14 January 2016
HATERS GONNA HATE
It's Brutally Nihilistic Westerns Day at Antagony & Ecstasy!
The Hateful Eight, sure enough, is about hate. I can't recall the last movie so explicitly about how all of its characters, and by extension the society that they are a part of, are irredeemably evil, and I certainly can't recall the last one that has such a jolly mood about it. This movie, if I were to start at end, takes as its theme the idea that the United States of America has racism, misogyny, and violence (both racist/misogynist violence and otherwise) so inherently baked into its soul that there's no salvaging it, and the best thing is to burn it all to the ground and hope that something better takes its place. I happen to think that's a perfectly reasonable attitude, given most of the country's history and especially its very recent history, but that is the territory we're living in: utter, unyielding nihilism. And if you're going to be that utterly nihilistic, might as well laugh about it, right?
At least, Quentin Tarantino certainly thinks so. Calling The Hateful Eight a "comedy" is pushing it, but the film wrings a fair share of laughs out of its bleak material: both from the flippant delivery of Tarantino's customarily stylised dialogue by a characteristically excellent ensemble cast, as well as from sheer visceral shock - this is a film that thrives on horrible acts of violence perpetrated by awful people that comes along so casually and out of no particular rhythm that it's perfectly absurd. I will not do the whole "reviewing the reviewers" thing, which is gross and lazy, but I do think that a lot of nervous laughter at the gonzo weirdness on display is getting mistakenly labeled as "misogynists laughing at a woman being beaten up" by people who for whatever reason didn't choose to meet the film on its own terms.
Anyway, the script for the film, which followed a bizarre path of leaks and staged readings and possible theatrical adaptations before winding up as a movie, is the most classical piece of drama Tarantino has turned out since Reservoir Dogs. Or ever, depending on how strictly you want to use the word "classical" the film subscribes (with one exception) to Aristotelian unity of time, and (with one arguable exception) to unity of place, which is something you don't really see in any movies, let alone those by a filmmaker whose literal most well-known trick is that he likes to shuffle up chronology to make films that evolve along an experiential rather than a narrative arc. The Hateful Eight is none of that - it's downright stately in its steady march, I think to its benefit. Though it's at this point that I need to make it very clear that I watched the film in its super-special 70mm roadshow edition, which is exciting for lots of reasons (the eye-searing clarity of a pristine 70mm film print being not least of those reasons), but the best thing it does for the film is insert an intermission. And I cannot speak to anything about how the film works if that intermission is taken away - almost everything I like best about the film (and I like it a lot: it's not as unusual, complex, or well-made as Inglourious Basterds, but it grabbed my attention more resoundingly; and it's across-the-board better than Django Unchained) springs out of the way the intermission suddenly and definitively re-writes the film's tone, themes, and even its genre.
The intermission is quite a ways from where we should have started, though. The Hateful Eight, more than it is anything, is a Very Long Film, and its first half is Very Slow-Moving, To Boot. More than half of the film (187 minutes in the roadshow version, which includes an overture and other assorted music, along with a few extensions to scenes; I do not actually know what is specifically different in the 167-minute intermission-free cut) is a long, steady crawl: first through a miserable snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains of the late 1800s, with several lost souls gathering in the same stagecoach. The driver, who is not one of the eight of the title and is for a very long time the only non-hateful person we see, is O.B. (James Parks); the passengers are John "Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter who paid for the ride to have a private trip with his latest quarry, the feral Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). As the weather worsens, Ruth reluctantly opens his doors for Maj. Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a fellow bounty hunter with a stack of frozen corpses he's trying to transport, and later Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who at least claims to be the new sheriff of the town everybody is trying to get to; but really, all we learn about him for sure is that his daddy was a Confederate hero, who led Mannix's Maurader's - the name recall's Merrill's Marauders of WWII and movie buff Tarantino surely knows the Samuel Fuller film about that unit, but the historical reference is undoubtedly to Quantrill's Raiders, a bloody paramilitary group during the Civil War. Which is the first point at which the film nods to America's limitless history of violence and by no means the last.
Between Domergue's self-indulgent venom-spitting and Mannix's ideologically-motivated racism, things are already awful by the time the stage arrives at its destination for the rest of the movie, an inn and way station called Minnie's Haberdashery. Here, we meet the rest of our title characters: Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a plummy Englishman who turns out to be a traveling hangman, Bob (Demian Bichir), an ebullient Mexican who has been left in charge while Minnie is away, the creepily taciturn cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and Gen. Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), a Confederate legend in his own right, which makes him both Mannix's immediate idol and Warren's immediate nemesis. And once the pieces are all in place-
-we grind to a virtual standstill. It's the boldest and probably the least-successful of Tarantino's aesthetic gestures that he lets The Hateful Eight simmer so long. The film's first half suffers to a lesser degree to the same unsolvable problem that hampered Django Unchained: editor Sally Menke is dead, and so Tarantino has lost the irreplaceable colleague who kept all of his films crackling with tension during even their slowest narrative passages. Fred Raskin has definitely tightened his game since Django but there are scenes that go on too long (especially inside the stagecoach), and the pacing is often a little bit too stretchy, even given the explicit goal of a steady thrum of slow-boil tension. Certainly, the cutaways between the inside of Minnie's and the fussing about outside are handled with no grace.
