10 Ways Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Broke The Tarantino Mold
10 Ways Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Broke The Tarantino Mold
Like Quentin Tarantino’s other movies, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was universally acclaimed but a departure from the director’s distinct style.
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In the summer of 2019, Quentin Tarantino released his ninth and, if he sticks to his long-held retirement plans, penultimate film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The director’s signature style is all over the sun-drenched ‘60s-set masterpiece, but it also sets itself apart from his previous work in a number of noteworthy ways.
It’s always refreshing — but sadly rare — to see a visionary director like Tarantino, with such a specific style, step outside their comfort zone and make the kind of movie their fans never thought they’d make and actually pull it off spectacularly. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood boldly broke the Tarantino mold.
10 No Particular Genre
Ever since his breakout crime thriller Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino has stuck pretty rigidly to genres. He’s made three crime movies, two westerns (one spaghetti, one revisionist mystery), one two-part martial arts epic, one carsploitation-meets-slasher, and a World War II epic. But as a hangout movie with elements of comedy and drama that takes a look behind the curtain of the film industry, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood defies genre classification. Its visual aesthetic is taken from its ‘60s setting as opposed to previous cinematic works.
But Tarantino used Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s lack of a genre to play in a few different genre sandboxes. Rick and Cliff’s back-and-forth feels like a full-on comedy, while the Spahn Ranch sequence plays like a horror movie.
9 Self-Awareness
After eight wildly popular movies, audiences know what to expect from a Quentin Tarantino picture. Even moviegoers who hate his style are familiar with it. This familiarity influenced Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s relationship with its audience. With plenty of gratuitous shots of women’s feet and a sudden descent into grisly violence in the final scene, this is easily Tarantino’s most self-aware movie.
Tarantino’s previous work prepared audiences to expect the worst when Cliff Booth went looking for George Spahn, then those expectations were subverted. For the ultraviolent finale to make sense, audiences are expected to know what really went down on Cielo Drive in 1969, and they’re also expected to expect Tarantino to tweak history.
8 Mostly Linear Story Structure
While there are a couple of flashbacks to Cliff’s previous stunt work and the untimely end of his marriage, as well as cutaways like Rick’s fantasy about playing Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follows a mostly linear story structure.
Going back to the all-over-the-place storytelling in Reservoir Dogs, nonlinear narratives have been key to Tarantino’s style. Bonus points if the story is split into chapters.
7 Relatively Bloodless Until The Final Scene
If there’s one single defining hallmark of Tarantino’s style, it’s graphic violence. From the ear-severing torture scene of Reservoir Dogs to the gruesome Mandingo fight to the death in Django Unchained, Tarantino’s movies have always been marked by their violent content.
But aside from Cliff beating up the hippie who slashed his tire and Rick burning Nazis alive in The 14 Fists of McCluskey, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood saves all its violence for the ending. And what an ending it is. The Manson Family murderers meet a cosmically just end at the hands of Cliff and his dog Brandy.
6 Period-Specific Music
One of the most celebrated aspects of Tarantino’s style is his needle-drop soundtrack moments. He usually doesn’t let a period setting influence his music choices. There’s a Bowie track in the WWII-set Inglourious Basterds and an original Rick Ross song in the antebellum-era Django Unchained.
But in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino kept the soundtrack period-specific to really give the movie a ‘60s feel. Artists like the Rolling Stones, the Mamas & the Papas, and Paul Revere & the Raiders make this one of Tarantino’s greatest soundtracks.
5 Improvisation
Tarantino is very precious about his scripts. He writes them as if they’re novels and doesn’t settle on a final draft until he’d be happy to publish it as is and let that be the only way the story is ever told. As a result, his movies usually stick pretty rigidly to the page with little room for ad-libbing dialogue or even tweaking the phrasing of a line.
In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the tone is a lot looser and there’s room for ad-libs. Rick Dalton’s meltdown in his trailer after forgetting his lines on the Lancer set was entirely improvised by Leonardo DiCaprio. It brought a whole new kind of energy to the Tarantino-verse.
4 A Day In The Life
For the most part, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood offers viewers a day in the life of Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth, and Sharon Tate. Rick shoots the pilot episode of Lancer, Cliff gives a hippie a ride to Spahn Ranch, and Tate goes to the movies to see her own performance on the big screen.
Usually when Tarantino has explored the daily lives of his characters, it’s been because something special happened that day. Jules and Vincent have a normal day until Jules perceives divine intervention and Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face. But Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has a tangible slice-of-life quality.
3 Real-Life Figures
While directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese make movies about real-life figures all the time (i.e. Oskar Schindler, Abraham Lincoln, and Frank Abagnale, Jr. for the former and Henry Hill, Jake LaMotta, and Howard Hughes for the latter), Quentin Tarantino usually sticks to original characters.
Before bringing fictionalized versions of icons like Sharon Tate and Bruce Lee to life in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s only instances of featuring real-life people in his movies were Zoë Bell playing herself in Death Proof, the 5.6.7.8’s playing themselves in Kill Bill, and all the Nazi brass attending the premiere of Nation’s Pride in Inglourious Basterds.
2 Slow Pacing
None of Tarantino’s movies chug along at a breakneck pace, because all of them take detours for scenes that aren’t related to the plot and feature plenty of verbose dialogue, but none of his movies take as long to bask in the milieu as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Despite being Tarantino’s slowest movie, Once Upon a Time doesn’t get boring for a second, because its 1969 setting is so vivid and immersive.
1 No Discernible Plot
Since most of Tarantino’s movies draw from the long history of formulaic B-movies, they tend to follow a plot, like Jackie Brown playing cops and criminals against each other, or the Bride checking off the names on her revenge list, or Django and Dr. Schultz heading to Candyland to free Broomhilda, or Shoshanna Dreyfus and the Basterds concurrently planning to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
When Tarantino was writing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he decided to forgo a traditional plot and just let the characters drive the movie. Instead of a traditional three-act plot, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood offers a hypnotic look at Los Angeles circa 1969 anchored by strong characters, both real and fictional.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/once-upon-time-hollywood-different-quentin-tarantino-other-movies/
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