![]() Rick’s conversation with co-star Trudi (Julia Butters) moves him to tears. An idle conversation with the young actor, ostensibly about the dime Western Rick passes his time reading, triggers the actor’s self-doubt to the point of tears. The actor needs help to find wardrobe, where his sartorial style is reworked by director Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond) to the new modern of the medium and waits uncomfortably alongside young Trudi (the awesomely self-possessed Butters), one of his scene partners. Nor is the absurdly stylized patois of the villainous dialogue scripted for him.Įverything about the set is, to Rick, well established as the film’s primary point-of-view character (along with, to lesser extents, Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate and Pitt’s Cliff Booth), disorienting. It’s all pretty straightforward, except that Dalton’s late-night rehearsal regimen of a blenderful of swimming-pool whiskey sours isn’t doing his aging memory or puffy face any favors. ![]() His character, coiffed and garbed in styles unfamiliar to Rick, will have scenes with series regulars James Stacy, played by Timothy Olyphant Wayne Maunder, played by the late Luke Perry and Trudi Frazer, played by Julia Butters. Here’s the setup: Rick, formerly the star of Bounty Law, is hired to guest-star on the pilot episode of Lancer, a multigenerational familial melodrama Western series in the mold of a Bonanza or Big Valley-but without the big stars or Nielsen numbers-as Caleb DeCoteau, a long-haired gunslinger and extortionist hoping to swindle family patriarch Murdoch Lancer. Recreating the set of Lancer, Tarantino works his ineffable magic, immersing viewers in his world-within-a-world, providing his talented cast room to shine and his production team an opportunity to recreate an Old West as New Hollywood had made it some 50 years ago. Hired to play the heavy-itself now a bad omen, one step further from stardom-on the new TV series Lancer, Rick must channel his thespian talent even when unnerved by the show’s production. I sympathize with those who find Tarantino’s portrayal of the late Bruce Lee unnecessarily arrogant and designed only to characterize Brad Pitt’s stuntman’s fighting prowess.īut along the way towards its explosive counter-conclusion are dozens of thoughtfully staged, brilliantly shot, and perfectly acted scenes that recreate a Hollywood of 1969 where television and film vie for viewers’ attention and Leonardo DiCaprio’s aging Western star Rick Dalton hopes to salvage what is left of his career. Personally, I just find it … silly, a sophomoric exercise in thoughtless slapstick violence, a cartoonish montage of head butts, crotch bites, and immolations. Others, I know, may think that torching Manson-family minions aflame might provide a cathartic alternative-universe conclusion to the gruesome reality of the Tate-LaBianca murders they committed fifty years prior. Tarantino’s 2019 opus Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is a film rife, to my thinking, with the kind of absurd spectacle that ultimately derails its narrative progress. And while I never leave a Tarantino film feeling fully satisfied, in each of them I will find myself for a while wholly, intensely immersed in the small, intimate worlds he creates, elaborate fictions set in alternate realities that provide ample occasion to reflect on the real worlds they mirror. ![]() There’s no doubting his place in or contributions to film history: as a writer, director, curator, producer, he’s had a profound influence on more than one generation’s understanding of world cinema and made two fistsful of the buzziest, brashest films of his era. I find every one of his films a hodgepodge of ideas and styles, some of them brilliant, more of them patently absurd. So, I’m not the world’s biggest Quentin Tarantino fan, or, for that matter, what you might call a fan at all.
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