For the first half, The Hateful Eight functions primarily as a series of psychological games between individuals who briefly rise to prominence out of the overall ensemble. It's here that the film lingers over the toxicity of its characters and the worldviews they represent, stripping away the illusion of heroism and decency that we want and expect from our protagonists. It's a process that starts from the first time Ruth belts Domergue, a swift and terrifying moment that gets a frightfully loud sound effect; it culminates in the potentially false story that ends the first act, in which our last potential hero reveals himself as either a rapist or a liar who just wants to make an old man suffer. And then, in the form with an intermission, the film tosses us out to regroup and process, and by the time we return, it's suddenly a full-throated Tarantino film, with zippy narration provided by the director himself (his all-time best use of his limited acting skills in one of his movies), manic amounts of blood, and a collision of genre - suddenly, this menacing chamber drama explodes into a contrived murder mystery. I can't name anything quite like it, but it's phenomenally interesting: having let us marinate in moral ugliness for so long, the film starts flinging death and cruelty at us at a clip that would almost be farcical if it weren't so grotesque. And before we can get accustomed to that, it drops into an extended flashback that changes things around entirely for a second time: it's the first time in the movie we see a whole lot of actively nice, likable people, and we know enough by that point to be aware that every single one of them is going to die horribly. It's the film's best sequence, by far: confident thriller filmmaking on par with anything in Inglourious Basterds, with Tarantino stretching the joyful, pleasant banter as far as it can go, and Raskin almost matching the ruthless precision of Menke's cutting in Basterds's farmhouse and basement sequences.
For myself, these twists in energy keep The Hateful Eight always exciting and unpredictable even though there's nothing actually unpredictable about it, and very little that's legitimate exciting; they also have the more pertinent effect of keeping the film's violence and nihilism always right near the forefront, in new and fresh forms so we can never get inured to it. Westerns, by their nature, have always served as referendums on the state of the American national character, and The Hateful Eight finds us deeply lacking as a people. It flags this explicitly: the plot of the first half is all about how the stench of slavery and the Civil War hovers over every interaction between the solitary black character and the variously contemptuous and fearful white characters; the climax is about how the only thing that unites American men of various backgrounds is perpetrating violence against women, and moreover the film's most appalling, disturbingly-framed act of violence as well. A major recurring motif is a letter from President Abraham Lincoln, whose name is invoked as a spectre of Americana at its noblest; this letter is revealed well before the halfway point to be a lie, and the film's final beats use this letter to demonstrate how even with nothing but evidence to the contrary, peole like to believe in the lie of American idealism.
So you know, cheery stuff all around. But it gets the job done. There's a literary quality to its use of symbols and iconography (there's not a single human being anywhere prior to the flashback who counts as a "real person" - they're all different kinds of metaphors) that sets it apart from everything else Tarantino has written, and not always to good effect; he's naturally possessed of a certain bullishness that's an uncomfortable fit with the delicacy otherwise demanded by this material.
Even if the meat of the film is simply too unpleasant to deal with, and that's a legitimate response to it, I think, the film is a great piece of craftsmanship. The world of Minnie's Haberdashery is appointed within an inch of its life by the production design and art direction team, and shot with vivid clarity by Robert Richardson with vastly wide-screen Ultra Panavision lenses on 70mm cameras. Neither Tarantino nor Richardson is constantly clear on how to fill up the frame, but I find the widespread grousing about using this indulgent format primarily on a single interior to be bafflingly misplaced: the clarity and depth provided by the technology (along with Richardson's snazzy use of split diopters to shift the focus within the frame in impossible ways) makes Minnie's Haberdashery stretch out with all the cinematic potential of the snowy landscape that opens the film, with its reduction of the stagecoach to a little blip of movement against an apocalypse of frozen wilderness, with a mournful wooden crucifix looming over. It is, I think it's fair to say, the most striking opening image of 2015, all the more because of Ennio Morricone's savage, droning music underneath - his first Western in decades, and his best score for an English-language production The Mission.
