Yesterday it was the day that marked 25 years since Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction (1994) premiered at Cannes Film Festival. In that occasion, the movie achieved the Palme d’Or, the highest award in the ambit of the European film festival, one of the most important ones on a global level. And also, yesterday it was the day when the filmmaker’s new work Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) has seen the world for the first time. A coincidence? I don’t think so.
The expectations for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) were great since the very day the project was announced. Released on the 50th anniversary of the Manson Family crimes, and with a cast including names like Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Luke Perry, Timothy Olyphant, Dakota Fanning, Al Pacino, Tim Roth, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Kurt Russell, Rumer Willis, Lorenza Izzo, James Remar, Sydney Sweeney, Michael Madsen, Zoë Bell, Lena Dunham, Bruce Dern, Clu Gulager, Clifton Collins Jr., Lew Temple, Rafal Zawierucha and James Marsden, the movie was getting the dimension of an epic with every new piece of news surrounding it.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is placed in 1969 Los Angeles. In it, a television actor and his stunt double embark on an odyssey to make a name for themselves in the film industry. In their quest, they end up involved with the young Sharon Tate, one of the biggest representatives of the future of Hollywood movies. Theoretically. It weaves “multiple storylines in a tribute to the final moments of Hollywood’s golden age“, as it has been stated by the filmmakers. Reportedly it is a love letter to the world of cinema, and it ends up in a massacre.
Like another of his most celebrated movies Inglourious Basterds (2009), which also premiered in Cannes around these dates already 10 years ago, Quentin Tarantino places his fiction with the background of real happening events, being the murdering of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the climax of the World War II, or the assassination of Sharon Tate and some of her friends by the hands of several sect members commanded by Charles Manson. Two key moments of the history of the last century seen through the eyes of the talented filmmaker. There are two kinds of history, the one that really happened and the one Tarantino imagines. And in both cases Brad Pitt is there.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) has collected almost unanimous positive reviews in its premiere at Cannes Film Festival yesterday, getting a rating of 9.8 at IMDB. The rest of us who couldn’t attend to the French film festival will have to wait until the summer for its opening in theaters. The 26th of July it will have its release in the USA, while the rest of the world will have to wait until August. In the meantime, here you can watch its new official trailer released yesterday:
