What’s Aged the Worst?
Eli Roth's feel for baseball; Fassbender being in only two scenes; the Cat People needle drop; the slow motion when Frederick shoots Shoshana
In the discussion (6)
Approx. transcript time · 00:54:13Read transcript
- Eli Roth's feel for the game of baseball: not a bad swing, but he seems to have learned the baseball vocabulary phonetically with no grasp of who Teddy Williams was or where Lansdowne Street is, and he reads as a New Yorker rather than a Boston guy.
- The clear winner or loser for one host is Fassbender being in only two scenes; he is such a dynamo that it feels misremembered, but he does not appear until the 50th minute and is in it for about 17 minutes, every second electric, and it is ballsy and disciplined of Tarantino to kill him off so soon after introducing him, though a host would watch 97 hours of him getting whiskey out of a globe and wishes the two would work together again, since Fassbender could use it.
- Regardless of Donnie Donowitz's origins, Ted Williams in 1941 hit .406 with a .553 on-base and .737 slugging, an OPS of 1.287 (transcribed as 1287), in what is thought to be his last season before enlisting; Mike Trout can eat shit.
- Asked by name for more, the host has little, is not interested in whether Quentin could have made the movie, and finds nothing that makes him want it to stop, but the Cat People scene is too anachronistic, with David Bowie's voice distracting in an otherwise consistent tone, even if the operatic, expressionistic German style it reaches for is understood. — Sean Fennessey
- Bowie may connect to Pabst and the artistic flourishing of 1920s Germany before the Reich, with Bowie's 1970s Berlin period as an extension of that bohemian Germany, though that is admitted to be far-fetched; more likely Tarantino just thought it would be cool, which has to be accepted with every Tarantino choice, like the title spelling he said he would never explain, an homage to the 70s movie and a Basquiat-esque flourish.
- The switch to slow motion when Frederick shoots Shoshana is one of the only pieces of filmmaking in the movie a host dislikes, cheesy and weird and a nod to a different kind of movie, among the literal dozens of homages in the film.