{"id":8145,"date":"2019-12-30T15:02:43","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T20:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8145"},"modified":"2020-01-14T23:39:21","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T04:39:21","slug":"once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/30\/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood\/","title":{"rendered":"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most frustrating filmmakers\nworking today, a brilliant author of dialogue with a unique eye for scene and\nsetting, prone to bombast, pretension, and general excess that nearly always\nends up detracting from even his best movies. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em>\n(now on amazon<\/a> & iTunes<\/a>)\nis one of the best things he’s done, and it’s also way too long and frequently\ntoo clever by half, buoyed by a pair of tremendous lead performances and\nburdened by the lack of interesting women and a meandering plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once<\/em> is another alternate history, in a similar vein to Inglourious Basterds<\/em> and even Django Unchained<\/em>, although this time around Tarantino’s playing with facts is subtler until the film’s climax. He gives us two lead characters, TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double\/personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), and follows them from the end of Dalton’s star turn on a TV western Bounty Law <\/em>through a dry spell that eventually leads him to work against type as the ‘heavy’ and to star in some spaghetti westerns, all in the late 1960s. Their paths intersect multiple times with Dalton’s neighbors, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha, his first English-language film role), and with a group of hippies who just happen to be living on the Spahn Ranch under the spell of a charismatic cult leader named Charles Manson (Damon Herriman, reprising his role from Mindhunter <\/em>and a damn good likeness). Cliff picks up a flirtatious hitchhiker (Margaret Qualley) who brings him back to the ranch, which helps set the plot on its alternate path away from actual events and gives us the most Tarantino-esque part of the film, the over-the-top violence in the big finish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This movie is quite good, almost great, but it’s way too\nlong. All three of Tarantino’s feature films since the death of his longtime\neditor Sally Menke have run 160+ minutes; Menke edited all of his films before\nshe died, and none ran that long unless you want to consider Kill Bill<\/em>\nas a single film. There is so much fat to trim from this film that you could\neasily have brought it home in close to two hours; the entire tangent showing\nRick working in Italy is wasted time, and many scenes, including most of the\ndriving scenes in L.A. and Rick’s tantrum in his trailer after he flubs his\nlines on set, could have been cut by half without losing anything of merit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That criticism shouldn’t take away from how strongly\nTarantino establishes this setting from the start of the film. It looks\nincredible in every aspect \u2013 clothes, hair, cars, background \u2013 and sounds just\nas good. If Tarantino was trying to capture a specific moment in time at a\nspecific place, he nailed it, both in terms of this golden age of Hollywood and\nthe post-Summer of Love counterculture movement that helped give rise to the\nManson cult. Some exposition early in the movie \u2013 the scene at the playboy\nmansion, which gives us a great cameo from Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen \u2013 does\nhelp establish the setting, and to try to put the audience under the spell of\nthe film, which might have held all the way to the climax had Tarantino not\ngone off on multiple needless digressions like Rick’s brief career in spaghetti\nwesterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood <\/em>is also full of\nTarantino signatures, which is mostly a positive thing. There’s tons of quick,\nsnappy dialogue, especially in the many movie\/TV show scenes within this movie,\nincluding DiCaprio’s Oscar-reel moment where he’s playing the villain in a\nwestern and gets to chew the scenery with the help of a precocious actress\nplaying the little girl his character has kidnapped. There are cameos galore,\nincluding Lewis, Bruce Dern, and Lena Dunham (who \u2026 doesn’t really work here),\nas well as the stunt-casting of children of famous actors as many of the Manson\nfollowers (Qualley is Andie MacDowell’s daughter; we spotted the children of\nEthan Hawke\/Uma Thurman and Demi Moore\/Bruce Willis, while director Kevin\nSmith’s daughter is here too). The movie is full of references and callbacks to\nother Tarantino films, a few of which I caught, including the dead-obvious riff\non Inglourious Basterds<\/em>. And it wouldn’t be a Tarantino film with lots\nof vaguely creepy closeups of women’s feet, especially the bizarre shot of\nMargot Robbie’s as Tate is watching herself in a movie theater and enjoying the\npositive reaction the audience has to her scenes, which is kind of ruined by\nthe way her feet, propped on the seat in front of her, ruin the perspective of\nthe shot and make her head (covered with comically large eyeglasses) seem so\nsmall in comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between the sheer ambition of the movie, Tarantino’s\nreputation, and the fact that it’s a movie about movies, this feels like a lock\nfor a Best Picture nomination. I’m assuming Pitt will submit for Best\nSupporting Actor, and will absolutely get a nomination, while DiCaprio seems\nlikely to get one for Best Actor. The most prominent actress in the film is Robbie,\nwhose lack of dialogue has received much coverage already (with merit), and\nwhile I think she does the most she can to use body language to infuse Tate’s\ncharacter with that of the promising ingenue, about to embark on a career of\nstardom, there just isn’t enough for her to do on screen. Qualley might have\nmore dialogue, and if there was any doubt after The Leftovers<\/em> that she\ncould be a star, this ought to end it, but she’s also a side character and only\nin the movie for maybe 20 minutes. Beyond that, I could see Best Director, Best\nOriginal Screenplay, and definitely Best Cinematography for the unusual shifts\nin perspective that Tarantino employs to change your sense of scale, including\nthe wide shots of the Spahn Ranch and the party at the Playboy Mansion (where\nDreama Walker plays Connie Stevens in a wig that perfectly mimics Stevens’\nlook in 1969<\/a>), and one for Best Makeup and Hairstyling too. For what it’s\nworth, though, I wouldn’t vote for this over Parasite<\/a><\/em> for the top honor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quentin Tarantino is one of the most frustrating filmmakers working today, a brilliant author of dialogue with a unique eye for scene and setting, prone to bombast, pretension, and general excess that nearly always ends up detracting from even his best movies. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (now on amazon & iTunes) is one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1146,1144,1142,1145,1077,215],"class_list":["post-8145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-best-actor-nominees","tag-2019-best-director-nominees","tag-2019-best-picture-nominees","tag-2019-best-supporting-actor-nominees","tag-2019-movies","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8147,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8145\/revisions\/8147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}