It’s hard to believe that 25 years passed since director Quentin Tarantino erupted into all our lives with Pulp Fiction, which like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
This 161 minutes long movie is a fantastical tale set in 1969 of a Hollywood struggling actor and his stunt double/best bud, and how their lives somehow intertwine with the Manson Family. The Manson connection is a bizarre and unnatural one in the storyline, which turns out to be an attempt by Tarantino to manipulate or even re-write historical events. The movie also features a new and very compelling type of Tarantino hero, the real men do cry character.
Tarantino creates with an almost fantastically detailed and time-machine precision Hollywood of 50 years ago, which is indeed fascinating to watch. Yet at the end of the day, this is definitely not one of those Tarantino flicks that stays with you, although it still carries most of the directors’ trademark antics like bloody vendettas, girls with guns, drive-ins, donuts, muscle cars, foot fetishism, and even Spaghetti Westerns.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not as revolutionary as we would have wanted a Tarantino movie to be having said that it still stands out as a quintessentially Tarantino storytelling achievement.
It is almost impossible to grasp that this is Tarantino’s ninth flick, which means he has only one more movie within him. Someone in Hollywood should be able to bribe him to continue, we definitely can’t afford to lose a genius like him! Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is funny and melancholic at the same time and gets a Thumbs Up from me.