Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Wistful, funny and complicated in interesting ways, Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, may be his warmest film since Jackie Brown - which may not be what you expected to hear about a movie set against the background of the 1969 Manson murders.

It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.

The result is a surprisingly funny and extremely melancholy hangout film, an elegy for a bygone era that reflects on how all art eventually loses its edge.

This is Tarantino’s Eden, the unspoiled garden when the things he loves don’t have to be sought out or championed because they permeate every aspect of life. The sense of blissful immersion extends to the film’s costuming and production design, both of which are as meticulous as one might expect.

The respective performances of DiCaprio and Pitt and the film’s meticulous attention to period detail are all great and keep you invested in where this cruise around Tinseltown will ultimately take you.

Tarantino, famously obsessed with the history of cinema and its preservation, has recreated a world he wishes he could have worked in with such care and skill and love that, for the most part, it feels like his most personal film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is lots of fun, but it’s also strangely, hauntingly sad.

I think what Tarantino is going for is brazenly manipulating historical events to suit his style, and turning a well-worn genre on its head. But in so doing he’s made an everything bagel of a movie: Part satire, part bear hug, part fictional bromance.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

그 시절 그 극장에 대한 타란티노의 애정. 따수운 햇살이 내내 비추고 역사에 대한 복수로 마무리된다.191229 (3.0)-1. 주역들의 연기가 하나같이 엄청나지만 타란티노의 낯선 모습은 그다지 즐겁지않다.2, 릭이 자책하며 하는 말이 너무 공감간다.“이 멍청한 등신! 위스키를 무슨 8잔을 쳐 마셔서는! 3잔 마시고 끊지! 난 망할 알코올 중독자야... 망할! 연습 해놓고도 안 한 것 처럼 멍청한 개코 원숭이 마냥 대사나 잊어버리고!”이게 디카프리오 애드립이라니.

Quentin Tarantino's back, with a grand posse of his favorite actors, to tackle the faded sheen and troubled dreams of celebrity life in Hollywood during the late '60s. Although their subjects are quite different, this film's structure is very similar to the preceding Hateful Eight, in that it takes forever to get where it's going and tends to linger on short, irrelevant asides that add to the tapestry but don't have much influence on the greater plot. It's loaded with flavor, lovely little touches that bring a very specific slice of life back into the present, but after a while it begins to feel over-indulgent. As if the director just wanted an excuse to recreate a beloved time and place, then take a stroll, breathe the air and look around. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is peppered with entertaining performances and amusing cameos, with particularly impressive work from Margot Robbie as the sweet, sunshiny Sharon Tate and Brad Pitt as a guarded, past-his-prime bachelor in the John Wayne mold. The city and studio lots all look great, bustling and alive, with various characters' paths crossing in a string of complex, delightful coincidences. And the last scene, loosely (er, very loosely) depicting the Manson family's violent siege on the Hollywood Hills, is pure Tarantino. Chaotic, gratuitous violence, rampant unpredictability, explosive payoffs... it's crookedly wonderful in the most wicked of ways. I don't want to spoil anything, because the surprise is part of the fun, but at that moment it changes gears from Hateful Eight to Inglourious Basterds. You'll know what I mean when you see it. I didn't dislike this, but I didn't love it. It certainly would've benefited from some selective editing and smoother pacing. I think the importance of Sally Menke, Tarantino’s longtime partner and behind-the-scenes collaborator, who died in 2010, has been evident in the director’s recent output.

For those viewers who are not interested in life in Hollywood, this is an extremely boring and uninteresting film. The only thing that interested me in the film was Tourette's syndrome, which the main character Dalton suffered from. It is manifested by paroxysmal crying, speech disorder and frequent use of vulgar words (coprolalia).

Maybe Tarantino is an overrated hack idk. He loves to parade the fact that he went to film school but I'm convinced he just failed upwards with Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. The movies are well directed but writing is not his strong suit. He can come up with fun snappy dialogue and cool characters but he rarely explores either in meaningful ways. This was a slog.