Charaters carry this aimless tour of Hollywood 1969

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2019)

The film has a lot more of Tarantino in it than a lot of his other movies. It's the only film of his I would say doesn't at least slightly fall under the banner of "action movie," and is focused more on character and less on violence. It also ends up feeling really aimless. There's not a straight forward plot or even a series of shorter stories, it's just things happening. There's barely any build up to the climax, it's just a thing that happened in this series of events. This is less of a movie, and more of Tarantino showing us around LA circa 1969. The shows he liked, the types of movies he loves, the places he wanted to visit, the actors he never got to meet. Which is fine as a back drop to a better story, but this a nearly three hour movie with hardly anything resembling a story. Honestly, the best parts of the movie are the extended sequences from the movies and tv shows being filmed within the movie.
The characters carry this movie hard. Tarantino is a great writer of characters and dialogue, and the only thing that kept engaged the whole movie was just seeing what these characters would do next. It almost manages to make up for the lack of narrative, since I did sort of enjoy seeing the random things these characters got up to.
A big part of that is the acting. DiCaprio and Pitt have both established themselves as great actors, and they both shine in this film. DiCaprio is required to play an actor who's honestly not that great and he manages to pull off bad acting without seeming like a bad actor himself. That said, his greatest moment in the film came in one of the sequences he was filming for a show within the movie. Robbie is also very well cast as Sharron Tate, despite having a smaller role. She does resemble Tate quite a bit and she really embodies what Tarantino was going for with that character. A lot of other decent actors were cast to play various celebrities, from Steve McQueen to Bruce Lee, and got only one or two scenes. Most disappointingly, Manson, who was hyped up leading up to the movie, appears in one scene. The Manson family is a constant, but the man Charlie gets one moment that I think easily could have been cut from the film and no one would be confused.
Without wanting to reveal too much, I have a bit of an issue with the ending of the film. It's reminiscent of what Tarantino did in Inglorious Bastards, but infinitely less satisfying. The violence almost feels unnecessary, like Tarantino couldn't go one movie without some hard R gore. It's not the ending I wanted to see, honestly.
I don't want to make it seem like I disliked the film. Overall the good outweighs the bad for me, and probably will revisit this movie. But for a director I love as much as Tarantino, I expect more from him. This will undoubtedly go down Tarantino's lesser known films like Jackie Brown. A good movie, yeah, but there's a reason it's not as well remembered as Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill.