I stopped laughing, crying, eating, sleeping…I just stopped. I was like a ghost, haunting my own life, going through the motions, but living even less than I had before. I became hyper-obsessed with the past—back when I was still happy and unperturbed by these thoughts and still had time left; the past also became a concept I loathed because it housed all of the mistakes that led me here, to this misery in which the second half of your 30s can somehow feel like The End, like it’s already too late to start over. I no longer felt like the central character in my life story, like the Hero; instead, I felt like the Heavy who’d destroyed any chance of true usefulness in my life.
- Travis Woods, Still Here: A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019)
Being a Quentin Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, which I first saw a year ago on the day of its UK release, was divisive. It was certainly my film of 2019 and in my view Tarantino's best film this century. Woods' extremely personal long read on the film mirrors a lot of my own thoughts on it and certainly explains why, as with him, it mattered so much to me.