Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Permanence is Actually Ephemeral
So, there must be at least eleventy billion commentaries on one of the biggest summer blockbusters of 2019, said to be Quentin Tarantino’s penultimate film before he moves on from making movies.
While it’s not his last film yet, his fans know the end is coming and are mourning in advance. With and without the context of this particular movie, film critics and commentators have been speaking with much fervor the past two months on Tarantino being problematic with respect to women in his films, over-the-top violence, and the simple fact that he’s a guy who makes movies about movies. Which is an abstract that was really cranked up to 11 in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: it’s literally about how our entertainment gets made, at a time when American culture and media as a whole were irrevocably transforming. Hollywood was no exception to such a monumental shift and the late 1960s heralded the end to what many consider a golden age in movies.
I lost count of how many reviews, Twitter threads, and write-ups I enthusiastically nodded along with, or felt enlightened or infuriated by, all of which came from so many different angles and aspects of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, some laced with…
