Day 58: Once Upon a Time in Colorado Springs

I did a bunch of stuff today, but nothing really all that significant or worth noting here. I did finally get around to watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood after it had been talked up and hyped quite a bit to me by some colleagues. And since the movie took up most of the day, that's all I have to report.

What I'm watching today

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Starz streaming) - The last 30 minutes of this film make for a great movie, and it's obvious why Brad Pitt won the Oscar, but most of the other 2:10 is nothing more than self-indulgent Tarantino pomposity. That another 20 minutes couldn't be trimmed off of the run time of the film is baffling; there are probably 20 minutes of footage of Brad Pitt just driving around LA. But those dialog-free, plot-free driving scenes do have a purpose: to allow Tarantino to inject irrelevant nostalgia into his film in the form of oddball radio commercials and golden oldies. This movie had a great roadmap and could have been something special, but in typical Tarantino fashion, Tarantino wadded up that map and threw it out the window. Characters who have no bearing on the plot are introduced and then immediately forgotten. Other characters with solid arcs for most of the film are inexplicably replaced 3/4 of the way through. For the first 2:10 of the movie there is in fact a plot, but it's hiding in the bushes so it's hard to discern. Is the movie about Brad Pitt's character? Leonardo DiCaprio's? Is it about Sharon Tate? Charles Manson? Roman Polanski? Then at the end of the movie when the film finally lets you in on the secret of the story, it doesn't explain why the story is happening, so that things just seem like random events. For the first 2:10 I kept constantly asking myself who this movie is for. It clearly wasn't made for me or a lot of other regular-Joe viewers. No, Tarantino makes movies for Tarantino. Sometimes he gets it right and we get a great film, and sometimes he gets it wrong and we get self-indulgence of the worst kind. To be fair, both Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are downright brilliant in this movie and deserve all the accolades. In fact I would have given DiCaprio the Oscar over Joaquin Phoenix, but rewarding the best performances at the right time is not what the Academy Awards are all about, and DiCaprio already got his lifetime achievement award for The Revenant.