Love Letter

Rating: 8/10 (16 August 2019)

People will say Once Upon a Time... is Quentin Tarantino's love letter to Hollywood, but it's really more of a love letter to himself.
Tarantino's passions are all laid out here in full Technicolor: Hollywood glamour and its stars, nostalgia for 50s TV serials, ludicrous ultraviolence, and an unbridled enthusiasm for (dirty) foot fetishism. He is one of the most recognisable film nerds in the history of cinema, and this realisation of everything he loves about the industry up on the silver screen is his wet dream.
And it's good. It's no secret that Tarantino is a very talented filmmaker; his talent for creating longform, engaging films is perhaps no more evident than it is here - the two and a half hour runtime flies by. This is attributable to his skills in blending thematic elements of comedy, tension, horror, and others on a whim throughout his screenplay. The imagery and mise-en-scene is also quite brilliant; not since Boogie Nights has 60's Hollywood looked this lush.
Quentin didn't go to film school, he went to films, and here his passion for them is as tangible as ever.