A failed fairy tale..a yawn

Rating: 3/10 (8 September 2019)

Quentin Tarantino's 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'...is a descent into the land of make believe. Much publicized. A rich gate and thousands of film viewers reviews.
Above all, as the title implies as conceived and realized by Tarantino: it's a fairy tale, with gratuitous violence and much nostalgia of a Hollywood of the 1960s, with cultural references in music and ambiance that are hardly exhilarating or unsettling.
It's a buddy film: Leonardo DiCaprio and an aging Brad Pitt. (A good pairing that deserves a better film.)
If 'Once Upon ... has a political subtext: it's violent America in Vietnam and gun violence that never cease, even today, to claim victims.
The film is a simplistic and condescending nod to Clint Eastwood's decaying and depressing career until he went to Italy to star in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns.
It's magical realism in the way Brad Pitt and even DiCaprio meet and give the Manson Gang a lesson they won't forget.
The film lacks palpable anger and is scatter shoot in emotions, especcally a weepy and self-pitying DiCaprio.
Technically Tarantino knows how to make a film, but it's hardly a major film.
Al Pacino turns in a wonderful cameo as a sterotypical Hollywood Jewish producer who Anglicizes the pronunciation of his name and has a non Jewish wife.