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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

In my review of Robert Rodriguez's film Machete Kills I speculated that Quentin Tarantino introduced a small reference to Grindhouse movies in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood to fulfill a rather outlandish promise from the fake trailer of Machete 3 in the beginning of Machete Kills. That there would be a Grindhouse movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. I think Paul Thomas Anderson just beat Tarantino in this regard. His 2025 film One Battle After Another ( starring DiCaprio ) is a straight up remake of the first Machete.

Well it is a remake in a very loose sense. Robert Rodriguez has a very different style to PTA. Machete is a sort of non-serious parody picture. While One Battle After Another is a very serious movie ( minus the PTA sense of humor ), realistically depicting the situation. But both films deal with immigration into United States and with organized resistance groups inside of the United States that facilitate that immigration.

Now, most of my ideas in these reviews I take out of my theorizing ass, and that next point I came up with, too. But it might actually be a clue to something that might actually be somewhat interesting, if it turns out to be true. I think Paul Thomas Anderson knew he was making a Machete remake.

In 2008 Steven Soderbergh makes a two part war movie called Che about Che Guevara. In those two films Che Guevara is played by Benicio del Toro. In 2010, Robert Rodriguez makes Machete where there is an underground resistance of Mexicans. And the underground resistance head, played by Michelle Rodriguez, has a nickname "She", a clear reference to Che. In 2025 PTA makes One Battle After Another where you have multiple resistance organizations. One of them is Latin-American, probably Mexicans, and the head of which is played by... Benicio del Toro, the original Che, and a sort of meta-reference to "She" from Machete.

Obviously everybody is talking about how fucking good Leonardo DiCaprio is in this movie. He is a gold-mine of goodness. And this movie shows him both very desperate and very funny in the same time. Like that one shot where he tries to jump from one roof to another and ends up falling in between the buildings, because he is unfit for the action. Pure gold. Even though in that shot it was probably a stunt-double. But his acting before and after that shot cements this scene as gold.

Yet I do not hear a lot of people praising Sean Penn, who plays another absolutely broken motherfucker, who is coincidentally one of the more interesting movie villains out there. We are immediately introduced to him as a Peeping Tom with a huge hard-on for black ladies. Yet he is trying to be this ultra-racist motherfucker. Immediately the whole character is filled with some of the most amazing irony imaginable. And ironically, the guy always walks with an unnaturally straight back, completely cementing his absolutely obvious insecurities.

He is this ICE general type person who is trying to get into a very elite club of ultra-racist white motherfuckers. And yet they find out that he might have had sex with a black lady, which might have had resulted in a mixed race child. Which is interesting, because the black lady, played by Teyana Taylor is using his fetishistic attraction to her to get away from the law. And coincidentally she is the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio's character.

So the whole main irony of the film hangs on the fact that DiCaprio ( being very unfit for the job ) is trying to save his daughter, during a huge ICE crackdown, from Sean Penn's character. While his daughter might as well in fact be the daughter of the bad guy. And the bad guy is hunting this girl because if she is his daughter it proves that he is not racist enough for the ultra-racist club.

I have one biff with the movie. The whole film is super-paranoid because there is a lot of crack down happening on the members of the resistance. And so they have to be ultra-careful. That makes them have a rule not to use smartphones ( for the simple fact we all know about these Orwellian devices. They track people ). Leo's daughter Willa ( Chase Infiniti, perfect actress to choose for a role where people are chasing here infinitely ) is secretly having a smartphone on her, because she is a teenager and teenagers do things in spite of what parents want. That eventually leads the bad guys to her location. Which should teach her that smartphones are not to be trusted. Yet when the big battle is over and they have a moment of relaxation in the end of the film, both Leo's character and her's have new smartphones. As if to say, they stopped being afraid of them or something. What a load of nonsense!

Speaking of the ending, the film ends with a chase scene. Paul Thomas Anderson is not really an action film-maker, so seeing him doing a chase scene was rather interesting. Anderson, in my opinion is rather good at action, it turns out.

