I have had mixed feelings about Tarantino and his films since the outset. I don't like his his world-view (sadists are cool, victims are contemptible) and think he's a one-trick-pony whose every film relies on a single mechanism (manipulating the audience into applauding cruel violence). But, that said, I can hardly deny the fact that Tarantino was a seminal voice of late 20th century cinema, and that some of the fan-boy adulation is warranted.
Regarding Tarantino as a persona, for me the elephant in the room is how sad it is that an obviously gay man is not brave enough (in 2016!) to come out, when he would be celebrated with hysterical adulation were he to do so. Instead he makes film after film that manage to be camp as a row of tents yet grotesquely homophobic at the same time.
On to the film. The old Hollywood saw says that "a movie with a message is like a gift with the price tag still on". Well, The Hateful Eight is like a vulgar nouveau riche snob swanning into a poor relative's humble home, bestowing a gift far too expensive to be reciprocated, then going on and on about exactly how much it cost.
We all got the message - America's history of slavery and its relationship to the civil war has cast long shadows that affect black/white relations in the US to this day. The symbolism could hardly be more on-the-nose. All 4 of the horses of the stagecoach for Caucasians were black, but SLJ had a black horse and a white horse working together. And there was a chess board with black and white pieces, but only white men ever sat in the two chairs. And the single Mexican character said people had tried to teach him the rules but they never stuck, nevertheless he wouldn't mind watching from the sidelines etc. etc.
Regarding the overuse of the n word: kudos to Jennifer Lawrence for turning down the role of Daisy. I can sort of visualise that meeting - she took one look at Daisy's first line, "Howdy n****r", and said "Um, what are the shoot dates? Oh no, the thing is, I might have a headache on those days, but thanks for considering me".
Anyway, the film overall was a fairly entertaining, modestly clever, sensationalist genre film, and usually I like those. If it had been an hour shorter, and shot by some scrappy teenagers on a budget of $90k (or even $350k as an upper estimate) like Raimi's The Evil Dead, I would be praising The Hateful Eight to the skies. But it wasn't made under those circumstances - it was made on a budget of $44 million by a veteran Hollywood darling director with every resource imaginable at his disposal.
What annoyed me most was the preposterous decision to shoot what was effectively a stage play on 65mm film. That's like hiring a supertechnocrane to film a pack shot. There weren't even that many wide shots - whole 15 minute sections of the film were pretty much just MCU singles and 2 shots filmed in studio.
I can only imagine that it was a deliberate industry in-joke that Tarantino decided to make a movie that was almost completely "tell, don't show". The script went:
Actor: You don't know about (character X)? Well I'll tell you about (character X).
or,
Another actor: Hey, don't I know you? You're (character Y). Didn't you (blah blah blah) at (blah)?
In fact it was nearly all verbal exposition, right the way through to the end of the film.
Regarding the acting. Well, they're all great actors, so I can only take it that they were delivering their performances as per Tarantino's direction. But the absurd macho posturing by everyone involved (including Jennifer Jason Leigh) ended up looking like a bunch of drag queens throwing shade in a vogue femme dramatics battle.
To paradoxically counter that, the most egregious homophobia in this one was SLJ's goading of Bruce Dern's character with the anecdote (amazingly, some back-story actually shown on screen, presumably to allow Tarantino to get in some "shocking" full frontal male nudity) about forcing his son to suck his dick, as if a white man having to suck a black man's cock were the *most* humiliating and shameful thing that any human being has ever had to do. Of course we understand that this is how SLJ's character hoped Bruce Dern's character would consider the scenario, but I don't fully buy it - it seemed more to me like the same projection of Tarantino's own internal homophobia that he has trotted out in pretty much every one of his films so far as a sort of public therapy session on a transparent throwaway account.
I can imagine Tarantino sitting down thinking: OK, I've got grind-house, I've got spaghetti western, I've got blaxploitation. But something's missing I know, let's throw in a chronology shift, a bit of voice-over (uncredited of course, in my new "manly" voice that I can pull off for a few seconds at a time), and see something we've already seen, but from a different angle. Ah god, there are no car boots available... oh, I know, let's have that guy Charly hide in the coal bunker so I can get a low angle shot of someone opening the door from the outside. I've got two more films to do to get to 10 which seems like an iconic number - I guess I can stretch these elements out until then - if it worked once, repeat it, that's what I always say (and do).
