Charlie Says

 Year 14, Day 263 - 9/20/22 - Movie #4,249

BEFORE: Another year, another film about Charles Manson... I put this film on a DVD with "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood", that's how long it's been on my list.  It's quite difficult to link to it, which prevented me from watching it last year close that that OTHER film about Manson.  This one seems to focus mainly on the strange pull that he had over young women, but ones that were estranged from their families, or the hippie chicks who were otherwise lost and looking for some direction in their lives. You can make a dozen movies about this and we still probably won't fully understand this. 

Annabeth Gish carries over from "Term Life". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Manson Family Vacation" (Movie #3,983)

THE PLOT: The tragic tale of an all-American girl who was transformed into a cold-blooded killer in the summer of 1969. 

AFTER: 1969 was a long time ago - in movie terms, it's become the time of legends. I was under a year old for most of that calendar year, and now I'm 53. One of the Manson Family members, Leslie Louise van Houten, is still alive and incarcerated, having initially received the death penalty in 1971, and she was the youngest woman ever condemned to death in California. BUT, the next year the California Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional, so her sentence was commuted to life in prison, and she didn't become recommended for parole until 2021, but Governor Newsom overruled the parole board in February of THIS YEAR, for a 72-year old inmate who's been in prison over 50 years. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it is what it is, but probably if she hadn't been so closely associated with Charles Manson, she'd be free by now, and able to enjoy her golden years outside of a cell.  Just saying. 

The other two "Family" members in this story are Susan "Sadie" Atkins, who died in prison in 2009, and Patricia "Katie" Krenwinkel, who's also been incarcerated in California for over 50 years. Krenwinkel has been granted parole, as of May 2022, but the governor could still step in and reverse it, he has until next month. All three women have been portrayed in TV series like "Aquarius" and "American Horror Story" and in movies like this one, and "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood".  There's a whole little side industry in TV shows and movies about Manson and his followers.  And of course they pop up in documentaries about the Beatles (because of the accidental inspiration Manson got from "Helter Skelter") and the Beach Boys (because Dennis Wilson lobbied to have one of Manson's songs placed on a Beach Boys album.)

This film re-creates the audition Dennis Wilson arranged for Manson with record producer Terry Melcher, and this may lead us to wonder what might have happened if Manson had landed a recording contract, just as we wonder whether Hitler's path might have been different if someone had put his paintings in a gallery show before he got involved with politics.  Support indie artists, because you never know...I mean, nobody thinks of "dictator" or "cult leader" as their fallback career, so I guess it just kind of happens. 

Was it a sudden incident, like blowing an audition by having his female followers perform an impromptu striptease while singing back-up, is that what pushed Manson over the edge?  Or was it a gradual deterioration of his mental condition, pressure that formed from the looming threat of an imagined approaching race war, which is what he called "Helter Skelter"?  Clearly he thought a lot about this, because he rationed out that American white people would be split into two factions, the racist white people who couldn't accept minorities as their equals and the non-racist white people who would, I don't know, encourage the Black rebellion?  Look, he's not wrong, necessarily, this schism does exist today, but it doesn't mean that the whole of society is going to collapse because of it - Manson was sort of a "worst case scenario" kind of guy. 

The other theory has everything to do with Bobby Beausoleil, and I kind of missed this point that might have been made in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". Beausoleil tortured and murdered an associate named Gary Hinman, and while Bobby was in prison, the Manson Family's goal was to go out and kill some people in exactly the same way Bobby killed Gary, to make it appear as if Bobby's killer was a serial killer who was still on the loose. But then, I wouldn't expect a Tarantino film to get every detail right, because at some point that film deviated from reality, while the director spent his time focusing on Margot Robbie's feet. (I personally don't find ANYONE's feet attractive, but to each his own, I guess.)

(Speaking of Sharon Tate, I thought the actress who played Sharon Tate here looked a bit familiar, so I checked out her IMDB credits, as I do for nearly everyone...Grace Van Dien. Yeah, I saw her recently in Season 4 of "Stranger Things", where she played cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham.  So she's got a "type", but WOW, her characters really can't seem to catch a break, can they?  It's a bit odd that 6 years after playing Sharon Tate, who died at age 26, she played a high-school cheerleader, though she was herself 26.  Somebody made a joke during the Emmys about actresses in their mid-20s being young enough to play high-school girls, but too old to date Leonardo DiCaprio...)

Anyway, "Charlie Says" toggles between two timelines, one set back in 1968-69 at the infamous Spahn Ranch, and the other one set after the Manson Family trials, with the three women on never-ending death row, kept away from the general prison population in their own cell block, either for their own protection, or perhaps for the protection of the other inmates.  The women took college-level classes from a social worker, Karlene Faith, who helped them re-establish their identities, separate from the "Family" and maybe de-programmed them a bit. The fear, however, was once they were able to release themselves from Manson's teachings, then they'd have to come to terms with their involvement in the murders, and take some responsibility for their crimes.  But, isn't that the whole point of prison in the first place? 

The social worker later wrote a book, "The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten", about her work with the Manson women, and that was the basis for half of the film.  But there are plenty of flashbacks to their time spent at the ranch with Manson, which are apparently based on another book "The Family", by Ed Sanders, who also served as an executive producer on "Charlie Says". Debate may always rage over whether Manson was a controlling genius or a paranoid lunatic - what if he was both? - but really, any screenplay has to eventually point out that he was willing to wander around the California desert, looking for a giant underground cavern that he and his followers could live in, and somehow survive. 

But after being fed fruit from the crazy tree for so long, apparently it took a couple of decades for Manson's close followers to realize that committing murders in affluent L.A. neighborhoods just wasn't ever going to bring about that race war that Manson believed was coming.  So, then, umm, what were they for?  Were they intended to make Bobby Beausoleil look innocent, or were they just commands from an insane leader?  More to the point, we learn that Manson unintentionally jump-started the "Freegan" movement, so think about that when you see people rescuing discarded food from a grocery-store dumpster, they're one step away from being in a psycho murder cult. 

Also starring Hannah Murray (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Matt Smith (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Sosie Bacon, Marianne Rendon, Merritt Wever (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Suki Waterhouse (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Chace Crawford (last seen in "Peace Love & Misunderstanding"), Kayli Carter (last seen in "Bad Education"), Grace Van Dien, Bridger Zadina (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Julia Schlaepfer, Dayle McLeod, Morgan Melton, India Ennenga (last seen in "The Irishman"), Aria Taylor, Cameron Gellman (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Christopher Frontiero, Jeremy Lawson, James Trevena Brown, John Gowans, Dillon Lane, Bryan Adrian, Lindsay Farris (last seen in "Gods of Egypt"), Nathan Sutton, Tony Armatrading, Christopher Gerse (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Jackie Joyner (last seen in "The Hero"), Dan Olivo, Darien Sills-Evans, Matt Riedy (last seen in "Book Club"), Anthony Traina (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Tracy Perez, Kim Yarbrough, Kimberly Gikas, Kimmy Shields (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Sol Rodriguez (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Danya LaBelle (last seen in "King Richard"), Adria Baratta, John Frank Rosenblum, Marion Braccia, Trevor Brunsink, Mitch Cleaver, Laura Denton, Sophia Rose. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 fairy costumes