Directed by Quentin Tarantino
This movie is about a lot of things but not enough about the right ones to be truly interesting. It's 1969 in Los Angeles and a TV actor and his stuntman friend keep running into the Manson family. Academics and film nerds will appreciate the period production values (clothes, music, cars) and read too much into the director's usual kink for women's feet, dialogue that goes nowhere, and scenes that go on waaay too long. When the material is this thin and the running time this long (2.5 hrs+) your mind has time to wander and wonder why there isn't more of something, anything. Or worse: anything interesting.
The best scene in the whole movie has a few Manson girls just watching TV. It covers the 60s in a second: the laziness, the last innocent hippie summer, the clutter of a living room before everything went digital and ergonomic. But the movie is best summed up by a scene of the same girls scrounging through a dumpster for food. Somewhere in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" is that awesome two minute trailer spread over a very dull, confused and very, very long movie.
