![]() Shot through it all is Tarantino’s obvious affection for the city, his love apparent in slow pans across sun-dappled Westwood Village and lingering shots of Hollywood Boulevard’s neon-lit facades.īelow, a map of some of the film’s major locations, which include swinging nightspots, drive-in theaters, hillside getaways and secluded movie ranches. Nonetheless, Barbara Ling’s production design brilliantly recreates 1969 LA in vibrant, period-accurate detail, while Robert Richardson’s expressive camera work makes the flamboyant landscape pop. It has unforced problems, seems rambling and messy, and relies a lot on the sheer force of its talent (cast and crew) to make the film work as well as it does - but this isn't well enough for something this long that doesn't have a strong enough narrative through-line.Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been described as the director’s love letter to late ’60s Los Angeles-but as the title suggests, it plays more like a fantasy version of the city, a vivid reflection of a place that never really existed. ![]() In the end, it is still a solid movie with plenty to like about it, but this is almost in spite of itself. Likewise the female characters bring less to the film, and are much more 'devices' than even some male characters with very little screen time. ![]() The women are consistently fawned over, with a particularly weird focus on feet almost every chance it gets. Robbie is a cheery presence, but only that - she isn't really a character so much as a frame of reference that we have to like as such she works, but it doesn't sit well in the film because there is a lot of oddity when it comes to the handling of characters. Pitt is good (although I was surprised by his Oscar) but I found DiCaprio to be the stronger performance as he had more character to get his teeth into. It was a distancing effect on me because I enjoyed all these moments but yet was happy in them without caring really for what came next. Almost all of the scenes are engaging in some way, but as a whole they do not come together even the extreme revision of history seems like it lacks a specific point or message for the casual viewer. It produces a reasonably enjoyable film with plenty to enjoy in the moment, in the performances, and in the overall delivery, but in terms of narrative flow it feels so fragmented and unfocused that it is hard to stick with it for such a long running time. What is less clear is 'why' the film is doing this. This is made reasonably clear throughout by the insertion of the characters into real shows and films of the era, and of course by significant elements of the ending, which changes history somewhat. ![]() Watching the film needed me to invest in that approach from the very start, because it is a nostalgic imagining of a better time without much of a connection to reality. I approached this film not knowing too much about it, although I was a little aware of the Manson murders, Sharon Tate, and the fact that this film was loosely set around those events, but very much a fictional version of them (or a total fairy tale as is suggested by the title).
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