The film is, all in all, opulent and overwhelming; and I think it would remain so even in a smaller scale than I saw it. The yawning void of the room's far walls and the moaning of the music would see to that. Everything about it, from the violent content to the busy deep focus that demands our eyes keep moving around the frame, seems designed to wear us down; it is not, unlike every other Tarantino movie, a fun film, even if it is, in a very dark and bitter way, funny. It is a reckoning. The director's instincts towards showboating work against it building to the fully operatic crescendo it palpably seeks, as does the all-over-the-place acting: Jackson is astoundingly good, cranked down from his usual persona several notches to a threatening stare and rumbling voice, and Leigh's electric performance of a woman who returns male violence with even more savage violence of her own is the best and nerviest works she's done since her career high-water mark, Georgia. But then there are things like Roth's misjudged comedy (justified in the script, but still distracting), or Madsen's perplexingly toneless drifter. Still, even its obvious weaknesses have the courage of their convictions, and the strengths are terrific. For good and bad, this is one of the most distinctive films of the year.
8/10
The Hateful Eight, sure enough, is about hate. I can't recall the last movie so explicitly about how all of its characters, and by extension the society that they are a part of, are irredeemably evil, and I certainly can't recall the last one that has such a jolly mood about it. This movie, if I were to start at end, takes as its theme the idea that the United States of America has racism, misogyny, and violence (both racist/misogynist violence and otherwise) so inherently baked into its soul that there's no salvaging it, and the best thing is to burn it all to the ground and hope that something better takes its place. I happen to think that's a perfectly reasonable attitude, given most of the country's history and especially its very recent history, but that is the territory we're living in: utter, unyielding nihilism. And if you're going to be that utterly nihilistic, might as well laugh about it, right?
At least, Quentin Tarantino certainly thinks so. Calling The Hateful Eight a "comedy" is pushing it, but the film wrings a fair share of laughs out of its bleak material: both from the flippant delivery of Tarantino's customarily stylised dialogue by a characteristically excellent ensemble cast, as well as from sheer visceral shock - this is a film that thrives on horrible acts of violence perpetrated by awful people that comes along so casually and out of no particular rhythm that it's perfectly absurd. I will not do the whole "reviewing the reviewers" thing, which is gross and lazy, but I do think that a lot of nervous laughter at the gonzo weirdness on display is getting mistakenly labeled as "misogynists laughing at a woman being beaten up" by people who for whatever reason didn't choose to meet the film on its own terms.
Anyway, the script for the film, which followed a bizarre path of leaks and staged readings and possible theatrical adaptations before winding up as a movie, is the most classical piece of drama Tarantino has turned out since Reservoir Dogs. Or ever, depending on how strictly you want to use the word "classical" the film subscribes (with one exception) to Aristotelian unity of time, and (with one arguable exception) to unity of place, which is something you don't really see in any movies, let alone those by a filmmaker whose literal most well-known trick is that he likes to shuffle up chronology to make films that evolve along an experiential rather than a narrative arc. The Hateful Eight is none of that - it's downright stately in its steady march, I think to its benefit. Though it's at this point that I need to make it very clear that I watched the film in its super-special 70mm roadshow edition, which is exciting for lots of reasons (the eye-searing clarity of a pristine 70mm film print being not least of those reasons), but the best thing it does for the film is insert an intermission. And I cannot speak to anything about how the film works if that intermission is taken away - almost everything I like best about the film (and I like it a lot: it's not as unusual, complex, or well-made as Inglourious Basterds, but it grabbed my attention more resoundingly; and it's across-the-board better than Django Unchained) springs out of the way the intermission suddenly and definitively re-writes the film's tone, themes, and even its genre.
The intermission is quite a ways from where we should have started, though. The Hateful Eight, more than it is anything, is a Very Long Film, and its first half is Very Slow-Moving, To Boot. More than half of the film (187 minutes in the roadshow version, which includes an overture and other assorted music, along with a few extensions to scenes; I do not actually know what is specifically different in the 167-minute intermission-free cut) is a long, steady crawl: first through a miserable snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains of the late 1800s, with several lost souls gathering in the same stagecoach. The driver, who is not one of the eight of the title and is for a very long time the only non-hateful person we see, is O.B. (James Parks); the passengers are John "Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter who paid for the ride to have a private trip with his latest quarry, the feral Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). As the weather worsens, Ruth reluctantly opens his doors for Maj. Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a fellow bounty hunter with a stack of frozen corpses he's trying to transport, and later Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who at least claims to be the new sheriff of the town everybody is trying to get to; but really, all we learn about him for sure is that his daddy was a Confederate hero, who led Mannix's Maurader's - the name recall's Merrill's Marauders of WWII and movie buff Tarantino surely knows the Samuel Fuller film about that unit, but the historical reference is undoubtedly to Quantrill's Raiders, a bloody paramilitary group during the Civil War. Which is the first point at which the film nods to America's limitless history of violence and by no means the last.
