Tarantino's Daring Film

Rating: 8/10 (16 September 2019)

What Tarantino's film does right is his sense of direction, knowing how to put just the right elements (comedy, suspense, friendship, history, and even a narrator) to tell a story. In this case, it's the story of Rick and Cliff (an actor and his double), and their tales.
First and foremost, the argument of the hippies is put on place very early on with Cliff (Brad Pitt) blinking an eye on a hippie girl. By the way, we aren't really seeing the bright side of them: they are depicted as a malevolous community capable of doing the worst, such as murder and of having an extreme ideology that doesn't really make much sense.
Along the scheme of the film, we might find this somewhat long "fillers", that lasted a few minutes each, where we see a single character, not speaking anything but merely driving, to go to another destination. To think of these as mere fillers is a mistake; we have this scenes to put the whole ambient of the 60's in just one piece, using the most important tool: music. That's their whole reason of existence, and while I understand the logic, I feel like sometimes it was too much of it, or too repetitive, perhaps it should have been done only at the beginning. In my opinion, this could have been removed to reduce the duration and it would still be great. This aspect was kind of reminiscent of Mussorsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, where we have the walk, Promenade, which represents the moment of going from one picture to another. In a similar way in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, we have this Promenades that gives you time to breathe between each section of the movie.
The comedy aspect of the movie was fine. It delivered all of the exceptions, with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, it just can never go wrong. Even in the way they spoke and not doing explicitly jokes, the way each other related, was full of good-measured humor and very enjoyable.
Moments of tension are also really, really tense. I mean, for real. The scene where Cliff walks into a hippy community in a ranch, (where they live together without shoes and almost in an undeniable animal-state), and goes to visit an old friend of his, George, very strange things begin to happen. The hippies are secretive and evidently trying to hide something, and George is delusional, blind, his memory fails. Other things like a rat's sound in a filthy house makes the whole thing scary and weird, as if examining a dead body kind of weird, mixed with a frightening violin melody
The different characters do a splending job in setting their own unique personality, and do it in a very relatable manner. We see a hippy girl, a Kung Fu fighter with too much pride, an intelectual girl that likes reading and is 8 years old.
The Polanski's (Rick's neighbors) failed to convince me, there just was something about both of them that I just didn't grasp or understand, and lacked potential to make the story even greater. Perhaps it was because they didn't really relate to Rick and Cliff's arch, until the very end, and they were there, almost filling a gap, their story a bit too independent of our two protagonists.
The changing of filming style between different sections of the movie is what made a film that otherwise would be "two guys into the sixties" into "all the colors and the very essence of the sixties, oh and by the way, the story of two guys", make a lot of sense. What I mean by this is that sometimes they used scary instrumental music from old films into a part of the movie, the actually black and white parts where Rick is recalling his past movies (and make it look genuine), a sudden narrator in the middle of the movie (which didn't last too long), and among other things, made it very enjoyable. It felt like watching a collage-like movie, or having a box of chocolates with different surprises.
Le Grand Finale was flawless and one daring move, that was being prepared before, with the hippie's tension scary, dark and disgusting side set into motion: we see a f*king war veteran torture to hell the crazy hippie guys and their ridiculous extremism. Even when Cliff was so gone and out of himself because of spolier: drugs, it felt like he was fighting an ant there. What we might have seen in an horror movie as a terrible, almost gore scene, it was depicted in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as a humorous sadism, where one just can't avoid to explode into laughter.