ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD or Welcome to Tarantinopolis

For entire article, go here: https://andreaweekly.blogspot.....com/2020/02/once-upo

Whether ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD will be remembered as a classic, only time will tell. Who knows how it will be regarded twenty or thirty years hence, with a double dose of nostalgia for 2019 and 1969. This was surely the case with AMERICAN GRAFFITI and DAZED AND CONFUSED. The former makes one feel nostalgic for the early Sixties and the legendary era of New Hollywood, and the latter for the Bicentennial 1976 and 1993, a banner year for American Cinema. Despite its happy ending, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is ultimately a melancholic movie and not only because the real Sharon Tate was murdered by the Mansons but because it features a lost California. If California today were demographically contiguous with its earlier self, the ending wouldn’t be so wistful, poignant. But like the deceptive ending of A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, the alternate world of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a pipe dream out-of-time(like the Stones song), not unlike the one Noodles in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA recedes into, perhaps to a world where Max and Debra are with him. Despite the Vietnam War, race riots, and problems of youth, the Go-Go Years of the Sixties were an unprecedented time of hope and dreams. And yet, too much of a good thing led to taking things for granted. And in the end, they ‘blew it’. Not just Fonda and Hopper as in THE EASY RIDER but all of White California. With the rapid and tragic transformations of the West into Third World hell-holes, it could be that the only reminders of White Civilization will be in the ‘regressively white’ movies, just like many near-extinct species can be found in zoos and preserves. On that note, even though Tarantino’s latest movie may fall short of being a major work and may not offer much in the way of food-for-thought (compared to works of true giants like Lynch, Leone, Kubrick, and etc.), it offers one of the more unique and special movie experiences in quite some time.