Between Domergue's self-indulgent venom-spitting and Mannix's ideologically-motivated racism, things are already awful by the time the stage arrives at its destination for the rest of the movie, an inn and way station called Minnie's Haberdashery. Here, we meet the rest of our title characters: Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a plummy Englishman who turns out to be a traveling hangman, Bob (Demian Bichir), an ebullient Mexican who has been left in charge while Minnie is away, the creepily taciturn cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), and Gen. Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern), a Confederate legend in his own right, which makes him both Mannix's immediate idol and Warren's immediate nemesis. And once the pieces are all in place-
-we grind to a virtual standstill. It's the boldest and probably the least-successful of Tarantino's aesthetic gestures that he lets The Hateful Eight simmer so long. The film's first half suffers to a lesser degree to the same unsolvable problem that hampered Django Unchained: editor Sally Menke is dead, and so Tarantino has lost the irreplaceable colleague who kept all of his films crackling with tension during even their slowest narrative passages. Fred Raskin has definitely tightened his game since Django but there are scenes that go on too long (especially inside the stagecoach), and the pacing is often a little bit too stretchy, even given the explicit goal of a steady thrum of slow-boil tension. Certainly, the cutaways between the inside of Minnie's and the fussing about outside are handled with no grace.
For the first half, The Hateful Eight functions primarily as a series of psychological games between individuals who briefly rise to prominence out of the overall ensemble. It's here that the film lingers over the toxicity of its characters and the worldviews they represent, stripping away the illusion of heroism and decency that we want and expect from our protagonists. It's a process that starts from the first time Ruth belts Domergue, a swift and terrifying moment that gets a frightfully loud sound effect; it culminates in the potentially false story that ends the first act, in which our last potential hero reveals himself as either a rapist or a liar who just wants to make an old man suffer. And then, in the form with an intermission, the film tosses us out to regroup and process, and by the time we return, it's suddenly a full-throated Tarantino film, with zippy narration provided by the director himself (his all-time best use of his limited acting skills in one of his movies), manic amounts of blood, and a collision of genre - suddenly, this menacing chamber drama explodes into a contrived murder mystery. I can't name anything quite like it, but it's phenomenally interesting: having let us marinate in moral ugliness for so long, the film starts flinging death and cruelty at us at a clip that would almost be farcical if it weren't so grotesque. And before we can get accustomed to that, it drops into an extended flashback that changes things around entirely for a second time: it's the first time in the movie we see a whole lot of actively nice, likable people, and we know enough by that point to be aware that every single one of them is going to die horribly. It's the film's best sequence, by far: confident thriller filmmaking on par with anything in Inglourious Basterds, with Tarantino stretching the joyful, pleasant banter as far as it can go, and Raskin almost matching the ruthless precision of Menke's cutting in Basterds's farmhouse and basement sequences.
For myself, these twists in energy keep The Hateful Eight always exciting and unpredictable even though there's nothing actually unpredictable about it, and very little that's legitimate exciting; they also have the more pertinent effect of keeping the film's violence and nihilism always right near the forefront, in new and fresh forms so we can never get inured to it. Westerns, by their nature, have always served as referendums on the state of the American national character, and The Hateful Eight finds us deeply lacking as a people. It flags this explicitly: the plot of the first half is all about how the stench of slavery and the Civil War hovers over every interaction between the solitary black character and the variously contemptuous and fearful white characters; the climax is about how the only thing that unites American men of various backgrounds is perpetrating violence against women, and moreover the film's most appalling, disturbingly-framed act of violence as well. A major recurring motif is a letter from President Abraham Lincoln, whose name is invoked as a spectre of Americana at its noblest; this letter is revealed well before the halfway point to be a lie, and the film's final beats use this letter to demonstrate how even with nothing but evidence to the contrary, peole like to believe in the lie of American idealism.
So you know, cheery stuff all around. But it gets the job done. There's a literary quality to its use of symbols and iconography (there's not a single human being anywhere prior to the flashback who counts as a "real person" - they're all different kinds of metaphors) that sets it apart from everything else Tarantino has written, and not always to good effect; he's naturally possessed of a certain bullishness that's an uncomfortable fit with the delicacy otherwise demanded by this material.
Even if the meat of the film is simply too unpleasant to deal with, and that's a legitimate response to it, I think, the film is a great piece of craftsmanship. The world of Minnie's Haberdashery is appointed within an inch of its life by the production design and art direction team, and shot with vivid clarity by Robert Richardson with vastly wide-screen Ultra Panavision lenses on 70mm cameras. Neither Tarantino nor Richardson is constantly clear on how to fill up the frame, but I find the widespread grousing about using this indulgent format primarily on a single interior to be bafflingly misplaced: the clarity and depth provided by the technology (along with Richardson's snazzy use of split diopters to shift the focus within the frame in impossible ways) makes Minnie's Haberdashery stretch out with all the cinematic potential of the snowy landscape that opens the film, with its reduction of the stagecoach to a little blip of movement against an apocalypse of frozen wilderness, with a mournful wooden crucifix looming over. It is, I think it's fair to say, the most striking opening image of 2015, all the more because of Ennio Morricone's savage, droning music underneath - his first Western in decades, and his best score for an English-language production The Mission.
