Cowboys and Indians: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Some quick notes on aspects I haven't so far seen discussed. The title's reference to Sergio Leone is obviously a bit more polysemic than its predecessors, the film being about Hollywood storytelling, about how Hollywood does 'once upon a time.' We might note here the movie's much vaunted rewriting of history and that 'Hollywood ending' and 'fairytale ending' are virtually interchangeable. A hefty tonnage of film references naturally get us there, detailed exhaustively elsewhere by now, but also referencess to the forms of moving image presentation itself: lots of curtains and proxy screens. Notably, in one of the films within the film, Di Caprio's protagonist Rick Dalton is revealed to the Nazis he's about to kill by the drawing aside of red curtains, at which point he lets fly with a flamethrower – all this a reference to Tarantino's previous Inglourious Basterds with its burning cinema screen. When Sharon Tate watches her own...