In a 7.25 piece called “Tarantino Spoiler Policy”, I wrote that “I don’t know when it will be fair to start discussing the final 20 to 25 minutes” of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood “but I would think that an ‘olly olly in come free’ policy could be instituted as of…what, Monday morning? Is it realistic to expect that people will keep their yaps shut any longer than that?”

Actually the cat scampered out of the bag earlier today with Owen Gleiberman‘s 7.28 Variety think piece **, titled “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Let’s Talk About That Ending“.

Owen basically says two things — that he doesn’t care for the ending at all, but that he also realizes that Quentin Tarantino had pretty much painted himself into an impossible corner when he decided to make this Hollywood-in-the-late-’60s, Manson-shaded film, and therefore understands why he did what he did. Because everyone would have been sickened by a recreation of what actually happened to Sharon Tate and her housemates on that horrible night, and that an alternative fantasy was necessary to make the film palatable.

I began predicting this narrative approach in early ’18, and in fact said the following in a 4.24.18 piece titled “Tarantino’s Not-Manson Flick Will Deal Escapist Cards“:

The first lost wallet story (which happened two or three weeks ago) is so embarassing I didn’t want to mention it, but Tatyana insisted. She thinks it’s hilarious. It makes me feel gloomy just to think about it, much less share it with the world. But what the hell.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Yesterday Donald Trump called the Baltimore district repped by House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

Tatyana and I are north-of-Sunset Beverly Hills hikers. We like to start around dusk and finish up in the dark. Three or four times we’ve humped it up Angelo Drive and then hung a sharp right onto Cielo Drive (which offers access to the private drive where the Sharon Tate murder house once stood) and then back down Benedict Canyon. I’m presuming that a lot of lookie-lous are going to be roaming around this area for the next two or three weeks.

“Red House,” initially posted on 7.8.12: “I was on the scooter yesterday afternoon, buzzing along Mulholland and in and out the canyons and trails and cul de sacs between Beverly Glen to Laurel Canyon. And I found myself hanging a subconscious right onto Cielo Drive off Benedict Canyon south, and up to an area that used to be known as 10050 Cielo Drive.

“This was the site of Robert Byrd‘s now-demolished California ranch-styled home where Polanski’s late ex, Sharon Tate, and four others — Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, Voytek Frykowski and Jay Sebring — were murdered by the Manson family on August 9, 1969.

“I knew that Trent Reznor lived there for two or three years in the early ’90s, and that the place had been torn down in ’94 and that a nouveau-riche Moorish-Mediterranean monstrosity called “Villa Bella” was built in its place by producer Jeff Franklin (Full House). The original street number was also erased — the address is now 10066 Cielo Drive.

“I stood on the other side of the canyon and told myself that anyone who would trash the original single-storied structure, which had a nice homey vibe with a pool and a guest house and was painted red with white trim with huge trees on the grounds, and then cut down the trees and build a ghastly Uday Hussein-style Euro-mansion, must be a real animal.

All hail the new Shout Factory Bluray of Joseph Newman and Jack Arnold‘s This Island Earth (’55). I’ve never been a fan of this well-written if somewhat rickety programmer — it’s respectably intelligent rather than riveting. But the huge cranium belonging to Jeff Morrow‘s “Exeter” character is as much of an icon of ’50s sci-fi as James Arness‘s thorn-fingered “thing”, and Clifford Stine‘s color cinematography delivers a lush palette. And the new Bluray is worth its weight in gold because it delivers 4K scans of two aspect-ratio versions (1.85:1 and 1.37:1). The shots of Morrow’s super-tall forehead in the 1.37 version give new meaning to the term “headroom.”

“The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter. They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough, [but] the politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

“My father stayed up all night the night Truman was elected because he was so excited. I would like to stay up ’til dawn the night a Democrat wins next year because I’m so excited to see the moment when the despicable Donald Trump lumbers into a Ma rine helicopter and flies away for good.

“But Democrats are making that dream ever more distant because they are using their time knifing one another and those who want to be on their side instead of playing it smart.

“The recipe for emotional satisfaction on the part of the progressive left is not a recipe for removing Trump from the White House.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s “Spare Me The Purity Racket,” N.Y. Times, 7.27.19.