And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to ... Adam Sandler

Doesn't come within a thousand galaxies of Basterds. It's QT's worst movie.

 

The quality of music and TV criticism isn't any better in that regard.

The movie was good enough I wish it had been better.

 

It's how Tarantino chooses to view the world.

I've watched it twice now. It got better the second time. I still think a lot of the movie is shits and giggles, Tarantino style.

 

Let me push back with this -- and I wasn't alive in 1969.

Perhaps there were "two Americas". The one that is described now. Vietnam protests, Woodstock. Any classic rock station plays the same 20 songs from that year. Beatles, Stones, a lot of CCR, the early Zeppelin.

However, if you look at the TV shows and the "pop music" of the day, you'll still come across a lot of "lolly-pop" material that is overly-cheery after what happened in 1968. QT takes a focus on this in the movie. The KHJ radio hits were, largely, music the 12-20 year old listeners were into. Hollywood set the tone in 1969 for what people across the country would consume. (Similar to MTV from 1981-85 would impact what us Midwest yokels would like.)

Mad Men also did this a lot with the music. I'd get all of these pop songs that I'd never heard of in the 1968-69 shows.

 

There absolutely were two Americas. In novel form, the collide most powerfully in Roth's American Pastoral. (Not the movie, but the book.)

But 1969 in Hollywood wasn't exactly the time Tarantino depicts either. Look at the 1970 Academy Awards for proof.

 

With Hack on this one. Probably my second-favorite QT after Pulp but I'd rather rewatch Once Upon a Time, as I have many times since it's been on Starz lately. Just love disappearing into that world. I remember Leitch's review had a line that was something like someday you'll put the movie on like an old pair of slippers. I like that.

 

I finally watched Uncut Gems today. While well acted in parts, through the movie was awful. Plot was idiotic and the ending was stupid.

 

Julia Fox though...

 

Very true. I thought that Idina Menzel looked very good as well and her role was written and performed extremely well.

 

I don’t think the plot is much the point. In essence the movie is about a kind of unquenched desire to matter that leaves Howie being a hustling asshole and leaves his mistress going from one shitty father figure to another.

There's a lot of good subtext in the movie. I liked the little scene where the two of them eat expensive steak late at night, because that's a thing they share. And I like the scene Sandler has with his daughter, who is incomprehensible to him. He has no clue what to say to her.

 

I think that there were moments which were well done. But as a movie I was incredibly disapponted.

 

At this point in my movie viewing life I’m about moments, subtext.

Occasionally something original, a knockout, comes along like a Parasite or Get Out. Or you’ll get a damn good genre film. I did not like, really at all, Three Billboards, but it had a point of view, an anger, that made me pay attention.

But a lot of movies today, first watch through, don’t dazzle me. I’ve watched The Irishman 3 times and I deeply appreciate the themes in it. But did it bore people? Oh yeah.