Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

This is and isn't a good movie. It's well made (looks good) and interesting, but it seems kind of evil. I think it also just fails on its own terms in some (but not all) ways. You expect Tarantino to be ironic, but his films have been fun in the past. This one seems more just contemptuous of just about everyone and everything, including Tarantino himself (a cheesy scene from a movie within the movie is reminiscent of the ending of Inglourious Basterds), but that doesn't "make it OK". It's especially contemptuous of Bruce Lee (the only person of color with a significant part in the film) and of women. (Also of Hollywood actors--Leonardo DiCaprio plays a drunk (Rick Dalton) with a speech impediment who cries when things go badly--and of hippies. Dalton's disability is mocked, but only by himself. So that's all right.) The hero, on the other hand, (Cliff Booth) is a white working class man who killed his wife and insults Bruce Lee.

The misogyny here isn't just something you might think you detect and then worry about ("Is it OK to like a film made by a bad person?"). It spoils the movie, since parts of it seem to rely on the audience's sharing this attitude. The death of Booth's wife is all but shown in a flashback in which she is drunkenly berating Booth on a boat while he drunkenly holds a harpoon-gun pointing in her direction. Did he fire on purpose? We can't be sure, and we don't see the shot. But the whole point of the scene seems to be to laugh at, or otherwise delight in, the imminent painful death of this woman whom we are shown from behind wearing a bikini. Another, longer scene, has Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) going to a theater to see a film she is in and the audience's reaction. The scene is pointless unless we are expected to enjoy seeing this woman taking pleasure in her success while, unbeknownst to her, the Manson family is planning to murder her later. Sexy women about to be murdered are apparently for Tarantino what getting into a nice mess was for Laurel and Hardy. Specifically, sexy women holding forth or basking in success. (I'm using "sexy" here not to express my feelings but as shorthand for "young woman in a bikini with the camera zoomed in on one of her buttocks" and "famously beautiful young woman in a mini skirt".)

If you too like sneering at women, hippies, and Chinese people then you might enjoy all this, but a few times I think the movie just plain fails. Early on, a car door opens and piles of cigarette ends fall out. Ho ho! How much are these guys smoking?! I'm pretty sure this joke has been made before. Maybe that's more irony that I'm just failing to enjoy. But in the big fight at the end of the movie, three main sights stand out: where Booth's dog bites the male intruder, what the injured woman's face looks like, and what Dalton does to the intruder in the swimming pool. The last of these is presumably not meant to be much of a surprise, but the other two, I think, are. But what the dog does is what dogs do in John Wick: Chapter 3, and what the injured woman's face looks like is much the same as one or two of the injured faces in Midsommar. So it looks like Tarantino has been beaten to the punch with his shock tactics here.

Having said all this, I mainly care about what a film looks like and whether it has any philosophical or thought-provoking content. This one is very nicely filmed and has made me think. It's just that it has mostly made me think about how nasty it all is.