Watched Once Upon A Time In Hollywood recently. I have a ton of issues with Tarantino normally but I thought this was fantastic, and a great contextualisation of movie violence. I knew of the ending beforehand, and it struck me halfway through that this is probably the only way you could have made a film about Sharon Tate without revelling in her death like a vulture.
[spoiler] I know people have voiced dissent about how Tate was marginalised in the movie, like it was a misogynic move or something, but I think it's the exact opposite: without her gruesome murder taking place it's just another normal day for her. She gets to be a normal person who gets to go to the movies and have fun at parties. There's nothing particularly interesting or unique about her when people can't fetichise the horrific and humiliating way she was killed, and the film lets her be a person again. I think that's a powerful statement.[/spoiler]
Also, Brad Pitt was incredibly good in this. Tarantino's best film since Kill Bill 2 in my opinion.
I also saw The Irishman yesterday. I'm not exactly sure what to say about it, but it too surprised me by being good in unexpected ways. I thought the last thing the world needed was another gangster movie but it captured my interest right away. The de-aging very occasionally reminds you of a video game (think LA Noire) but on the whole it worked really well. I didn't think it would, but it did. I also noticed that Pacino and Pesci didn't look uncanny at all in the flashbacks. Only De Niro did, which I think is because his role is more physical. Something about the way he moves that isn't quite right. I think they also messed up by changing his eye colour digitally instead of just giving him contact lenses to wear.
The film was kinda great though. I thought the story would feel bloated but it really didn't. It requires some prior knowledge about Hoffa and the Cosa Nostra to follow along, but it's an extremely well-written talkie and the acting is supreme. Both De Niro and Pacino are better than they've been for 20-30 years, but it's Joe Pesci who steals the film. He's giving the finest performance of his career in my opinion and should be the frontrunner for an Oscar regardless of which category they put him in. His character is the opposite to the volatile figures he played in Goodfellas and Casino. He's calm and collected and carefully chooses his words, and his magnetic personality becomes an anchor point for the whole film.
I gotta say I also liked the morals of the film. Scorsese has always been very aware of the fetichising aspect of cinematic violence and the risk of glorifying the mob through gangster narratives, but I don't think I've ever seen him choose so carefully what to show before. There's a scene where Albert Anastasia gets murdered in a barber shop but the camera doesn't follow the hit men inside. Instead it lingers on the shop window of the flower store next door. Similarly, whenever Frank is introduced to a new mobster the film usually freezes and there's a short text about how years later the person will die in a gruesome or sad way. People have described the film as a farewell to the gangster genre, and there's definitely a feeling of the story being a reckoning, like it's about the destruction of the human spirit.
