Very Good, Very Tarantino, And This Time That Made Perfect Sense

Rating: 8/10 (23 November 2019)

In my review for Django Unchained I said that the ending of the movie was very Tarantino, and that that was part of the problem for that particular film. I also said, "Tarantino got in the way of Tarantino," in Django, or something to that effect. I won't go into detail here about what I meant by that statement. You can go read it if you really want to know. However, I only bring that up now, because I want to say the opposite here: For Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood, Tarantino ends the film in good ol' Tarantino style! And it fits perfectly here. He most certainly did not get in his own way here. About mid-way through OUATIH, I started to get the feeling that the audience was going to get a Tarantino version of a history lesson, much like they did in Inglorious Basterds (now don't get me wrong, this film is not as good as Basterds, but it is still pretty doggone good). Which is to say, not a history lesson at all. More like the version of things that many people would rather have seen play out in the pages of history. In Inglorious Basterds, Hitler receives the type of justice most of us would have preferred he received at the close of WWII. And here, the Manson clan that committed that unspeakable act of evil in August of 1969, gets their comeuppance in very Tarantino-like fashion. And that was exactly what, not only I was hoping for, but what everyone who I saw the film with was hoping for, as well. The only thing that could have made it any better, as far as I am concerned, would have been to have Manson, himself, meet the same type of fate some of his followers met at the conclusion of this film. But, that is a very small complaint in an otherwise very good movie.