So many folks I know and/or read have cast strong votes on this one that I almost wish I could vote Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down and be done with it. With me, it's more like Thumb Sideways. Glad I saw it. Liked a lot of it. Zero urge to see it again and even less to own the rumored DVD/Blu-ray with an hour (?) of deleted footage.
My pal Ken Levine gave it a pretty good review but said something like Tarantino should have cut 45 minutes out of it. This didn't surprise me coming from Ken. You could show Ken a 30-second commercial you'd produced and he'd say you should have cut 45 minutes out of it…but in this case, I think he's right. And a bit more forgiving of the length than I was.
A lot of my friends who grew up where I grew up absolutely loved the re-creation of Hollywood in 1969…and yeah, I liked the KHJ soundtrack, the reappearances of buildings in Westwood Village and on Hollywood Boulevard that are no longer there, bus signs for George Putnam and so on. I couldn't help but grin at the video clip — I didn't think there were any — of Larry "Seymour" Vincent, a local horror movie host back then who I knew. After so many articles about how Tarantino had those sections of town painstakingly redressed, I was expecting to see more of that than there was.
Someone wrote that the film captured the way people talked and acted in Hollywood back then. Well, not around me, they didn't. (And hey, what's the deal with all the shots of feet? And of POV shots of people driving around with you, the viewer, in the back seat?)
I dunno. I liked so many things about this film, many of them spinning around Brad Pitt's performance, that I can't be negative. I guess I didn't care a lot about the sad predicament of poor, deprived Rick Dalton who doesn't have a TV series at the moment and tragically hasn't quite made the leap to being Steve McQueen.
And I just started and deleted a paragraph about other things I didn't care about but a lot of them would have required a Spoiler Alert here. Me, I think I enjoyed this film more than I might have if I'd read more reviews and seen more clips. I liked all the times I was surprised that the movie seemed to be going one way and then pulled a one-eighty and went in another. And that's about all I want to tell you about it.
So here's my one-paragraph review: Didn't love it. Didn't hate it. Glad I saw it. Don't get all the feet. Could have done with less violence. Liked seeing it at the New Bev with an enthusiastic audience. Might not have liked it as much at home and if I'd read or seen more previews. Brad Pitt deserves an Oscar and not a supporting one. A little too long. I don't blame Bruce Lee's family for being pissed at his portrayal but as I have no particular feelings for Bruce Lee, that didn't bother me. And isn't it nice that a filmmaker with a strong style and approach made a movie that so many people are talking about?