Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

My longtime reader may remember that I used to work at a video store called First American for a woman named Dipshit Suzanne. That’s what we called her, although, I didn’t ever know her real name. I think it was Dipshit Elizabeth.

One time, Dipshit Suzanne stuck her hand down my pants and that’s the closest I ever got to a bonus. Only “high performers” received expired boxes of Red Vines or the promotional posters for the Ernest P. Worrell movies. Suzanne put her hands down the losers’ pants, but the “high performers” got to put their hands down hers.

First American was the kind of video store that didn’t have a lot of the new blockbusters, but the shelves were stocked with old shit like Pink Panther and John Wayne flicks. That was just to make us look like a respectable joint. The real moneymaker was the back room, blocked off by a dirty blue curtain and smelling like solvents and old carpet. That’s where we kept the pornos with glossy pink boxes featuring tits bigger and redder than a screaming baby’s head. They cost five times more to rent than a VHS of Topkapi, and we rented five times more of them.

One of my coworkers at First American was this middle-aged guy named Rex. He fucking loved old lunch boxes. He talked about them, took pictures of them and read books about them. When he wasn’t talking about his collection, he talked about the people who wrote about them. He invited all of us over to his apartment once, and he had shitloads of the damn things, carefully displayed on shelves, in hutches, in glass display cubes. There was Land of the Lost, Happy Days, Star Trek, Howdy Doody and his favorite, an ultra-rare MacNeil-Lehrer Report hardside. Some of them were still in wrappers, one he showed with plastic fruit inside.

Rex’s enthusiasm for lunchboxes rubbed off on me. He was so focused and so compelling when discussing them that I was convinced there must be something to it. Maybe lunchboxes really were cool. Why else would someone want to know every detail about every one? He took me to yard sales and thrift stores. He helped me value damaged boxes and how to bully old ladies into selling me the good ones for cheap. He explained how much less they were worth without the original Thermos, even when it smelled like ten-year-old milk. I even bought a few.

Then I got bored. Even while Rex kept talking, collecting and reading, I ran out of things to find interesting about lunch boxes. His enthusiasm went from infectious to annoying. He wouldn’t talk about anything else and he wouldn’t shut the fuck up about lunch boxes. Try to change the subject. Try to suggest we play the ‘Quiet Game” while filing the Asia Carrera tapes, but he’d go right back to his favorite subject.

Rex wasn’t cool; he was a boor and a weirdo who suckered me into buying crap I had no use for and couldn’t afford. I dreaded seeing him at work, I resented that these stupid boxes took up space in my apartment. I

Lucky for me, he got fired from First American when Dipshit Suzanne found a Steve Canyon box overflowing with semen and shit tucked behind the cardboard cutout promoting Candy Bottoms’ IndiAnal Jones and the Sphincter of Doom. He swore it wasn’t his, that he would never do that to a perfectly good lunchbox. She fired him anyway, reasoning that who else would have a lunchbox around. Excellent question.

Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is another obsessive asshole showing off his lunchboxes. He wants you to see them all, to tell you about every fucking detail on every fucking one of them. He can’t stop, and for a while his enthusiasm draws you in. Maybe all this old school Hollywood shit is cool. Maybe I just didn’t appreciate it before.

After a while, though --and Once Upon a Time takes a long fucking while--I realized just as I had with Rex that, no, I understood it. I just didn’t care that much. And after I left the theater it all meant nothing.

Tarantino just fucking loves his lunchbox collection: Old Hollywood, spaghetti westerns, cheesy martial arts movies. He CGIs fictitious actors CGI’d into flicks like The Great Escape and The Wrecking Crew. He loves 60s soundtracks, women’s feet, Charlie Manson, explosive violence. He lays them all out and caresses each one, lingering on every last fucking detail making sure you get it, yelling at you to appreciate them.

