Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Will the fanboy ever grow up?

I may be in a small minority that considers Quentin Tarantino to be highly overrated. I find his movies, with the exception of Pulp Fiction, bloated, self-indulgent, and not particularly witty. This latest one sounded promising, a movie about Hollywood by the biggest movie nerd ever. Alas, even though this meandering, mostly boring film is peppered with cameos by wonderful actors, it‘s a huge nothingburger.

As its title suggests, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is a fairy tale, a fantasy inspired in part by the cheesy westerns of Sergio Leone. So I expected more insight on the surreal, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing interaction between reality and make believe, which is how movies, which are our present day myths, get made. But Tarantino doesn’t go beyond the facile. What little insight he brings is to how people behind the scenes make insecure actors seem bigger than life.

Leonardo DiCaprio is funny and dead on as Rick Dalton, a washed up movie star, now doing second banana roles on TV shows, and Brad Pitt oozes charm as Cliff Booth, his stuntman and best buddy. Dalton is all hat and no cattle, whereas the joke is that his stuntman, who looks like Brad Pitt, can actually do the heroics in real life, and is not interested in being a movie star; he’s not a needy, insecure egomaniac. Both DiCaprio and Pitt…