The film is, all in all, opulent and overwhelming; and I think it would remain so even in a smaller scale than I saw it. The yawning void of the room's far walls and the moaning of the music would see to that. Everything about it, from the violent content to the busy deep focus that demands our eyes keep moving around the frame, seems designed to wear us down; it is not, unlike every other Tarantino movie, a fun film, even if it is, in a very dark and bitter way, funny. It is a reckoning. The director's instincts towards showboating work against it building to the fully operatic crescendo it palpably seeks, as does the all-over-the-place acting: Jackson is astoundingly good, cranked down from his usual persona several notches to a threatening stare and rumbling voice, and Leigh's electric performance of a woman who returns male violence with even more savage violence of her own is the best and nerviest works she's done since her career high-water mark, Georgia. But then there are things like Roth's misjudged comedy (justified in the script, but still distracting), or Madsen's perplexingly toneless drifter. Still, even its obvious weaknesses have the courage of their convictions, and the strengths are terrific. For good and bad, this is one of the most distinctive films of the year.
8/10
37 comments:
Just a few rules so that everybody can have fun: ad hominem attacks on the blogger are fair; ad hominem attacks on other commenters will be deleted. And I will absolutely not stand for anything that is, in my judgment, demeaning, insulting or hateful to any gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. And though I won't insist on keeping politics out, let's think long and hard before we say anything particularly inflammatory.
Also, sorry about the whole "must be a registered user" thing, but I do deeply hate to get spam, and I refuse to take on the totalitarian mantle of moderating comments, and I am much too lazy to try to migrate over to a better comments system than the one that comes pre-loaded with Blogger.
O.B. was James Parks, not Michael.
ReplyDeleteBack to the review!
So, with slight spoiler possibility, was it just me, or did Tim Roth sirens the first half of the movie doing a "Christoph Waltz in Tarantino films" impersonation?
ReplyDeleteI really liked the movie, while never being comfortable with it, if that makes sense?
Man, that post-intermission narration was, by far, the least favorite choice in the whole film--it's a ruinously blunt way of showing the bomb--and it was made all the worse, since the pre-intermission sequence, with its obviousness and trademarked Tarantino "edginess," not to mention some unfortunate word choices, was my *second* least favorite.
ReplyDeleteYou're more enthusiastic about the Everything is a Metaphor quality of the script than I am, too, since (as you note) it gets in the way of the characters being better, even on the level of a Tarantino Cartoon. Plus, if the ending's making some kind a statement, it's not one that fits in well with the film-long examination of racism. (The Lincoln letter stuff, however, is fantastic.)
Anyway, as for nothing like it: I mean, just in 2015, there was Ex Machina, the other chamber-drama-turns-into-a-murder mystery--and another big let's-look-at-society-with-metaphors-film--which was vastly more successful one on both of those counts.
Still, I enjoyed it (I also got to see it in 70mm! on very rare occasions it doesn't suck to live in a real city!), and you come awful close to making me want to like it that little bit more.
P.S.: Tim, when you tried to see it in 70mm, was it routinely sold out and, when you finally did, packed to the rafters with people? It was here in Pittsburgh, which I think is a good sign for the future of the archaic format. Even if I'd much rather just see a repertory showing of Grand Prix.
I found it simultaneously totally compelling and totally repellent. Can it be both of those things at once? I think "unpleasant" is very much the right word. Fuck me is it ever unpleasant. Yes I was riveted and yes on some level I admire the craftsmanship, but seriously, what was the POINT of spending three hours rolling around in all this muck and filth?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I saw the theatrical. The narration was jarring as hell.
ReplyDeleteI love this film! I've seen it three times now. I don't like to dwell on what that says about my personality...
ReplyDeleteMy favorite film of last year is still 'Mad Max: Fury Road', although I must admit that I was a rather lazy moviegoer during most of 2015.
But back to the H8ful Ei8ht. Unfortunately I've only gotten to see the multiplex-version, the only difference being that it had an intermission anyway. ALL movie theaters in Iceland (bar one arthouse cinema, god bless it) stick intermissions in the middle of movies in order for people to buy more popcorn, update facebook, deal drugs, have sex, diarrhea... anything, really.
Odder still, the first time I saw it was at a special preview screening that didn't have an intermission so I've actually gotten to experience it both ways and in my opinion the intermission makes the film work even better than without it. I can't wait for the special edition blu-ray to watch the longer version (which I'm assuming will be included.)
One other thing, I find the choice of the Roy Orbison-song There Won't Be Many Coming Home during the end credits quite interesting. From what I gather Roy Orbison wrote it for a western/musical he starred in called 'The Fastest Guitar Alive' and in the context of that film it was about soldiers going off into the Civil War. Only it ultimately wasn't included in the film because the bittersweet song didn't really fit with the movie's otherwise comedic tone. I presume. I've never actually seen the damn thing and if the number of votes it has on IMDb is anything to go by I assume most people under the age of 45 haven't either.
