Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

It’s Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film and nothing changed in his storytelling. It’s true that he tuned his hubris down a bit so we don’t see any 40-minute scenes with zero content, as was the case with The Hateful Eight.  But it's still exactly the kind of movie you can expect from Tarantino. It‘s three hours long, with nothing happening for the first two hours, and the last 40 minutes are so full of suspense you will watch it with bated breath. Quentin strategically chose a new topic – Hollywood, but it’s actually just Pulp Fiction in a new coat. This movie seems likes Quentin Tarantino’s opus magnum. He portrays a period he obviously likes the most from Hollywood history – the Western era – and makes allusions to everything that comes to his mind. And he doesn’t care a bit if you like that era, have seen those movies or are their fan at all. He just does what he wants, and it fascinates me how much time and effort he had to invest in shooting scenes from various imaginary films, creating their posters and names. If nothing else, this makes Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a remarkable movie. Plus Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are a pair of cool guys who can’t let Tarantino’s fans down. It still, however, seems just like a film where a group of actors meet to have some fun together, most of all Leo and Brad. You feel like you went to grab a beer with them, took a peek into their lives, and in the last part of the film you got to see some traditional Tarantino action, which is just as wild and brutal as we’re used to. In short, nothing new under the sun. (13/01/2020)

Tarantino's worst film and one of the most tiring cinema experiences ever. There are only two things to praise about this film, namely the decent retro styling and the perfect performances of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, the rest is not even worth mentioning. Bruce Lee is in the film for two minutes and it's no wonder the daughter is upset for the travesty they put him on. Charles Manson is in the film for five seconds! (and it’s what the film was originally supposed to be about) And the alluring Margot Robbie is in the film for about eight minutes total. So more or less, it’s two and a half hours of bullshit about something that I don't give a shit about. But I don't care at all, and I could still get over the fact that Tarantino ditched the action, but to ditch the humour as well? Well, that deserves punishment. It's saved a little by the ending, which Pitt steals for himself, and at least in the last ten minutes Tarantino makes it clear that he's the director, but that’s not enough with a three-hour running time. My friends gave up on the film halfway through. This one passes me by. 40% (12/09/2019)

Hmm! Watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a bit like when the proud parent of a newborn shows you an album full of pictures of their baby, gushing over it and expecting you’d gush too. But even though the photos are really nice, after a couple of pages it stops being fun, and you end up not giving a toss about the brat. Similarly, in his new film Tarantino gushes over the Hollywood of the 1960s, playing entire, often incredibly long scenes of old, mostly fictitious films that have nothing to do with anything that could be called a “plot”. And yeah, it’s nice, cute, atmospheric.. but, for someone who doesn’t care much about old Hollywood, it lasts too long. And this is not what I would love to see from Quentin. This is only masturbating over the atmosphere of the movies from the 60s, a time that is long gone. And on top of that, it’s almost without humour, which was the biggest surprise to me. The occasional efforts also fall pretty flat. For example, the scene with Bruce Lee was so incredibly stupid that I was embarrassed by it. There was a man sitting behind me in the cinema who laughed loudly for about two minutes and I just shook my head because there was really nothing to laugh about! I don’t know, this time Tarantino simply didn’t make a film for me. Only the scene at Spahn’s Ranch and the famous climax show what this film could’ve been if it’d really been “about the Manson Family”, as the reports of the new Tarantino movie said. (22/08/2019)

It's so long. It’s like inhaling the smoke from a filter-less cigarette and enjoying its equally long exhalation. It won't make you cough, and it won't scratch your throat. Which is actually the only problem I have with this "California dream". Connoisseurs of Tarantino's work will soon suspect that history will change again, and this time it is far less subversive fun than Inglorious Bastards. The three-pointed storytelling (actor-stuntman-Sharon Tate) does not have the exact structure of The Hateful Eight, but is rather an episodic collection of stories from filming and enchanted memories of faded neon. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not the best that Tarantino has to offer, which does not mean that after the end of the I won’t be madly in love with the corked smile of Cliff Booth and dividing the 162 minutes by three, because that’ show fast the film went by. You won't resist the urge to see it again, even if you already know what’s going to happen... (09/08/2019)

The ever-increasing navel-gazing seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster. After the admirable Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino started flagging with Django Unchained, only to slightly overdo it with The Hateful Eight, saved only by the actors and a decent amount of tension. The prospect of another film lapping at the three-hour mark, this time around in tribute to golden era and voluntarily apologizing in advance for its disregard of the audience, therefore tempted me very cautiously. However, the biggest surprise lies in just how wrong I was. Instead of traditionally engaging in endless conversations, the author fragilely confesses his love in a hundred and one ways. Unlike many of his previous works, he does not brag about his own talent; he genuinely and solely pays tribute to the talent of others and wants nothing more than to return to the sixties, immerse himself in them, and simply experience that boundless enchantment with film and television that only early youth can bring. So even though the drawn-out running time seems like showing off in principle, partly because it only slightly and superficially expands on the genre (just try retelling the Sharon Tate storyline yourself), a smile came to my lips incredibly often. The almost playful idea of digging your claws into a beloved world or period, where you tell the story "your own way", could theoretically become a goal for countless other directors, but something tells me that many of them would blindly break their own teeth on it. (22/08/2019)