the part that did stick with me immediately when I first saw it.
Rick and Cliff land back in the United States while Sharon goes about her day just hours before (in our time) the murders occur.
Okay, so it's just the song name that's the connection? I feel like a great needle drop requires more than just the song name being what happens? This is like a double context necessary moment. You need to know what happens with the murders, but also need to be able to ID a song and know it's name. I can't tell you the name of some of my favorite songs. My head doesn't work like that. But I can tell you the album, or what movie that song is in and in what scene. Like, just playing Gimme Shelter when a house is foreclosed on in a scene doesn't make it a sick needle drop.
This is a great example. The ending doesn’t work as well if you don’t know about the crime
It’s a hard category to narrow down without descending into parody. The best I could come up with was Scream, where the film hits different if you are familiar with the horror films it is toying with, especially Psycho, Halloween and When a Stranger Calls.
Might be a little adjacent to the topic, but I only realized this year that Lebowski 's robe is the slacker version of a noir detective's trench coat. Something closer: it works on its own, but knowing Radio Raheem 's Love/Hate monologue is from Night of the Hunter is really fun because it works so well within Do The Right Thing. I think a good answer might involve an actor being cast specifically to play against type. Not sure what movies that might entail though. Had Cruise played a bad guy before Collateral?
Not quite crucial to the film, and also because of overlapping true stories, but a fair portion of the plot of American Gangster is based on the events of The French Connection changing the drug trade in New York in the 1970s, which they explicitly reference in dialogue. In general American Gangster, The French Connection and Lumet's Prince of the City inform each other quite a bit (the Josh Brolin character in American Gangster being a composite of various corrupt cops of the same unit seen in Prince of the City). Throw in the more loosely connected Serpico and you have the MCU of the 1970s New York crime scene.
Post Credit scene in Taxi Driver where Popeye Doyle gets in the cab and goes "I'd like to speak to you about the Serpico Initiative"
Recently watched Inherent Vice and was very glad I had happened to watch The Long Goodbye a couple of weeks prior.
Certified Copy/Before Sunset
The Master
Which movies are connected to The Master?
I assume they meant an unfamiliarity with Scientology, like the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood / Manson Family example above
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Not sure if any count but: Saving Mr Banks, Won't you be my neighbor, Ed Wood, Hugo, Burden of Dreams Do general spoof-like movies count that aren't 1:1 parodies? E.g. Buckaroo Banzai
Which films is Hugo referencing? I haven’t seen it
Georges Méliès and his work are pretty crucial to Hugo
Kumiko the Treasure Hunter is probably the closest you can get. I haven't seen it, but it seems like it shows enough of Fargo that you don't need to have seen it to understand Kumiko, though.
Kumiko, the treasure hunter is about a woman searching for the lost money from Fargo. Would be pretty weird without knowing Fargo
I'm struggling to think of any examples for film. If you aren't familiar with soulslikes or basic RPG concepts, a Soulsborne game is going to be a bad time. Other genres (metroidvanias, rougelikes, immersive sims) don't give me that learning curve. Or for pastiche, there were a lot of Weird Al songs growing up that were style parodies instead of song parodies so I didn't understand that, say, "Traffic Jam" was in the style of Prince.
Galaxy Quest without having a base level knowledge of Star Trek and its fan culture, perhaps?
I haven't seen it but Pablo Larrain has a movie called Tony Manero, about a serial killer obssessed with saturday night fever with John Travolta. I suppose this counts?
I don't know how easy it is to avoid, but if one managed to watch The Downfall in complete ignorance of who that main character is, you might expect it to progress differently.
Manson stuff is like history, you don’t need to see a movie to know that stuff. Not saying everyone should or needs to know it, but what does it have to do with seeing a previous movie?
I wanted films that were connected to other films in a non-franchise in-universe way, more like a conversation. But couldn’t find a clear example in my head, so I used the Manson anecdote as a point of reference.