“And I'm sure there's a few people like that that are multiple viewers of Quentin's audience that probably, you know, laugh straight up at the Mexican remark that Brad Pitt makes out in the back parking lot of Musso and Frank's, and probably laugh at the Bruce Lee sequence without thinking anything like, well, maybe I shouldn't be laughing at this because it's basically, I'm endorsing Brad Pitt's Cliff being a jackass. And I don't know. It's, I'm sure the other appeal of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, if you're seeing it over and over and over and over and over, is the mourning (a form of primal scream/moose bellowing) over, especially Leo's character, obsolescence and that working conditions get worse and jobs are harder to find, and you have to go into Europe, because you're an American name, you can at least make movies, even though you know in the back of your mind, you're not likely to have a career balance like Clint Eastwood, or even Eli Wallach, or Lee Van Cleef did.
And I'm sure that there's a lot of people, me included, who like the sequence, where Leo and Brad just sit and talk movies that restaurant in Sherman Oaks, and probably would love to see like an hour of them riffing, and then you hear Quentin's voice from off camera, encouraging them to keep going.
Quentin does kind of recognize on some level that there's a kind of narrowness about the lower rungs of the industry, where people love to talk about movies (mostly old ones) and I've bonded with some of them, and sometimes the price of bonding is you get a heavy dose of very right-wing politics and or outright racism or sexism, and then you have to think very, very hard, is it worth the stress because you're around people that are, you know, really, really stunted and backward looking when you know the world is and should be bigger and more inclusive.
You can't really do a depiction of 1969 without, you know, showing people. being narrow and unenlightened. The question is whether or not the filmmaker is depicting without endorsement or is he or she cuing the audience to laugh a la Mel Gibson directing BRAVEHEART with Patrick McGoohan throwing his son to his death from a castle window.
From Reviews And Otherwise: BONUS EPISODE: SOME MILD HERESY REGARDING QUENTIN TARANTINO AND ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, Jun 28, 2021
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reviews-and-otherwise/id1570012238?i=1000527088313&r=1553
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