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I've been thinking about the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at lot lately. It just keeps invading my thoughts. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, it's my favorite of his movies after Pulp Fiction; and even more than that masterpiece, this one feels personal -- clearly for him, and especially for me. 

While largely plotless, at times meandering, this movie stays in your head for a long time after seeing it. It deposits itself in your soul. It makes you think in layers. The point of the movie isn't the story or action but its characters, their relationships with each other, and their place and time i.e. a culturally changing city and movie business in 1969. This movie is truly a work of art, a self-contained world that invites you to stay awhile and become absorbed in it. Like this blog, it captures "the spirit and psyche", the soul, of a particular time and place. 

When I think about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the word "pastiche" comes to mind. Pastiche is defined as an artistic work consisting of a medley of pieces taken from various sources. This movie feels just like that, a collage, a repository for memories, a collection of favorite things, a funhouse of nostalgia, a love letter to the past and future (again, much like Mr NYC). Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also Tarantino's tribute to working people, to the grunts, to the almost-was and never-weres, to the people who don't make history but live through it and deal with its consequences (much like Mr NYC).

Specifically, this movie is about a has-been C-list cowboy actor named Rick Dalton and his stuntman/gofer/driver/friend Cliff Booth. They are trying to find work in a newly swinging, hippy Hollywood that they don't recognize anymore (sort of like how I don't recognize NYC anymore while trying to keep a middling career going in it). Rick has never been a big star (he lost out to Steve McQueen for The Great Escape) and Cliff's stuntman days are over (many in the business believe he may have killed his wife; we never learn if he did or didn't, leaving a tantalizing mystery for us to ponder). Along the way we also meet Sharon Tate, their beautiful neighbor and an up-and-coming actress, married to the big-time director Roman Polanski. In real life, Sharon and several others were killed by the Manson Family in August 1969, sending shockwaves through Hollywood and the country, a dark moment in the shiny city.

This movie poses a simple question: "What if the Manson murders were thwarted? What if good prevailed instead of evil? What if guys like Rick and Cliff got a second chance? What is there was a real-life Hollywood ending? Would the future and past have been different? Would our world, our present, be a slightly better place?"

Once Upon a Time ... asks these questions but smartly doesn't answer them -- it leaves it to us, the viewers, to imagine the answers, the possibilities of the roads not taken. The brilliance of this movie is not only that it lovingly recreates the Hollywood of 1969, and tells the real-life and fictional stories of some of its players, but it reminds us of how life is a daily struggle between darkness and light, between hope and fear, between kindness and cruelty, between making this choice and that choice, between our love for the past and our hopes and fears for the future.

As the name connotes, Once Upon a Time ... makes you think that it's a fairy tale, a nostalgia trip, a mere backwards glace, but it's actually a very forward looking "pastiche" -- it makes you wonder about the future as much as gaze on the past. It's not un-coincidental that this movie takes place exactly 50 years (1969) before its release (2019) -- it forces us to confront where we came from, about what happened in those intervening 50 years, and about where we might be going in the next 50 years. That's the neat trick of this story, the many ironies within it -- a hero might actually also be a killer, an actor might actually play his role in real life, imaginary violence inspires real violence and vice versa, the real heroes are behind the scenes and never acknowledged, the heroes we see aren't really heroes at all, and the real villains are nowhere to be seen because they make others do their dirty work. It's about the illusions, the myths, the shadows and lights, that we see in the movies and that hover over American life. It's also about innocence lost, the falling away of real life into vague memories, the past gone forever, the evitable forward grind of the future.

Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Who will we become? And let's have fun along the way! That's the movie in nutshell: a series of these unanswered questions, beautifully presented, as well as a celebration of the journey of life.

And that, in many ways, is also what this blog is about for me and NYC -- a pastiche, a collage, a repository for memories, a collection of favorite things, a funhouse of nostalgia, a love letter to the past and future, a work of art, a self-contained world that invites you to visit a while and become absorbed in.

Welcome.