Once upon a time... in Donnywood

“Is everyone okay?”

“Well the fuckin Hippies ain’t”

Jeff unfortunately couldn't make it to the cinema with me

SPOILERS

In hindsight, cycling to the cinema in new hometown storm ridden Doncaster was a terrible idea, but I think it was worth it. We enter Hollywood. Everything is perfectly dated, 1969 LA captured. Kid Colt comics line Rick Dalton’s shelves, showing the washed up forgotten cowboy. The movies within a movie are a refreshing and ridiculous way of bringing us our characters without a narrator. In a film that follows Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth driving round LA for a considerable time, the car is the soundtrack, all the hits diegetic. Camera wise, we get a throwaway shot on horseback of which most westerns would be jealous and shots following the car that paint the Hollywood hills prismatic. The dialogue the perfect mix between everyday mundanity and wit-fuelled hilarity. With all this, we are given Tarantino’s love letter to ancient Hollywood, barely concealing his hate mail to what it has become, a perpetually flipping coin. I felt myself groaning at Rick sobbingly relating himself to the dried up character in his book, before grinning at his octuplet whiskey fuelled caravan explosion. There’s nothing to predict, and you’ve no idea what to expect.

"I'm Rick fuckin' Dalton"

This was the first Tarantino film I’d been able to see in the cinema. So an hour in, just starting to dry off, and I was wondering where it was going to take us, what violent insanity or wacky time jumping we’re going to see, and it all seems pretty straightforward until: enter bruce lee. The unique humour of Tarantino makes you laugh without realising why- a laugh has burst from you before you realise anything is funny. And the flashback that you don't know is a flashback was, for me, the start of good things to come in this Film, as there’s truly no reason bruce lee being slammed into a car is hilarious, but there’s certainly no arguing that it was.

The thing with Tarantino films is they always seem a bit beyond your grasp, as if you are enjoying them but theres something you cant quite read. Especially so upon the ranch. My sleeping pattern is all out of sync, but even wide awake this was the point at which I would have felt most in a fever dream, witlessly following Cliff, a man who seems to have thrown caution out of the pram. He’s the perfect Easy Breezy stoic cowboy counterpart to Leo Dicaprio’s frantic nostalgic, who himself superbly portrays the insecure actor in the twilight of his career, and the shared scenes between the two are consistently solid. An unacrominous friendship is so rarely created this well, you’d be hard pressed to believe this was their first feature Film together.

Now I have heard of the Manson murders, but shamefully did not know the name Sharon Tate. After a bit of reading, I can imagine the final act would probably be pretty terrifying for someone who knew more than I, especially with Charles Manson earlier lurking round the Polanski house- but terror soon turns into hilarity with possibly the most Tarantino 30 minutes I can imagine, with Uma Thurman Jr. to boot. We come off a ride through LA, the crescendo of the director’s penultimate ballad as the cinema lights fill the streets and our two stars enjoy one final bloody-mary-margarita-sendoff. With my stand out quote of the whole Film,

“When you come to the end of the line with a buddy who’s more than a brother and a little less than a wife, getting blind drunk together is the only way to say farewell”

I honestly saw the story ending there, innocently forgetting that this was a follow up to Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds. My nerves rear their ugly head to meet the Manson murderers, not helped by by a paralytic Dicaprio and drugged-dumb Pitt, that everyone is going to meet their end in a gruesome finale. This gets completely candy flipped. Cathartic violence galore, a nuts-tripping Cliff and faithful Brandy taking down the Manson Murderers with a tin can, and Rick really wondering if there’s anything the crew can do with that heat, is the 30 minutes of insanity I never knew I needed at 2pm on a Friday.

And if that sentence sounds like gibberish to you, then you need to go and see Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (preferably in a car).