Not that it's a perfect movie or anything. I just have a soft spot for movies with a cold winter setting and particularly thrillers set during a cold winter. Like 'The Thing', which would make an awesome double feature with this movie.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure 'The Revenant' and I are going to get along just fine.
I hated this movie so much, it actually made me question my interest in Tarantino films. Like it retroactively made me go back and think, "holy shit, has his dialog always been this...tryhard cool and self-satisfied and goes on and on until all the tension is drained out" "Have they always been this unpleasant to watch?"
ReplyDeleteAnd there was a white guy in my audience who laughed every single fuckin' time somebody white said "Nigger". Every time. Every single time. And I got a little more angry about Tarantino's usage of the word every time it happen. Not a good theatrical experience for me.
Does Brutally Nihilistic Westerns Day mean what I think it does?!
ReplyDeleteHallvarour: I'm an American, I just want to say that the Icelandic policy of intermissions in all movies sounds just awesome (although I take it you disagree). I can't count the number of times I've suffered through theatrical presentations devoting half of my attention to not wetting myself, and it's worse, naturally, when I'm actually enjoying what I'm watching.
ReplyDeleteBut this is one reason why, generally speaking, I'm not afraid of the VOD Future, with movies like The Hateful Eight still running in the few remaining "event" theaters. (To be clear, I'm not afraid of it in terms of capital-lettered Film Art--the larger phenomenon of automation and information technology destroying every last job below "engineer" and "CEO," of course, is obviously not an unalloyed good--but *that* subject's definitely beyond our scope here.)
Hunter Allen: I totally understand where you're coming from. The intermissions are definitely not all-bad. I still remember the time I went to see 'There Will Be Blood' and spent like 2/3 of that wonderful film holding it in because the movie theater employees actually forgot to stop the movie for the intermission! Seriously, the lights went up and everything but the movie kept on rolling, Hallvarður's bladder be damned!
ReplyDeleteIntermissions can be a life-saver especially during long movies.
My main frustration with the intermissions is that they are more often than not poorly placed, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence or a suspense scene or, in the case of 'Drag Me to Hell', right in the middle of a jump scare. Whoever is in charge of where the movie is cut for intermission, is either someone with no sense of narrative rhythm or a sociopath.... who has no sense of narrative rhythm.
Of course, a movie like 'The Hateful Eight' neatly sidesteps that issue by having a built-in intermission, even if that particular version isn't even supposed to have an intermission, but y'know, death-of-the-author sump'n or other...
I know a lot of people who also loved the flashback scene, and for the life of me I can't figure out why. It was 15 minutes of watching some very nice people be very nice to people we know are about to kill them, and then they died. It didn't feel tense, or suspenseful, in any way to me. I was mostly sitting there wondering why we were watching it, since nothing happened that we couldn't very easily extrapolate from simply the first couple minutes of the scene, up to when we find out who the four passengers are. Even the bit with the jellybeans wasn't anything we needed, since Marquis had about half a dozen other reasons he knew Minnie had most definitely not left Bob in charge, and had since almost the moment he arrived.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like I'm pretty clearly in the minority on this, but my attention flagged for that whole scene. I was just waiting for the movie to get back to the present and get on with it.
I'm with Geo, RE: what is the point of spending so much time wallowing in glacially-paced nihilism. I admit to being a total square and finding Tarantino's heightened brand of gore and viscera incredibly repugnant (but not as repugnant as the epic-sized stiffy that Tarantino gets from said gore and viscera), so this was a bad fit to begin with, but the whole film added up to a big plate of Who Cares for me. The craft elements were admittedly pretty grand (I saw the wide release version, where even then the cinematography was stellar), but all in service of... I don't even know. "People Suck And Deserve Violent Death, Especially If They Are Female: The Movie?" I think I'm done with QT pictures. They're not for me.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as when Spring Breakers "meant" to be a Parody Of Slut-Shaming In America while Maybe Actually Being Slut-Shaming felt like an intellectual cop-out on the part of the director, Hateful Eight "meaning" to include misogynistic violence for comedy and white folks dropping N-bombs will he, nill he (because if there's one thing Tarantino loves almost as much as violent geekery, it's white folks dropping N-bombs) as a way to make its characters awful doesn't make it okay.
The Hateful Eight: Tarantino is still a one-trick pony. The trick is still pretty good, but I really, really don't want to see this trick anymore.
ReplyDeleteFor a guy who's known as one of the world's foremost film connoisseurs', doesn't he want to make anything other than revenge epics? Doesn't he ever wake up and go to his director's chair thinking, "and now we come to the part of the story where all the bloods are shed and everybody needs to die. Eight times have I already used this ending, and maybe that's enough of this shit."
