By Frank Kemp
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood as per IMDb:
A faded television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame and success in the film industry during the final years of Hollywood’s Golden Age in 1969 Los Angeles.
I wish the movie was as simple as that. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is written and directed by Quentin Tarantino And as expected you can expect to see a lot of QT’s signature style. The long takes, the music, the slow build up, driving scenes and feet. Lots and lots of feet. If you didn’t know he had a thing for feet, this movie will let you know.
The films stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt who do a phenomenal job as well as the rest of the star studded affair. You would be very hard pressed to find a bad performance. Sadly, that’s the only nice thing I have to say about this flick.
At 2 hours and 45 minutes this film felt like a chore just to get through and this is coming from the guy that saw Endgame in theaters eight times. I love a good, long movie, but it cannot feel long. As I was watching Hollywood I could tell where the movie could have trimmed it up by 50 minutes at least. I’ve always wanted to see an assembly cut of a movie and this feels like it. QT went overboard in wanting to try and give every character a backstory for us to see when it just simply wasn’t needed. Many of the unnecessary scenes made it into the trailers which makes me wonder if the trailers were written first to convey the tone of the film, and the rest filled in to connect those dots.
For the most part I consider myself a fan of QT and Hollywood has to be his biggest misstep of his career and considering it is his 9th (or 10/11th depending on how you count) I feel like he should be too mature of a filmmaker to be making a film this poorly paced. On the other hand, he got to deliver the exact film that he wanted to make and that’s ideally every filmmakers dream.
I wanted to enjoy this movie. Honestly. There is a really good movie buried in here, Tarantino should have shown a lot of restraint and take to the adage that sometimes less is more.
If you’re a fan of Tarantino, but all means check the movie out. I feel like the movie will be split among the fans. As far as non-fans, this is not the movie to try and convert over with. In the mean time, I hope maybe Netflix will convert this film into a miniseries like they recently did with Hateful Eight.
Grade: C-