Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Rating: 8/10 (13 December 2019)

Tarantino is one of those directors I love as a filmmaker but not so much as a person. As a personality he can be rude and obnoxious, and his handling of the Uma Thurman car crash is reprehensible. And don't even get me started with the whole Harvey Weinstein fiasco. However, as a filmmaker you can't deny that he makes entertaining films. Pulp Fiction and Inglorious Basterds are great pieces of cinema and they should be inducted in the National Film Registry if they haven't already. Anyway I digress, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is essentially a love letter to 60s cinema. Everything is pitch perfect from the cars to the clothes and overall the period detail is impeccable. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt have excellent chemistry as friends. Leonardo DiCaprio plays an insecure actor named Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt plays a devil-may-care stuntman named Cliff Booth. They're playing stand-ins for Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham and most film fans will eat this up. Margot Robbie is also great in a small role as Sharon Tate and Mike Moh is great as Bruce Lee. The fight scene between Bruce Lee and Cliff Booth is the highlight of the movie for me. Like most Tarantino films it gets very self indulgent and you get the sense that the run-time could get trimmed by 30 minutes. Perhaps we could have gotten more scenes with Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate? But as a film it's still highly watchable, and the dialogue sparkles when the characters speak. The third act gets a little crazy, but that's par for the course for most of Tarantino's films. In a strange way, this film is his most sentimental film with the way the film ends. Tarantino loves revisionist history and the ending to this film is kind of sweet. In conclusion, definitely check out Once Upon a Time in Hollywood if you're a Tarantino fan.