Doesn't he have anything else up his sleeve? Wouldn't he like a do a screwball? A musical? A swashbuckler? Couldn't his legendary film know-how be put to better use than him constantly repeating himself like this?
I'm not sure what hayley is talking about. Tarantino quite clearly has much more than just one trick. "Everybody needs to die" is not even close to describing the endings of Pulp Fiction or Death Proof or Jackie Brown, movies in which the majority of the named characters all live.
ReplyDeleteBut do count me as another hater of Tarantino's narration. I was shocked to see that Tim actually liked that, I disagree to the extent that I thought it was the WORST use of Tarantino-the-actor in any of his films ever. It sucked cold shit out of a dead elephant's ass.
And this movie wasn't really a revenge epic the way Bill, Basterds, or Django were. There were a few moments ahead through out where people briefly freshly with revenge, but it was far from the dominant theme of this film.
ReplyDeleteCount me in as one more supporter of intermissions--as someone who comes from theatre, I just don't understand why they aren't routine for any movie over 2:20 or so. Plus, from a storytelling perspective, there's nothing better than an Act I closer that sends the audience into intermission with their jaws on the floor.
ReplyDeleteHow do people feel about Tarantino's announced intention to adapt this into a play?
I'm all for the stage adaptation. Can't wait to see it at Borgarleikhúsið with a clunky title like 'Átta Andstyggilegir', 'Átta Full af Fyrirlitningu' or 'Hin Hatrömmu Átta'.
ReplyDeleteI think I've probably been spoiled by the routine intermissions and that's why I don't appreciate them.
This is a perfect example of why I love this blog so much. I really liked Hateful Eight, but was having a hard time putting into words what exactly it was that appealed to me. This review expressed what I was feeling so clearly I'm just going to link people to it instead of trying to reword the sentiment for myself. Thanks again, Tim, for being awesome.
ReplyDeleteI actually did not go into this expecting to like it all that much (why do all latter day Tarantino trailers all seem so gosh-darn...inaccurately comedy-action-adventurey?).
ReplyDeleteBut I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Had the good fortune of seeing it in 70mm, and while the intermission is rightfully getting love, can we just give a shout out to the overture for setting the mood? The whole "event" aspect of the roadshow version worked like gangbusters.
Someone far smarter than I should comment about how QT finally using an original orchestral score does something to the texture of this film as opposed to his previous work. On one hand, it's more traditional, on the other hand it's this whole other layer, beyond just hearing great music and thinking "awesome, what a cool choice!" I feel like I have something insightful simmering in my brain but it hasn't fully formed yet. So please, I invite someone to run with this.
QT, famous for worshiping at the alter of disreputable cinema, has once again created such a film and people are surprised? Yes, it is a nasty film but I feel like Tim pinpoints a lot of why it is that way and why it works and isn't just nihilism for the sake of it. Personally I left the film feeling like it was very layered, it's just that it wasn't so easy to untangle. The characters' propensity for hate and violence kind of cross over each other in a hating free-for-all...I guess I felt that was the point, and as a rather unblinking look at modern society, it's bleak but not an invalid point of view. Thus it worked for me. The Lincoln letter was simultaneously a lie and an illusion but also something aspirational, a possibility for hope, maybe once everything (hate and goodness) is torn away. So it didn't feel like there was no light at the end of the tunnel, just these hater basterds were the ones stopping us getting there.
As for length etc, it didn't drag for me at all. I liked when things slowed down once they got to Minnie's, just more to sink our teeth into. I appreciated the film-length attempt to make the dialogue keep an audience on it's feet. All in all, it felt like an accomplished meal cooked up by a master using his usual tricks and trying out a few new ones. Why not relish it?
It had a pretty good ensemble and an interesting story structure (I'll agree on this; it's definitely a distinctive movie, if just in comparison to its end-of-the-year competition, and for that alone I would revisit it more than almost any of the other films coming out right now) though I confess that much of what made it interesting also made it maddening, to my tastes.
ReplyDeleteThe (admittedly petty) part that distracted me the most? All the callbacks to Carpenter's The Thing, whether it's through the music (unused and used cues, and far be it from me to say that Tarantino should stop using music from other movies, because I tend to like it. But taking it all from just the one film seemed... I don't know, lazy? Maybe 'unnecessary' is better), the unrelenting violence and nihilism, or the choice of putting Kurt Russell in an isolated, wintry setting with a bunch of paranoid individuals (he even gets an amazingly similar line to the whole "1 or 2 of us might be things" bit from the earlier film, changed to "1 or 2 of them might be working for Domergue" - a plot point that, unless I'm misremembering something that happened beforehand, seemed rather inorganically introduced). I'll admit, there's a good chance the callbacks work and that I was just caught off guard by them, but in the moment, they felt like a rare case of Tarantino's tendencies as a cineaste interfering with his other strengths.
