This is as good a spot as any to enter my vehement dissent to the critics' love for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Ebert's standard for genre pictures was that what was important was not what a movie was about but how it was about it. That's good enough for Tarantino's riffs on genre like Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Hateful Eight, but it doesn't make the cut for his pseudo-historical pictures like Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, and Once Upon a Time.
History is. You can present it, you can interpret it, you can criticize it, but it is childish simply to wish it away in revenge fantasies. Tarantino is an excellent technician, but his historical pictures use his technical skill, imagination and creative freedom for fundamentally silly purposes. His rewriting of history, or of movies about history, as he wishes history had been is as puerile as a middle school boy's imagination. It doesn't even rise to the pathos of Faulkner's 14 year old Southern white boy wishing Pickett's Charge had turned out differently. Tarantino is more on the level of 6 year old Calvin playing "Tyrannosaurs In F-14s" while Hobbes looks on in bemusement.
Yes, Tarantino beautifully recreates the look and feel of LA at the end of the 60s, but what does he do with it? He saves Sharon Tate. If you're going to hop in the time machine, go back to the late 60s and save someone in California, why not RFK instead? His death was a historical turning point of national and perhaps world importance. Hers, though tragic for her and her husband, was no more than the loss of one more good looking, fairly talented young actress on the Hollywood conveyor belt. Despite the effort of frightened contemporaries like Joan Didion to build it up into an End Of An Era event like the 1527 Sack of Rome, the Tate-Labianca murders were just a minor incident in the history of Hollywood and Los Angeles. But then, Tarantino sees the world only through the prism of Hollywood.
History is. You can present it, you can interpret it, you can criticize it, but it is childish simply to wish it away in revenge fantasies. Tarantino is an excellent technician, but his historical pictures use his technical skill, imagination and creative freedom for fundamentally silly purposes. His rewriting of history, or of movies about history, as he wishes history had been is as puerile as a middle school boy's imagination. It doesn't even rise to the pathos of Faulkner's 14 year old Southern white boy wishing Pickett's Charge had turned out differently. Tarantino is more on the level of 6 year old Calvin playing "Tyrannosaurs In F-14s" while Hobbes looks on in bemusement.
Yes, Tarantino beautifully recreates the look and feel of LA at the end of the 60s, but what does he do with it? He saves Sharon Tate. If you're going to hop in the time machine, go back to the late 60s and save someone in California, why not RFK instead? His death was a historical turning point of national and perhaps world importance. Hers, though tragic for her and her husband, was no more than the loss of one more good looking, fairly talented young actress on the Hollywood conveyor belt. Despite the effort of frightened contemporaries like Joan Didion to build it up into an End Of An Era event like the 1527 Sack of Rome, the Tate-Labianca murders were just a minor incident in the history of Hollywood and Los Angeles. But then, Tarantino sees the world only through the prism of Hollywood.