I don’t care how accurate or meticulous Once Upon A Time’s trip down Hollywood’s 1950s and 1960s memory lane is. (The level of detail would make a dude who paints Dungeons and Dragons figurines blush.) I don’t care about sideburns, hippies, stunt men, washed up cowboys, classic L.A. eateries, honking-big American cars, studio backlots and homes in the canyons. I don’t care that Tarantino has the rare Charlie Manson lunchbox, with its Thermos still intact. I give a shit when those details matter, when they enhance to a story. Here, there barely is a story, and what there is is just a fancy fucking curio hutch for Tarantino to display his lunchboxes.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick, an actor on the backside of a career that peaked with westerns in the 50s. Now he does two things: one-offs as villains in 60 TV dramas and fretting about his decline. Brad Pitt plays his faithful sidekick and stunt man Cliff. As Rick’s career goes, so does Cliff’s work opportunities. But Rick’s ultimately a lonely guy, so he keeps Cliff around to chauffeur him and to do menial jobs like fix his TV antenna.

Cliff’s a loyal guy, or maybe he’s just too damn lazy to leave, so he stays aboard the sinking SS Rick. He bucks him up, they eat and drink together, and the stunt man fixes his boss’s messes. The hierarchy is always clear, though. While the star sleeps in a swank house nestled among the hills, the stunt man goes back to a shitty trailer behind a drive-in to crash and feed his dog, who is faithful to Cliff just as Cliff is to Rick.

The wispy story is supposed to be a warm telling of these two men’s Hollywood friendship, but that’s horseshit, a slim excuse for the lunchbox show. Which are campy clips of the old westerns Rick starred in, and of his Italian work. There are scenes of Rick doubting his talent while playing second fiddle to a new generation of actors. There’s Cliff beating the shit out of an arrogant Bruce Lee in a flashback. There’s Sharon Tate (Margot Robie), dirty bare feet right in the front of the camera, getting jazzed on being in a movie star.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes place in 1969, the summer of Helter Skelter. And Rick lives right next door to the actress Sharon Tate, who the Manson Family murdered in real life. As Cliff runs Rick’s errands across L.A., he shows us the bottom of shelf of Tarantino’s hutch, like the Spahn Movie Ranch. the Ranch was north of Hollywood and set up like a western town for movie shoots in the 50s. By the 60s, westerns were out of favor, and so was the Ranch. It fell into disrepair. The Manson Family holed up here while they killed and robbed.

The movie ranch, and the Manson Family, are just more lunch boxes. But they are also part of the fairy tale implied by the title of Once Upon a time in Hollywood’s. After two hours of looking at Tarantino’s collectibles, the movie moves into its abrupt and violent conclusion, which is a retelling, fairytale-style of the night the Manson Family killed Sharon Tate.

Only, in the fairy tale, the Mansons make too much noise on approach, and a drunk and angry Rick stops them in the street and tries to scare them off. Rather than kill Tate, the mad psychopaths decide instead to kill the former western star. Except, Rick’s trusty stunt man is there and has his trusty dog. They beat the shit out of, torch, stab and shoot Manson’s followers. Sharon Tate lives, only homicidal hippies die.

That’s fucking it. That’s the fairy tale. That’s the reward we get for looking at one man’s lunch boxes for 160 minutes. It’s meaningless, an imagined conclusion to an event that has been glorified and memorialized by weirdos like Tarantino for 50 years. It says nothing, it means nothing, and it gives us no new insight, and there’s no moral to the story.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood looks great. Every scene is a really nice fucking lunch box. And every one of them might be interesting on its own, or as a jewel in a better movie. But they’re all here, scene after scene, lunchbox after lunchbox, looking inertly pretty and smelling a little like rotten milk. It gets old.

Maybe you’re into lunchboxes just like Tarantino. If you are, this movie is for you. I’m not. In fact, I only have one left from the time when I thought I was. And I’m saving it for the next time I have a job and a coworker I don’t like. Two Fingers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.