Paul Thomas Anderson once stated that one of his main influences is Steven Spielberg. Spielberg ( especially back in the 80s ) liked to do a specific type of shot over and other again. You've got a hill from a far and nothing on that hill. And then something ( be it a character running, or a car going real fast ) comes up from behind the hill, slowly revealing itself.

The whole chase scene is PTA doing variations on this one shot idea. Like there is the standard one hill. And then there are multiple hills. Or a framing where the hill starts at the top of the frame and then the road goes for quite a while toward the bottom of the frame. Even the film itself has a plot point, during the chase scene, which uses this hill reveal thing as a plot device. One of the characters realizes a possibility to do something with the fact that a lot of the times the car is obscured by the hill. And that ultimately leads to the end of the chase scene.

Okay... so yeah... the movie is great and all. But here is one problem I have with it. Technically speaking the whole mixed race child thing DiCaprio already did a few years ago with The Revenant for which he even got his first Oscar. DiCaprio did films like Don't Look Up and Killers of the Flower Moon which are clearly filled with left-wing ideas. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024. He even made this movie, the one we are talking about, portraying the whole ICE thing as obviously evil. And any means of resistance ( even violent ones ) as obviously good. So he is very hard-core when it comes to left-wing ideas.

With all that, what on earth does Leonardo DiCaprio doing in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood?

I can understand DiCaprio playing Calvin J. Candie in Django Unchained. The movie is about racism, where the bad guys are the racist motherfuckers. There is nothing unclear about that movie. And DiCaprio ( even though playing the bad guy ) fits into said movie.

In Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood the bad guys are the Manson family, or the representation of violent resistance against the Hollywood elite. And the movie even portrays torching of a teenage girl ( by DiCaprio ) as something heroic because she was the one that dared to step onto his private property.

Tarantino ( who you may remember has a house in Tel Aviv and who went to boost the morale of IDF by physically showing up at the military bases ) makes here a politically right-wing leaning picture, where the white motherfuckers are the good guys. And the hippies that resist them are the deranged sons-of-bithces. And the choosing of the historical setting and story of Sharon Tate murder just makes this point easier to tell.

Again, what the fuck Leonardo DiCaprio is going here?

If we look back at One Battle After Another I think I might get a clue. There is a very interesting scene that happens toward the beginning. One of the guards of a bank, the resistance is robbing, to fund their resistance, is black. So there is a black guard. And our black female protagonist is at a situation where she needs to shoot that black guard. Since he is impeding on her mission. She doesn't want to do it. But she has to. This is some ironic, motherfucking shit.

Maybe this whole thing is just a weird Hollywood awakening of sorts. Like the shit I talked about in my review of Eli Roth's The Green Inferno. Everybody wants to be idealistic about everything, but shit's messy. You can't be so idealistic. It's naive.

Tarantino is obviously not a racist. And obviously not a sexist. His films are filled to the brim, either with strong female characters, or incredibly smart black motherfuckers. He has even made films like Django Unchained and Death Proof which are specifically anti-racism and anti-sexism films.

From his book Cinema Speculation you can learn that he not just grew up among black folk that he respects dearly, he is a very thoughtful guy. He is just smart enough not to be naive about the world. And like in The Green Inferno the message of protecting the indigenous people can coexist with the horror of said indigenous people, for Quentin the left-leaning messages can coexist with seeing the Manson family as being a bunch of deranged evil motherfuckers. He isn't sugarcoating this fact. Not reducing this fact. And he even gives them the dialogue that might come out from the likes of Greta Thunberg. Yet he doesn't outright disagree with Greta Thunberg. He just thinks Greta Thunberg types are too naive.

Maybe DiCaprio being a smart person in his own right, understands that Tarantino has no evil intentions. And therefor understand that Tarantino can be trusted, even if on the surface the film might feel a little off-putting. Hell Tarantino is a friend of Rodriguez. And Rodriguez was the one that made Machete. The same Machete that started all this review of mine.

Happy Hacking!!!

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Your Bay obsession turned into a Tarantino obsession.

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