Quentin Tarantino, 2019            #1, 2019 Skandies

Well, I guess it stands to reason that the Skandies voters would make this their #1 movie of 2019.  After all, they already made it their #1 movie of 2009.  It was called Inglourious Basterds back then.

Okay, they’re not exactly the same movie.  Basterds is set during World War II; this movie is set in 1969.  It looks like a lot of the paeans to the film revolve around how thoroughly it has recre­ated 1969 Los Angeles.  And, hey, Pattern 24 says that I like a chronologically and geographically grounded narrative, so, sure, points for that.  Once Upon a Time isn’t detail-perfect, though⁠—I was thrown out of the illusion at least a couple of times, once when I spotted a numbered freeway exit (exit numbering in California didn’t begin until 2002), and once when I spotted a car whose license plate ended in PCE (the equivalent of a 555 tele­phone prefix).  More importantly, the movie tries to evoke 1969 primarily through TV and, especially, movies.  “For film nerds like myself, watching Once Upon a Time[…] in Hollywood is like being treated to a tour through the cinematic theme park that is Tarantino’s mind,” read one review.  “You can feel the love of cinema in it,” remarked another.  And… I am not a film nerd, I do not love cinema qua cinema, and in fact Pattern 43 says that I find films about filmmaking and the film industry tiresome.  So all those Pattern 24 points got canceled out.

spoilers really
    kick in here

And without them, what’ve we got?  Tarantino’s trademark amygdalar cinema, in which he designates a target as deser­ving of absolutely any amount of lurid vio­lence and then gleefully doles it out.  In Inglourious Basterds the target was the Nazis (as Tarantino reminds us in a film-within-the-film); here he’s set his sights a bit lower and chosen the Manson Family.  In both cases, the gimmick is that the targets have the ultimate plot armor⁠—they’re real, and we know that neither Adolf Hitler nor Squeaky Fromme was gruesomely murdered by Tarantino’s fictional protagonists.  And then he just goes ahead and has his protagonists gruesomely murder these historical figures anyway.  Legitimately shocking the first time.  Less so the second.  There’s a reason that stories rarely begin “Twice upon a time”.  Or “Once upon a couple of times”.

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