Unlike say, Reservoir Dogs, which reportedly popped into his head during the writing of Pulp Fiction, this is a film he has wanted to make for a long time, perhaps because its central idea is more relevant to him as a filmmaker than any of his previous material.įading Hollywood actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is coming to terms with the fact that his best days are firmly in the rear-view mirror. From the mythic-sounding title prefix to Tarantino’s pre-release remarks that his tenth and final film will serve only as an epilogue of sorts to his career, everything points to this movie as being his magnum opus, the great work by which he would like to be remembered. As a result, we, the audience accept and understand that we are experiencing a finite body of work, that we are in the hands of an auteur with finite things to say, therefore bestowing greater importance on the things that are said, imbuing them with them with the same sense of significance that their creator is said to possess.įrom the outset, Once Upon a Time seeks to further gild this mythology. Of course, this process has often been underlined by Tarantino’s tendency to embellish his own mythology, ‘the ninth film by Quentin Tarantino’ being an example, a continual reminder that the Legend of Tarantino states that there will be only ten films to define his career. Throughout his filmography, from the self-aggrandising title credits to the (sometimes self-serving) cameos, Tarantino has made it impossible throughout the last two decades to separate the art from the artist. I use the term ‘legend’ not to bestow any form of cinematic immortality upon Tarantino but rather as a reminder that the movies that make up his oeuvre live perpetually in the shadow of their creator. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood marks director Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film since he blazed onto the scene in the early nineties with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, a pair of films that shifted cinema’s terms of engagement, spawned countless imitators and birthed a directorial legend. Warning: this review contains spoilers for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and previous Tarantino films!
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