Directed by Quentin Tarantino
This movie is about a lot of things but not enough about the right ones to be truly interesting. It's 1969 in Los Angeles and a TV actor and his stuntman friend keep running into the Manson family. Academics and film nerds will appreciate the period production values (clothes, music, cars) and read too much into the director's usual kink for women's feet, dialogue that goes nowhere, and scenes that go on waaay too long. When the material is this thin and the running time this long (2.5 hrs+) your mind has time to wander and wonder why there isn't more of something, anything. Or worse: anything interesting.
The best scene in the whole movie has a few Manson girls just watching TV. It covers the 60s in a second: the laziness, the last innocent hippie summer, the clutter of a living room before everything went digital and ergonomic. But the movie is best summed up by a scene of the same girls scrounging through a dumpster for food. Somewhere in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" is that awesome two minute trailer spread over a very dull, confused and very, very long movie.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
"Hustlers"
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
Jennifer Lopez isn't a character actor but she keeps playing the same character in her movies: a beautiful, proud, hardworking, single Mom kept in her place by The Man. This time Lopez isn't a maid or wedding planner but the impossibly hot leader of a pack of plucky strippers scheming to even things up with their rich customers. Problem is the movie's trailer doesn't have just the best parts of the movie in it, it's also got the all of energy the movie needs. The actual movie feels long, drawn-out, cheap and icky, kinda like a bad lapdance.
Lopez hasn't gotten any better as an actor over the years but she's starting to look a lot like Eva Mendes, who's a slightly better actor. She's still in good enough shape to manage some ridiculous fetish scenes (rolling around in money, teaching her shy coworker how to pole dance). She's still defensive about her image, defying the W.C. Fields rule of never acting with children. She probably signed on for a gritty script and then slowly softened it, thinking her characters need The Child, The Fat Friend, The Help that Jen's maid/wedding planner/stripper is kind to. They help soften and simplify an image that should be getting harder (and more interesting) with age.
Jennifer Lopez isn't a character actor but she keeps playing the same character in her movies: a beautiful, proud, hardworking, single Mom kept in her place by The Man. This time Lopez isn't a maid or wedding planner but the impossibly hot leader of a pack of plucky strippers scheming to even things up with their rich customers. Problem is the movie's trailer doesn't have just the best parts of the movie in it, it's also got the all of energy the movie needs. The actual movie feels long, drawn-out, cheap and icky, kinda like a bad lapdance.
Lopez hasn't gotten any better as an actor over the years but she's starting to look a lot like Eva Mendes, who's a slightly better actor. She's still in good enough shape to manage some ridiculous fetish scenes (rolling around in money, teaching her shy coworker how to pole dance). She's still defensive about her image, defying the W.C. Fields rule of never acting with children. She probably signed on for a gritty script and then slowly softened it, thinking her characters need The Child, The Fat Friend, The Help that Jen's maid/wedding planner/stripper is kind to. They help soften and simplify an image that should be getting harder (and more interesting) with age.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)