An enjoyable, good film. I intensely disliked The Hateful Eight: I found it boring and wilfully ugly, so Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a pleasant, even heart-warming surprise. It’s in many ways the opposite of Eight, bearing a colourful variety & fast pace, and actually sympathetic & human characters rather than psychotic filth. Brad Pitt’s stuntman character Cliff Booth is the heart of the film, an ageing, wryly observant man, a man who has seen just about everything and is unsurprised, if not unamused.

It’s a thoughtful film, odd though that sounds to say of a Tarantino work; the underlying dynamic is the fractal doubleness of the fake and the real: so the two main characters are an actor and his stunt double, Di Caprio and Pitt. The Di Caprio character has his moments of authenticity, e.g. when he’s talking to a 8-year-old child actress (who, knowing what we know of Hollywood, would have been sexually abused by the directors, producers, other actors) and experiences his own age & lack in contrast to her youthful hope; and he is also at times a typical Hollywood fake. Even Pitt’s Cliff Booth has a tactful manner, a barely-managed tactical fakeness which slips from time to time, e.g. when he is watching Bruce Lee posture and cannot restrain a cynical laugh.

This doubleness extends to the film itself, which like Inglorious Basterds revisions a historical event, in this case the Manson killings. I personally kind of enjoyed watching the top Nazis getting gunned down in Basterds, because Tarantino portrays them as the imbecilic, wicked trash we all know from “History”, who somehow rose to power for no reason at all – for such fictive grotesques one can have little sympathy; here, I found the violent denouement highly satisfying and even spiritually uplifting – it had for all its glorious sanguinary excess, a note of Shakespeare’s late plays, the redemptive air of Pericles and Cymbeline, as Tarantino simply re-envisaged the night of Sharon Tate’s murder and puts Pitt’s calmly violent & capable stuntman in the path of the deranged hippies, to enjoyable consequence.