☆☆☆½
Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood has everything a movie could possibly need – a magnificent cast, exquisite design, expert craftsmanship – except a compelling screenplay.
It's a beautiful but empty-headed piece of nostalgia, a splendidly gorgeous piece of nothing. Watching it is like biting into an extravagantly hand-crafted eclair only to discover the baker forgot the filling.
It's the movie Quentin Tarantino probably needed to make, an ode to the movies he grew up watching and to the time in which they were made. For almost three hours, he lavishes over meticulous recreations of 1969 Hollywood; it's cinema as immersive experience.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a has-been movie star hurtling toward obscurity. His stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is his co-dependent sidekick. Rick lives on Cielo Drive, just beneath the house Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate are renting in the winter and spring of 1969.
But the movie is only kinda-sorta about the Manson murders. Played by Margot Robbie, Tate is merely a distraction; her biggest scene simultaneously pities and mocks her desire for celebrity, and is indicative of how tonally off the movie is. It all winds as circuitously as a road in the hills to the night of the murders. Its final 30 minutes are as sadistically violent as they are unexpectedly wrong-headed.
Tarantino has made, it turns out, the cinematic equivalent of a red Trump hat: It's so damned sure that things were better back then that it never stops to ponder its garrulous insistence.
Viewed July 28, 2019 -- AMC Burbank 16
1040
It's a beautiful but empty-headed piece of nostalgia, a splendidly gorgeous piece of nothing. Watching it is like biting into an extravagantly hand-crafted eclair only to discover the baker forgot the filling.
It's the movie Quentin Tarantino probably needed to make, an ode to the movies he grew up watching and to the time in which they were made. For almost three hours, he lavishes over meticulous recreations of 1969 Hollywood; it's cinema as immersive experience.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a has-been movie star hurtling toward obscurity. His stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), is his co-dependent sidekick. Rick lives on Cielo Drive, just beneath the house Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate are renting in the winter and spring of 1969.
But the movie is only kinda-sorta about the Manson murders. Played by Margot Robbie, Tate is merely a distraction; her biggest scene simultaneously pities and mocks her desire for celebrity, and is indicative of how tonally off the movie is. It all winds as circuitously as a road in the hills to the night of the murders. Its final 30 minutes are as sadistically violent as they are unexpectedly wrong-headed.
Tarantino has made, it turns out, the cinematic equivalent of a red Trump hat: It's so damned sure that things were better back then that it never stops to ponder its garrulous insistence.
Viewed July 28, 2019 -- AMC Burbank 16
1040
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