fairy tale--Taratino gets soft in his old age

Rating: 8/10 (28 September 2019)

It's been a long time since I actually left the cinema smiling with content. The movies in recent years are mostly all disappointments, higher the appraisal from media, greater the disappointment. I don't want to recall the terrible experience when I fell asleep during La la land in cinema and almost caught a cold. Most recent movies can not even interest a hard-to-fall-asleep passenger like me to watch during painful long-haul flights. With these movies in comparison, Taratino's once upon a time in hollywood is a very good one. However, it is not his best nor one of best in history as Taratino puts too many his own fixations in this movie, be it Italian westerns, recreating his golden age hollywood nostalgia, etc.
It's a long movie, and requires a bit pre-knowledge on the golden era hollywood and the Manson Family murders. The knowledge of the golden era brings up the nostalgia to stay in mood to ignore the relatively boring and flat first 2 hours. Knowing about the Manson murder of Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski's wife keeps the viewer hooked to see how all three lines converge to the murder and how Tarantino would depict it. Neverthess, the foreshadowing is way too long and flat, mostly because of Taratino's own fixations---it is more of a personal movie to himself, in my understanding. He used a lot of tacnics to make it less dull for average viewer: charismatic actors, flashback, movie in movie, three lines slowly integrating through the same recurring elements, nostalgic warm yellow color theme, and the 60s music. However, even the nostalgic Californian warm color/lighting theme can only do limited magic. I got sleepy in the midway, and only the anticipation of the Manson murder is keeping me awake.
The ingenious twistful ending compensates for the long foreshadowing. Until the end I finally see the cleverness in the title---Tarantino is telling a fairy tale, satisfying yet sad. History is cruel, but the blood-shedding director is getting soft in his old age. He indulges in the last glory days of the golden era Hollywood while not ingoring the unresting 60s America in the background. He pictures what could be a smooth transition, a gradual reform rather than a turmoil revolution. And it works better than depicting the harsh history---sorrow, compassion, and empathy are all magnified with in the dark yet humorous fairy tale.
Overall, it is an enjoyable movie worth going to the cinema, which is quite rare nowadays. I only watched once, so I cannot say too much on the technical side. It succeeds as a good movie with the ingenous ending, but I feel it also fails to emphasize the main message with the ending---if time is the main message. Several interviews of Taratino and the cast suggest that Taratino wants to delivery the transition of time in this movie, from the old golden Hollywood to the shiny and carefree new time, from the struggling has-beens to the rising movie stars, from the glorious stars to the ordinary people who anomonously contributed the fantasy industry but could not afford to live on the fantasy land they build. The elements are there in the movie, bright and clear, but it feels that they failed to converge into the bigger theme--time.