Discussing Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) with a friend after seeing it the other evening, I was reminded that Tarantino’s genre-bending WWII-era masterpiece is now 10 years old this month. Some critics took umbrage at QT’s depiction of a commando unit of Jewish American soldiers as Allied equivalent Otto Skorzenies, but they’re missing the point: Tarantino is more likely including such things for the purpose of annoying his detractors rather than drawing any historical comparisons. He does it because he can.
Regardless of any ethical considerations when it comes to shooting history (and re imagining it), the movie is so witty and sometimes outright hilarious. It’s pure entertainment, and of all the post-Pulp Fiction (1994) Tarantino films, his least indulgent, with no unnecessary scenes stretching out the running time. We can also christen this ‘The Christoph Waltz show’. His Hans Landa is a behemoth, a cunning, sociopathic polyglot five steps ahead of everyone else. He even makes the eating of strudel captivating.
N.B. There is an outrageous ‘Antonio Margheriti’ connection between Basterds and Hollywood, Donnie Donowitz’s alias he adopts for Landa the same moniker as the real-life Spaghetti Western director whom DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton stars for in Hollywood.
