A problem noted

To say I am no fan of Tarantino is an understatement - and I suspect his legacy is already starting to degrade - so I won't be seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.   But I will still read reviews of it, especially if I can find support for my disdain for him and his oeuvre.  Hence, I was interested to read this in the Slate review:

A revelation about Pitt’s character’s past midway through the movie might change how you respond to the culminating orgy of violence, which, as is often the case in Tarantino films, seems at once like a critique of the vision of masculinity that’s imposed on us by TV and the movies and like a celebration of it. (In fact, a character in the movie—to reveal which one would be to say too much—at one point advances a theory about our culture’s dependence on mediatized mayhem.)

Well, if you ask me, such ambiguity is a problem, not a feature.  You don't critique something by celebrating it.   Back to the rest of the review, confirming that it's not just me that wonders how shallow his motivations seem to be:

In choosing to set a movie on Cielo Drive in the summer of 1969, Tarantino took on a historical event that not only changed how Americans thought about fame, violence, and the counterculture but also ended five innocent lives (seven if you count Tate’s next-door neighbors the LaBiancas, who died in a separate Manson-incited incident the following night). It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements—the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees—were just so cool.