Some SPOILERS maybe, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.
The whole point of Once Upon is that it shows you characters who are in orbit around Manson and his followers (the Family), and you know that these same hippies are going to murder 7 people at Roman Polanski's house, and then 2 more the next day (LaBiancas). It makes you spend pointless time with Sharon Tate because in real life she was butchered at 8 or 9 months pregnant. So Tartantino toys with the viewer, daring you to like the hippie girls (Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell, is one of the main ones), and to like Tate. But then his big "subversive" act is to obviously not have the real events play out, like he did in Inglorious Basterds. So it's the Manson Family murders but the murders don't happen.
I'm from Los Angeles. I live here now. I work in the film biz. I hate Tarantino's movies - with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction being the two exceptions. He is brilliant at directing but he doesn't know his A material from his B material these days. He can get great performances out of his actors, he really knows how to set up shots and make his films look amazing, but his scripts are not as interesting as he thinks they are. This is really obvious when you see Kill Bill parts 1 - 437, he does homages to other types of films and classic works, his use of camera as storytelling is masterful, and he's great at suspense and action, but he's kind of tedious. It's like sitting in a room with someone who is all coked up and listening to them talk about their favorite movies for 2 and a half hours.
I'm also really put off by his use of graphic violence in his most recent few films. This one, OUATIH, saves the violence for the last 10 minutes, so it's mostly an easy going, breezy, sunny afternoon of a film. The rapport between DiCaprio and Pitt is supposedly a big sell, but I don't really like DiCaprio, and against Pitt he is shown to be far less interesting to watch. Pitt swans around being cool. DiCaprio does a terrible accent the whole time, and there are countless overly long scenes that have no real importance or relevance. There is one scene on a movie set where DiCaprio is filming with some 8 year old girl. You're supposed to get it that DiCaprio is jaded and the little girl is worldly and tells him some things he needs to hear, but that scene goes on for like 10 minutes, and nothing is learned or gleaned after the first 2 minutes, so it's 8 minutes of filler (like this entire post, ha beat you to it!
) :. There's also a long goofy scene of this stuntman Pitt kicking Bruce Lee's ass on a movie set. That one just irked me because not only is it not believable in the slightest but also because it's insulting to Lee and totally unlike how he was as a person.
The violence: to put it in perspective, violence per se in movies does not bother me. It can be cartoonish, or realistic and brutal, or an afterthought. The way Tarantino does it is gratuitous. Think of it like you are seeing a character in a movie vomit. Okay, everyone gets it, we all know what vomit is, and you don't really need to see stunt vomit to get it. QT would show the vomit coming out of the actor's mouth, then another actor would scoop it up and use it as shampoo, and then a third actor would wiggle her toes in it, while a fourth actor then sucked those toes. He basically does that but with blood and gore.
In Hateful Eight, he has one character get "surprise" killed, but then that character's head is blown all over his sister. It's not enough that at the moment this prisoner has been waiting for to see her brother, he is suddenly killed. Not enough for QT, he then has the brother's blood spray on the sister, still not enough, he has to show you brains and blood go into the sister's mouth. Isn't that hilarious? It's overkill. In OUATIH, the entire last 10 minutes is the alternate universe Manson murders, and if you want to hear one character scream for a solid 10 minutes, this is the movie for you.