Overall The Hateful Eight was not bad - acceptably entertaining in fact - but it was certainly not good, and definitely not worthy of its current 8.1 stars. I'm giving it 5 out of 10 because it was just OK and nothing more or less.
Regarding Tarantino as a persona, for me the elephant in the room is how sad it is that an obviously gay man is not brave enough (in 2016!) to come out, when he would be celebrated with hysterical adulation were he to do so. Instead he makes film after film that manage to be camp as a row of tents yet grotesquely homophobic at the same time.
On to the film. The old Hollywood saw says that "a movie with a message is like a gift with the price tag still on". Well, The Hateful Eight is like a vulgar nouveau riche snob swanning into a poor relative's humble home, bestowing a gift far too expensive to be reciprocated, then going on and on about exactly how much it cost.
We all got the message - America's history of slavery and its relationship to the civil war has cast long shadows that affect black/white relations in the US to this day. The symbolism could hardly be more on-the-nose. All 4 of the horses of the stagecoach for Caucasians were black, but SLJ had a black horse and a white horse working together. And there was a chess board with black and white pieces, but only white men ever sat in the two chairs. And the single Mexican character said people had tried to teach him the rules but they never stuck, nevertheless he wouldn't mind watching from the sidelines etc. etc.
Regarding the overuse of the n word: kudos to Jennifer Lawrence for turning down the role of Daisy. I can sort of visualise that meeting - she took one look at Daisy's first line, "Howdy n****r", and said "Um, what are the shoot dates? Oh no, the thing is, I might have a headache on those days, but thanks for considering me".
Anyway, the film overall was a fairly entertaining, modestly clever, sensationalist genre film, and usually I like those. If it had been an hour shorter, and shot by some scrappy teenagers on a budget of $90k (or even $350k as an upper estimate) like Raimi's The Evil Dead, I would be praising The Hateful Eight to the skies. But it wasn't made under those circumstances - it was made on a budget of $44 million by a veteran Hollywood darling director with every resource imaginable at his disposal.
What annoyed me most was the preposterous decision to shoot what was effectively a stage play on 65mm film. That's like hiring a supertechnocrane to film a pack shot. There weren't even that many wide shots - whole 15 minute sections of the film were pretty much just MCU singles and 2 shots filmed in studio.
I can only imagine that it was a deliberate industry in-joke that Tarantino decided to make a movie that was almost completely "tell, don't show". The script went:
Actor: You don't know about (character X)? Well I'll tell you about (character X).
or,
Another actor: Hey, don't I know you? You're (character Y). Didn't you (blah blah blah) at (blah)?
In fact it was nearly all verbal exposition, right the way through to the end of the film.
Regarding the acting. Well, they're all great actors, so I can only take it that they were delivering their performances as per Tarantino's direction. But the absurd macho posturing by everyone involved (including Jennifer Jason Leigh) ended up looking like a bunch of drag queens throwing shade in a vogue femme dramatics battle.
To paradoxically counter that, the most egregious homophobia in this one was SLJ's goading of Bruce Dern's character with the anecdote (amazingly, some back-story actually shown on screen, presumably to allow Tarantino to get in some "shocking" full frontal male nudity) about forcing his son to suck his dick, as if a white man having to suck a black man's cock were the *most* humiliating and shameful thing that any human being has ever had to do. Of course we understand that this is how SLJ's character hoped Bruce Dern's character would consider the scenario, but I don't fully buy it - it seemed more to me like the same projection of Tarantino's own internal homophobia that he has trotted out in pretty much every one of his films so far as a sort of public therapy session on a transparent throwaway account.
I can imagine Tarantino sitting down thinking: OK, I've got grind-house, I've got spaghetti western, I've got blaxploitation. But something's missing I know, let's throw in a chronology shift, a bit of voice-over (uncredited of course, in my new "manly" voice that I can pull off for a few seconds at a time), and see something we've already seen, but from a different angle. Ah god, there are no car boots available... oh, I know, let's have that guy Charly hide in the coal bunker so I can get a low angle shot of someone opening the door from the outside. I've got two more films to do to get to 10 which seems like an iconic number - I guess I can stretch these elements out until then - if it worked once, repeat it, that's what I always say (and do).
Overall The Hateful Eight was not bad - acceptably entertaining in fact - but it was certainly not good, and definitely not worthy of its current 8.1 stars. I'm giving it 5 out of 10 because it was just OK and nothing more or less.