Sunday, December 27, 2015

The Hateful Eight: Simply Great

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

After getting shutout of a sold-out performance Saturday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I drove back down to the AFI-Silver on Sunday to see the eighth film of Quentin Tarantino's illustrious career, aptly titled The Hateful Eight. Tarantino resurrected the long-abandoned Panasonic Ultra 70 film format, the same ultra-widescreen process used on the 1959 classic Ben-Hur (indeed, the film was shot with the same lens used to shoot the chariot race), and for one week only has released it in 98 theaters as an old-school roadshow engagement, complete with overture, intermission and commemorative program.

Just the way they used to make 'em in my childhood.


The story is essentially a three-hour retelling of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None in a Wild West setting. A motley crew of bounty hunters, war veterans, cow punchers, an Englishman with a fascination for the niceties of public executions and a gallows-bound Jennifer Jason Leigh wind up riding out a blizzard in a strangely-deserted general store deep in the trackless nowhere of a very empty Wyoming. They sit by the fire, drink coffee and talk, talk, talk.

And then when the talking is through, the blood and the bullets start flying.

Stripped of the filigree, this is the plot of every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made.

If you know and love Tarantino the way we do, you know you're in for a banquet of ornate oratory, digressions and shaggy dog stories that for someone eager to get to the point I suppose must be maddening. But I'll tell you right out, I like listening to a man who likes to talk and The Hateful Eight stars some of the great talkers of screen history.


Kurt Russell is the bounty hunter determined to see Jennifer Jason Leigh swing, Samuel L. Jackson is another bounty hunter lugging three dead bodies and a letter from Abraham Lincoln through waist-deep snow, Walton Goggins as a would-be sheriff finally gets a big screen role worthy of his silver-tongued talents, Tim Roth as the hangman channels Eric Blore in Top Hat, Bruce Dern is a broken-down Civil War general, and Michael Madsen is a passing cowboy who says he's just headed home to visit his dear old ma.

For such an out-of-the-way place, this deserted cabin starts to seem a bit like Grand Central Terminal. With the emphasis on "terminal."

This is Tarantino, and you know at some point you're going to get a bloodbath worthy of a 1970s horror movie, violence so over-the-top it has an innocence about it, like something a demented preschooler might doodle in his hymn book during a long, boring church sermon. As I put it in an e-mail to my good pal Mister Muleboy, "it's a 3-hour gabfest ... directed by a drunk Sam Peckinpah right after he'd seen John Carpenter's The Thing."


High praise, indeed.

What rating do I give it? Why, an 8 of course.

(8 stars out of 10).

11 comments:

Katie said...

And what happened to the cat?

Nigel M said...

My immediate thought with this one was Reservoir Dogs meets The Big Silence. Anyhow, great film. Love Tarantino.

Mythical Monkey said...

My immediate thought with this one was Reservoir Dogs meets The Big Silence. Anyhow, great film. Love Tarantino.

Spot-on analogy. Really enjoyed the film and the Roadshow Engagement treatment was a blast.

Bradley Copper said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mister muleboy said...

Why would I watch The Hateful Eight online free when I'd do so knowing it was piracy, and that I was helping in some small way to put entertainers (performers, crew, writers, editors) out of work? Why, I'd be hurting their children. It would be hateful.

I didn't like the flick as much as the Mythical Monkey.

I liked Samuel L. Jackson's performance as much as any that he's given. He's brilliant.

I think that Kurt Russell enjoyed gently sending up his prior performances as the smart, good guy out west. But I enjoyed him a bit more in Bone Tomahawk, another western currently in theaters and on demand.

By the way, Vader is Luke Skywalker's FATHER !

Mythical Monkey said...

Why would I watch The Hateful Eight online free when I'd do so knowing it was piracy

I meant to delete that at the time but it would have required me to log-in over New Years and now that we've discussed it in the comments ... ah, to hell with it, I deleted it.

For anyone wonder what we're yakking about it, there was a link (which I did not follow, not knowing what virus-y link I might find) purporting to be a pirated copy of The Hateful Eight. Watch it in the AFI-Silver in glorious 70mm or watch a jittery, pixilated copy the size of a postage stamp on my computer. Tough choice.

Mythical Monkey said...

I find the "captcha" thing at the bottom of the comment page to be both annoying and necessary. Necessary because blog spam is a problem even in the best of times. Annoying because it requires me to lie and pretend I'm not some sort of bug-infested cyborg masquerading as a human being.

This is me at a cocktail party:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-o-4txOiVE

Look a bit like that, too ...

Mythical Monkey said...

I didn't like the flick as much as the Mythical Monkey.

Nobody did, except possibly Quentin Tarantino himself.

Mythical Monkey said...

I liked Samuel L. Jackson's performance as much as any that he's given. He's brilliant.

Absolutely.

Mythical Monkey said...

I think that Kurt Russell enjoyed gently sending up his prior performances as the smart, good guy out west. But I enjoyed him a bit more in Bone Tomahawk, another western currently in theaters and on demand.

Not only have I not see Bone Tomahawk, I haven't even heard of it. But I really like Kurt Russell in The Hateful Eight.

Also very fond of Walton Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Mythical Monkey said...

By the way, Vader is Luke Skywalker's FATHER !

Success has many fathers, failure two or three. Something like that.

Liked the new Star Wars movie (The Force Awakens) very much.

Liked Trainwreck, which we saw on demand, very much.

Liked Sherlock: The Abominable Bride very much.

Liked the reruns of Guy Williams as Zorro last night very much, better actually than Douglas Fairbanks as the original Zorro (we watched The Mark of Zorro over Christmas). Fairbanks was just beginning to experiment with movement and narrative, and while The Mark of Zorro was groundbreaking and hugely influential (think Batman), looking back at it from the vantage point of the 21st century, you can see he wasn't quite there yet.

His masterpiece was The Thief of Bagdad with The Black Pirate runner-up.

If I were to bother with a New Years resolution other than the obvious one (live to next New Years), I would resolve to write proper essays about The Mark of Zorro, The Thief of Bagdad and The Black Pirate.

Don't hold your breath.