電影《從前，有個好萊塢...》影評：[Film Review] Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) 8.1/10

Quentin Tarantino’s 9th feature film, ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD headlines two biggest current Hollywood matinee stars for their first collaboration, DiCaprio plays a washed-up actor Rick Dalton and Pitt is his former stunt double and current chauffeur, Cliff Booth, in the twilight of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the year is 1969, also notoriously for the Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate (1943-69), Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, and her friends. By drawing on his facility of slasher to tackle the real-life grisly tragedy, Tarantino cunningly promises his votaries a bloodbath that prowls like the elephant in the room with its looming premonition (not least the final countdown of that ghastly night), which is unexpectedly deflected into a brutal house invasion where the preordained positions of victims and victimizers are ingeniously swapped, and comes off far more hellaciously if gruesomely uplifting and gratifying, yet very much in Tarantino’s wheelhouse in terms of its graphic violence and surreal drollness, a fiendishly clever wheeze that pays off magnificently! Indeed, the thread about Tate, played by Margot Robbie with a sacrosanct fresh-facedness and amicability, a starlet aspiring for a bright future which is apparently stalled by any first-time viewer’s ingrained foreknowledge, is sidelined for a paralleled major plot regarding our fictitious has-been movie star Rick, who has been sensibly retreated to the small screen and later revivifies by an spaghetti western sortie in Italy, and the charismatically hard-nosed Cliff, who can best a fanfaronade-laden Bruce Lee (a black belt Mike Moh) in a split second (somehow, a racist whiff is too tenacious to dispel), appear gritty enough to mount a lone-hero derring-do into the lair of Manson’s cult (effectually suggesting something grotesque by its ominous and apprehensive vibes, Tarantino is a mischievous and masterful teaser of genre tropes, and Dakota Fanning’s cameo is electrifying), but also manages to live down his dark past and subsists a low-key existence without any fuss. Incredibly, Pitt acquits himself as an optimal symbol of lethal coolth and unpretentious poise that becomes the main draw of the picture. For Rick Dalton, it is a diametrically different story, whose glamorous lifestyle cohabits with his personal crisis when his career goes on the skids and a flamethrower-wielding DiCaprio robustly inhabits Rick’s more conventional character arc with exasperated sophistication, self-parodying appeal and sheer unscrupulousness, also visibly luxuriating in the faux-movie/TV footage that Tarantino conjures up in tonality with the film’s outstanding period texture and luster, and his interaction with a brilliantly precocious child actress Trudi Fraser (Butters, what a revelation!) hits the high watermark of the sheer unpredictability of what life leaves in store for you. Tarantino’s 35mm eulogy of a bygone era in the Tinseltown,ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD is suffused with blokey bonhomie (along with female feet fetish), nostalgic homages (in lieu of Morricone’s score, here we have bountiful retro-tuneage to indulge our aural sensorium), deadpan absurdity and a love-thy-neighbor tenet which visualizes a well-meaning rectification of the timeworn Sharon Tate calamity, pure magic invoked by cinema as both an art media with massive appeal and a means of effectuating a filmmaker’s sky’s-limit fantasies, Tarantino still gets it! referential entries: Tarantino’s DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012, 7.9/10); Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN WEST (1968, 8.4/10).