Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in Hollywood

I actually had a real opportunity to see Quentin Tarantino's latest in Hollywood, in the heart of Hollywood Boulevard, at the world-famous Mann's Chinese Theater. We took our kids by there on Wednesday to see all the handprints and footprints, while picking out a surprising number of people they knew from the Hollywood Walk of Fame (including, unfortunately, Donald Trump). The movie was of course playing at the theater.

But the reality of travel is that it's not worth making the long trip into Hollywood from Marina del Rey (where we're staying) for a 2.5 hour movie when you have a dine-in movie theater just down the street from you. "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in Marina del Rey" does not have quite the same ring to it, so we'll go with this.

In the end, I wished I hadn't spent 2.5 hours of my vacation watching it at all.

Not a fan of Quentin Tarantino's latest. I suppose it demands a second viewing, but I don't know that it would change my perspective on it too much. I won't go point by point on what I didn't like, but maybe I'll share a take a friend of my wife gave when she met him for drinks on Tuesday night. He said he found the first two hours to be tedious (!) but they were redeemed by the way it all comes together in the final act. I agree with the first half of the statement but not the second.

However, maybe this demands a second viewing more than most. I was falling asleep during the movie, which started at the reasonable hour of 8:30 -- reasonable when you are in your normal routines, anyway. I most certainly am not right now, and exhaustion takes any foothold it can and turns that into sleep. For example, that afternoon I fell asleep during a 30-minute movie at the La Brea Tar Pits. Give sleep an inch, it takes a mile.

I did have the dine-in option to save me. I had already determined to order a little brownie ice cream sundae thing they make, which was really good, but which I had consumed before the movie was a third over. The Coke and a half-dozen Oreo cookies I'd smuggled in didn't last much longer. I did order another Coke later on, but by then I'd already fallen asleep for ten seconds at a time about ten times. I probably didn't miss much, but you can never really tell how long you've been asleep.

Ordinarily the segmented, set piece-heavy nature of a Tarantino movie would keep you glued and charged, but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is not that kind of movie. Some people seem to be fine with this, but I am not one of them. It may represent growth as a filmmaker that he doesn't lean into his typical Tarantino-isms, but if they're not there, they need to be replaced by something equally compelling. I didn't find much of the content of this movie compelling at all. And I didn't get any joy/laughs out of his return to his usual preoccupations in the third act. In fact, as I'm sure has been discussed extensively online, I found that portion to deepen some of his already documented problems with gender politics. But I'm sure that's a topic for an entire post.

In this post, I'll just say that I have now definitely scratched my "see a movie on vacation" itch as I took the kids to The Lion King the day before as well. Who would have thought that I might actually like the latest half-baked Disney reboot better than the latest film from Quentin Tarantino.