Mostly about caste-system and castouts . . . in Hollywood

Rating: 9/10 (8 June 2020)

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is really a great movie, if also greatly flawed, distinguished by keen cinematography, a ridiculously articulate soundtrack, and obsessively-accurate period detail. Writer-director Quentin Tarantino has elicited varied, nuanced, and powerful performances from a huge cast of stars of yesterday and today, and especially young stars on the rise. The story is, in fact, about generational succession and aging in Hollywood careers, and the 2019 film can be meaningfully described as a survey of the Hollywood caste-system circa 1969. Who is anointed to party and dance in the upstairs lounge of the Pan Am 747, who has to settle for first-class, and who rides way back in coach? As in the best of Tarantino's other films, the story also stirs the pot with explicit and implicit moral questions, one of which I'll enumerate here as "how does Hollywood deal with the outcasts of its society?"
Spartacus Super Bowl has more to say at FOOTBALL examen . . . .