It must be hard being a film reviewer. In fact, it must be hard to be a reviewer of anything. We live in an era where if something isn’t awesome, it must mean it is crap.

I went to an Indian restaurant last week and someone asked me if it was any good. I said, “yeah it was okay”. They replied, “So it was shit then?”

Eh? I said it was okay?

We live in a world where okay is shit and something is only worth watching or eating if it is awesome.

This creates a problem for me, as I don’t really know what awesome is? Is it a curry that tastes quite nice or a bottle of wine above £10.00? Fuck knows?

Anyway, I went to the cinema last night to see ‘One a Upon a Time in Hollywood’ a film produced by Quentin Tarantino, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt.

Before I left home, I had two concerns. One being that I am at an age where I doze off a lot, with the second being that the film lasts two hours and forty-five minutes. How would I get through that amount of time in those leather retracting seats?

So, after a half an hour doze and a cool shower, off we went, picking up some snacks and a small bottle of rum on the way, thus avoiding the £3.70 fruit pastilles section in VUE.

Because I am your friend, if you are going to watch this film, I am not going to give you blatant clues that ruin it. What I will say, is this. Before you go, do some research on Charles Manson, Roman Polanski and perhaps, more loosely, the likes of Natalie Wood and Burt Reynolds.

This will help you follow the track of the film and understand some of the connections. There are also some links to Bruce Lee (which are hilarious) and Steve McQueen and in all likelihood, many more I didn’t notice or understand.

If you like Tarantino films, it is unlikely you will be disappointed. It focuses on the lives of Rick Dalton (Di Caprio) a fading western actor, and his stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) living life in Hollywood at the height of the psychedelia era in the late sixties.

There is plenty of gratuitous violence of the type that for some reason makes me cackle uncontrollably and as usual with Tarantino, a great soundtrack. There are also plenty of sub plots that you can’t really grasp or work out how relevant they might eventually be.

As you would expect, the climax gets you calculating the reason why it ended in such a manner. This is why I said that research into the above characters would be worth it. But what a fantastic climax it is.

What is classic Tarantino is the fact that much of the film is open to interpretation, allowing the viewer to form their own opinion of what happened to who, particularly the wife of Cliff Booth, a plot that just got left out there.

So, after two hours and forty minutes of not dozing off once, what did I think of ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Well, it gave me plenty of laughs, good music, intriguing links to real life events from a hedonistic era and, of course, some classic violence.

It was Awesome!!