Når Tarantino laver en film om hvad der kunde sket hvis den gamle kultur havde nedkæmpet hippiekulturen er det skelsættende. Kim Møller har set filmen.

Jeg er ikke den store filmnørd, men Quentin Tarantino er manden bag Reservoir Dogs (1992) og Pulp Fiction (1994), og Once upon a time in Hollywood skulle naturligvis ses. Jeg blev positivt overrasket. Brad Pitt er cool som i Fightclub (1999), og hippiescenerne er intet mindre end fantastiske, og så kan med leve med at filmen varer mere end 2,5 time. Hermed anbefalet.

Kyle Smith anmelder filmen for National Review – The Shocking Right-Wing Tinge of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

“Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is steeped in an element critics love: It celebrates movies, thus validating the lives of those who spend inordinate amounts of time watching them. So many critics love this aspect of Tarantino’s latest that they missed an equally important factor: It mercilessly sends up leftist values. In its foundations, it’s so breathtakingly right-wing it could have been made by Mel Gibson.

Spoilers follow. Tarantino’s story (which has just been released on Blu-Ray and DVD), drips disdain on hippie Boomers from the vantage point of an older, sturdier, more rules-bound and more conservative America, personified by its Greatest Generation heroes: the aging cowboy actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt man/factotum Cliff (Brad Pitt). They are a middle-aged two-man army battling Sixties youth culture as it discards all norms and steers the culture into a ditch. At the bottom of that ditch is the gruesome reality of the Manson Family murders that took place in the closing weeks of the Sixties. It was a stark announcement to everyone that the hippies had gotten out of hand.

… In its now-famous climactic scene, OUATIH goes beyond hippie punching and ventures into hippie roasting. Watching a hippie murderess get flame-broiled by Rick Dalton might have been the single most delightful moment at the movies this year.

Rick and Cliff stand for an old-school way of doing things — all macho movies and masculine camaraderie. They wear their hair much shorter than what has become the norm for men. … Cliff drives around in Rick’s Cadillac — that epitome of Greatest Generation aspiration — listening to Neil Diamond while the Manson girls dress like sluts and dive through dumpsters. Cliff takes a liking to one girl, Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) and offers to drive her home, but when she offers him a sex act, he instead brings up a discarded norm — ‘How old are you?’ She replies, ‘First time anybody’s asked that in a long time.’ He’s sticking to the rules of another era. …

When one of the boys hanging around the ranch gives Cliff’s car a flat tire as a prank, Cliff makes him pay for it with a broken nose. Then makes him change the tire. Cliff is not just a stunt man in Westerns; he’s a sort of walking embodiment of manly Old West values. You mess with a man’s ride, you pay dearly.

The sexual politics of the film are hilariously reactionary. … Tarantino’s purpose, revealed in the final act, is to imagine a kind of cultural restoration of the pre-hippie Sixties by having Cliff, with an assist from Rick, dispatch the wild hippie girls of the Manson Family and the one feckless hippie boy who comes along with them vowing to do the work of Satan.

… Cliff metes out even more punishment than is strictly called for, smashing one hippie wench’s face into hamburger, and Rick uses a prop from pre-hippie genre cinema to turn one of his attackers into a s’more. The spirit is ‘Wouldn’t it have been beautiful if it had actually turned out this way?’ It’s very Inglourious Basterds — with hippies incurring as much needful wrath as Nazis.“