Tarantino's "Hollywood" is an unsettling place.

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2019)

I'm not sure what to say about this film. I'm definitely a little disappointed but maybe only because my expectations were so high. I was really into it in parts (The ranch scene was fantastic) and I'm not sure how I'd have preferred for it to play out but I have to say it fell a little flat by the end, despite some quintessential Tarantino motifs.
It's a peculiar style that Tarantino has chosen to tell his tale, and it's the first of his movies that I've watched where I had to remind myself this is a Tarantino film. Certainly there were plenty of his tell tale signs throughout, but for many passages it felt very unlike him; almost as though he was absent.
There are small touches, like advertisements on street benches and radio chatter in cars, that bring you subtly into the era, in a way that only someone passionate about it could think of. He has recreated a part of history that I never knew; One that almost touches upon fascination before making me recoil.
For so much of the first two thirds I swam in the mirage that Tarantino placed before me. Excitement filled me as the scenes jumped from one tangent to the next, the links never quite touching but close enough to keep me at ease. However, as story carried on, I began to get anxious.
It was the blending of reality and fiction that I found most unsettling. Like water upon oil, they slide amongst each other to form pretty patterns but they never properly mix. And in the end, after almost three hours, I was left with a feeling of 'what was the point?'.
Maybe that's Tarantino's goal. The '... in Hollywood' alludes to the phoniness of it all, and that if that's how Hollywood says it was, then that's how it is. The truth is secondary to a good story. And even though Hollywood does this in order to make the cinematic experience more satisfying for the viewer, in this case, it feels like I'm being lied to because they don't trust my ability to stomach the truth.