Tarantino's Turned-On, Tuned-In Tinseltown: 'Once Upon A Time In ... Hollywood'
Call it peak Tarantino: The writer/director's ninth film — about a Manson-family-adjacent actor and his stuntman — is an ode to the grimy, neon-lit place and time that shaped him.
Quentin Tarantino's florid, sun-bleached, la-la land fantasia, would be a groovy trip of a movie in any era. But only now, with virtually the entire industry consumed by Disney's circle-of-life pop-cultural recycling algorithm — a vast, unsympathetic intelligence more larcenous and self-referential than 1,000 Tarantinos working in round-the-clock shifts — does it look like an essential one. Tarantino's sophomore feature, hit with such seismic force 25 years ago that pleading its became a stubborn pre-Reddit subreddit of film criticism even as imitations proliferated. Now, QT is one of only a fistful of filmmakers who can still get studios to commit substantial resources ($90 million
