For moviegoers old enough to remember the sickeningly grotesque details of the Manson family’s massacre of Sharon Tate, her unborn child and the other victims in her house, it will be hard to believe that the alternate massacre in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is greeted with gales of laughter throughout that sequence. The theater was full at the 4pm weekday screening, and I was shocked to see how many of the viewers were at least middle aged and could be expected to have at least read about this shocking mass murder that took place in 1969.
Early on in this film about Argentina, we see a solitary man sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant. Another man walks in and stares at him unrelentingly, eventually telling the waiter that he should be given that table since he is ready to order while the man already seated is waiting for his late wife To tell you more about what happens next would be a spoiler except to say that most of it is unexpected and the degree of tension the director (Benjamin Naishtat) builds from this mild beginning is unnerving, brilliant and a sweeping foretelling of events to follow.
Stimulated by the reports of federal prosecutors probing the nefarious activities of Jeffrey Epstein, I googled “online sites with nude girls” and was surprised to see that 874 million such sites are available to us. When I added “teenage” to the request, the number jumped to 1, 470,000,000 - it’s hard to say that number and much worse to believe. “Sexy pictures of children” fetches a mere 185 million sites, all of which are perfectly legal to look at. The only thing that’s against the law in our state is printing, downloading or stashing them. One would hope that faced with the enormity of underage sex trafficking online, our legislators would be hounding NY State for new legislation that would stop this public epidemic at its source. Yet the legislation currently being considered in Albany has to do with decriminalizing prostitution so that sex workers get more respectability as well as better compensation for their work.
