adrongardner

Tarantino has said, he makes movies for himself. The audience, he says, is just allowed in. But it's a lie.

Once upon a time, Quentin Tarantino was the kid who took us to places that may not have existed but he makes us feel as if they did because we believe at some point he actually had been there. Tarantino movie worlds are the equivalent of going to have a burger at Jack Rabbit Slims. And so we are allowed in to play.

We might have eaten in that diner Jules and Vincent have breakfast in. Maybe we walked down that same street alley from Reservoir Dogs. Maybe I passed Jackie Brown at the mall food court. But around the time Hitler was killed, I started to wonder.

I really wanted to know where it went wrong and so I looked back to the beginning. Reservoir Dogs was an excellent take of City on Fire as a play. Pulp Fiction still works because he had help. As much as The Golden Watch is a little weaker than the rest, it gives so more more weight to and allows the Bonnie Situation to really hit so hard at the end. Jackie Brown, to me, is the real gold (watch) standard. It works from beginning to end without a single fault But again, he had help because he was playing in Elmore Leonard's back yard. I think Kill Bill was his Saving Private Ryan - A peak technical exercise that doesn't carry much other weight but tons of fun. From there on it gets fuzzy.

The old days were less was more. Tarantino would cut away from a cop getting his ear cut off. We imagined the heist in our head and guessed what the golden glow was in the Wallace briefcase. But later Tarantino has blood from whips splash into cameras and hammers smack into people's faces. It would have more hit seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh get smacked once in Hateful Eight had we not had to see it over and over again for nearly three hours. But everybody has to evolve and so does their work.

Once upon a time I wanted to see what happened. Who was the rat in the crew? What happened to Jules and Vincent after they left that apartment? Would Jackie get out of this alive? Those movies actually had a cohesive whole where you wanted to get to the end. It's even simpler: they had a story.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in title is that of a fairytale but it's a lie. It wants so bad to be a celebration of a time and place, but that's a lie too. It doesn't feel anything like Jack Rabbit slims. It doesn't feel at all like any LA I know, knew or dreamt of. Much like Inglorious Basterds and Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood isn't a story at all, it's just a vague idea without the smells and comforts of his earlier funhouses. It's a dream of a Hollywood that Tarantino probably never really knew because it never really existed - he was only five or six-years-old when he moved to California.

I guess there's sorta something about the Manson Family in there but Once Upton a Time in Hollywood is about the wash out, the once was and the has been. It wants to be his LA Story of stars and starlets, about what could have been and what he wanted to remember. But in that circle of dreams and nightmares, it's not a contender. He already saw someone else make this movie and that movie was absolutely made by somebody who KNEW that world and lived in it. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is just Tarantino trying to make make Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic LA dream and nightmare was one he knew a little too well and so we feel that too by the time the firecrackers start popping around Alfred Molina.

Boogie Nights isn't Wonderland, but it feels like jt could be and it lands so much harder than Once Upon a Time because we know Paul Thomas Anderson really knew some of these people and these places - he went to that Jack Rabbit Slims. Dirk Diggler isn't Jake LaMotta in that dressing room or John Homes for that matter, but Paul Thomas Anderson understood Hollywood and his LA dollhouse enough to tie it all together.

It was said that when Jackie Brown came out, Tarantino went to the theater night after night to watch not just the movie, but how the audience reacted. He is most definitely making movies for more than himself. He wants people to have a good time but artists are rarely the best judge of their own work and its best they tell stories - in some manor - that they really know because all I could think of after seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was "WHAT was that?! WHAT aint no country I ever heard of..."