Page 47Tremblay’s all grown up in this pre-teen Superbad
Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019Hollywood!
Sweet: Isabela Moner
as Dora The ExplorerGood Boys (15)
Verdict: Crude, but funny ★★★✩✩baddie being directed by
Wanamaker, in turn being
directed by Tarantino.
Rick’s insecurity is
encapsulated in a great
scene with a child actor, a
precocious little girl, who
tells him afterwards that
she has never seen such
excellent acting. He is
absurdly chuffed.
Really, he is a self-
absorbed wreck of a man
and owes far more than
he realises to the staunch
Cliff, who, after driving
Rick back to his hand-
some bungalow, goes
home each night to his
humble trailer and
devoted dog.
Cliff is unequivocally
the hero — but even
he has a major skeleton
in his closet, with which
Tarantino naughtily
tantalises us.
Mind you, it isn’t as
naughty as the film’s
extraordinary, provoca-
tive ending, which
hasn’t pleased every-
one, but seemed to
me a touch of genius.
There are so many
memorable sequences
— and a clutch of eye-
catching turns in little more
than cameos from stars such
as Kurt Russell (who also
narrates), Dakota Fanning and
Bruce Dern.
There is also, this being
a Tarantino picture, a full
repertoire of his tricks: voice-
overs, split-screens, quirky
captions, slow-mo, flashbacks.
But they all add to the fun.
Dern plays George Spahn, the
old reprobate who owned the
ranch where Manson and his
disciples hatched their evil.
So behind that fun there is
genuine tension as the story
inexorably (though not, it has
to be said, concisely) moves
towards a bloody ending that
we all already know... or think
we do.
Let’s not dwell on the Tate
murders. Let’s just say, to
use the vernacular of 1969,
that Once Upon A Time... In
Hollywood is an absolute trip.
n A SHORTER version of
this review appeared in
earlier editions.McQueen (Damian Lewis)
running an appreciative eye
over the female guests.
Tarantino recreates the era
meticulously, bombarding us
with pop-culture references.H
e HAS, in a way,
made the film a
love letter to his
own square-eyed
childhood, with copious
references to the movies and
TV shows of the time, such
as Bonanza, as well as to
Sixties fashion and music.
Yet it is also an exam-
ination of Hollywood as
it teetered on the edge ofchange and grappled
with the challenge
of television.
Rick himself has
been the star of a
Bonanza-type series
called Bounty Law, but a
hotshot agent-producer
— played with glorious,
cigar-chomping swagger
by Al Pacino — tells him
that his career is going
nowhere and he needs to get
some film roles.
Rick duly lands one, a West-
ern, with Sam Wanamaker
(Nicholas Hammond) direct-
ing, enabling Tarantino to
indulge himself with a movie-
camera version of a hall of
mirrors — DiCaprio playing aSo where does
it stand in his
catalogue of
modern classics?
THe influence of Seth Rogen is
plain to see throughout this crude,
frequently offensive, but sometimes
uproariously funny pre-teen version
of Superbad, the hit 2007 comedy
about a pair of teenagers plotting
to lose their virginity.
Rogen co-wrote Superbad with
evan Goldberg, and they are
producers this time round, with
Gene Stupnitsky, a writer on the
U.S. version of The Office, making
his directorial debut.
Good Boys basically shuffles the
Superbad premise back a few years,
with three 12-year-olds getting into
all kinds of scrapes as one of them
plots to kiss a girl for the first time.
It sounds adorably innocent, but
don’t be fooled: an awful lot of
expletives erupt from the mouthsof these babes — played by actors
who aren’t even old enough to watch
the film they’re in.
One of them is Jacob Tremblay,
which is disorientating for those of
us who vividly recall his first star-
ring role as the cute five-year-old
alongside Brie Larson just four
years ago in Room.
Add to that a barrage of porn-
ography, divorce and drug-related
gags and you might decide that the
material is inappropriate in a story
about three boys whose voices
haven’t yet broken.
And yet their innocence is sort
of maintained throughout (theythink a sex doll is a dummy for
cardiac resuscitation practice).
Moreover, the writing (Stupnitsky
and Lee eisenberg) is so slick, and
the performances so engaging (withan eye-catching cameo by Stephen
Merchant), that this is a hard film
to dislike.
Max (Tremblay) and his two best
friends, Thor (Brady Noon) and
Lucas (Keith L. Williams), collectively
the ‘Beanbag Boys’, commandeer
a drone belonging to Max’s father
(Will Forte), to spy on the older girl
next door, in the hope of seeing her
kiss her boyfriend and thereby
learning how to do it.
But the girl and her friend capture
the drone — whereupon the boys
retaliate by pinching one of the
girls’ handbags, which contains
some drugs.
The plot then revolves around
the exchange of the drugs for the
drone, which becomes predictably
complicated and silly. And funny.QuEnTIn TARAnTInO
has often said he will
make only ten films, of
which Once upon A
Time... In Hollywood is
the ninth. So how does
it compare with the
others? Here is my
ranking of the movies
he has made since he
burst on to the scene
with Reservoir Dogs in
1992, in time-honoured
reverse order...- Death Proof
(2007)
TARANTINO’S interest in
brutality and fetishism is
unleashed with too much
relish in this exploitation
slasher movie starring
Kurt Russell. - Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2
(2003/4)
VOLUME I in particular
is an ineffably stylish
martial arts revenge
thriller, but Tarantino
sees these two movies
as halves of a whole, and,
if he has one flaw as a
filmmaker, it’s that he
takes too long to tell
his stories. - The Hateful Eight
(2015)
TARANTINO’S own all-
time favourite film is The
Good, The Bad And The
Ugly, and he indulges
his passion for old West-
erns by making this a
conspicuous homage. - Inglourious
Basterds (2009)
ONE of Tarantino’s great-
est scenes kicks off this
wild World War II drama:
a gut-wrenchingly tense
encounter between
Christoph Waltz’s urbane
SS colonel and a French
dairy farmer hiding Jews
in his cellar. - Django
Unchained (2012)
HIS first Western bears
Tarantino’s best-known
hallmarks — extreme
violence, witty dialogue
and terrible revenge.- Jackie Brown
(1997)
BASED on an Elmore
Leonard novel, this
showed — following
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp
Fiction — that Tarantino
could adapt another’s
material as stylishly as he
could originate his own. - Reservoir Dogs
(1992)
TARANTINO could hardly
have announced his
arrival more spec-
tacularly than with this
outrageously violent and
funny heist thriller. It
earned him, before his
30th birthday, instant
comparisons with the
likes of Sam Peckinpah
and Martin Scorsese. - Once Upon A Time
... In Hollywood (2019)
SEE review, left. - Pulp Fiction (1994)
THE greatest and most
influential of Tarantino’s
works, hailed as a rein-
vention of the gangster
film, and certainly a rein-
vention of John Travolta,
superb as one of a pair of
mob enforcers (Samuel
L. Jackson is the other).
Starry line-up: Leonardo
DiCaprio (far left), Brad Pitt
and Margot RobbieGrowing pains: Jacob Tremblay
(centre) and the ‘Beanbag Boys’Pulp Fiction: Peerless