I almost gave up hope on the film after the first half (being stuck in an auditorium of film geeks saying "soooo, so good" for ten minutes didn't help), and then again when Tarantino's narration starts. But then, almost miraculously, I started cottoning to the film somewhere early on in the 2nd half. Not enough to forget my dislike for the first, and even then I was half-annoyed at some of the things going on (in spite of the spiky humor - some of which worked, some of which didn't - I found the brutality of the whole thing a lot harder to take than much of The Revenant), but enough that I could honestly recommend the film to somebody, and not just out of deference to my love for the 70mm presentation. It's still the least of Tarantino's films in my eyes, but I think that speaks more to his credit than not.
I absolutely loved the "slow" build and I am one of the folks who was bored to death with some of Tarantino's indulgent talky scenes in Death Proof and Kill Bill 2.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the flashback scene was appalling and tone deaf to me. No suspense, just dread. Followed by extremely unpleasant and graphic violence against a lot of women. A theme that carried through to the end. I get what he's saying about violence and justice but it doesn't change the fact that he wants us to get off on the carnage and depravity he's thrown on the screen. Can't really pinpoint why the violence in Kill Bill and Basterds was so fun, yet in this, repulsive, but my best guess is that he completely misjudged the tone. Still better than Django but I'd have a harder time watching this one again.
When was your intermission? In the UK we only have the 167 min version, but it still had an intermission. Mine was when Bruce Dern got himself killed. But you made yours sound like it was a lot later in the film. Was it?
ReplyDeleteJust barely earlier, actually! It was right as Jackson finished his story about Dern's son, and laughs menacingly.
ReplyDeleteI don't know, maybe it was right after Dern died. I think he died immediately following the entr'acte. I saw it ages ago, and that's one note I failed to take.
I saw the roadshow version in Australia, and the intermission hits the second the bullet hits Dern, before we even know if he's dead or not, which sounds consistent with the version J.S. saw. I thought the timing of it was perfect, though, and I couldn't imagine it happening any differently to that.
ReplyDeleteMy version, if we're talking exact moments, happens exactly the second Bob closes the Piano Lid after the Bullet hits Dern.
ReplyDeleteYes! That's it!
ReplyDeleteGood to know I got the full experience.
ReplyDelete**SPOILERS**
ReplyDeleteThe intermission for the US roadshow comes right after Bob closes the piano lid shortly after Warren kills Smithers, but after the movie I sort of found myself entertaining the idea of having an intermission right in the middle of O.B. and Ruth's blood-vomit-a-thon (like several minutes in) and then returning to the movie with the same sort of entrance in (minus QT's narration) and once we see the poisoning and Daisy's recognition of it, returning to the present and seeing O.B. and Ruth dead on the floor and Warren taking charge.
Maybe that's a dumb idea but I was thinking in terms of the immediacy and shock value of the placement in that manner. I could easily see people who were not feeling the length and breadth of the first half (I was not among those people) not wanting to stick around otherwise.
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ReplyDeleteIf anyone reading these comments has any relevant influence, please consider utilizing that power for the good of all our bladders, and promote the return of intermissions to US cinema. I've been preaching its virtues since I first saw The Avengers in Iceland. I've since seen three other movies in Icelandic cinemas, and the shine hasn't begun to fade. In fact, it's only become more brilliant, as absence makes the heart grow fonder. Between that, and the far superior selection of refreshments, I always make it a point to see a movie when I'm there. But apparently I'm in the large minority of people who didn't grow up eating salty black licorice, but still find it to be among the most delicious of treats.
ReplyDeleteI rarely purchase a soft drink when I see a movie, and when I do, I have to be conservative in how much I drink. Even so, I've just given up on seeing a complete movie, because I know that regardless of how judicious I am, I'll still have to miss a few minutes. I've developed a real talent for when to time this dash to the restroom, but I'd prefer not to have to do so. Between the anxiety of missing part of the film, the concern about discomfiting my fellow patrons, and the strident demands of my bladder, it tends to diminish the general experience. I cannot describe how good it feels to casually order a soda, and actually consume the whole thing before the movie ends. It feels like you got away with something, like you flaunted the rules.
I can't imagine it's only good for the patron, either. I've heard that due to how movie licensing is done, the theatres make relatively little from the tickets, and so have to supplement their earnings with concession sales. Well, who buys more concessions? An audience who is afraid to consume too much, who has no opportunity to refill their popcorn, and cannot buy anything new before the movie is over? Or one who can actually do those things without sacrificing any part of why they left the house in the first place?
There is only one drawback, and that is that it does increase the time you must invest to see a movie. I didn't notice it as being a problem in Iceland, because there were less pre-movie advertisements, but here, it already takes too damned long. Between bloated running times, inflation in advertisements, and more and/or longer trailers, it's exhausting to go to the movies these days. I don't imagine anyone would reduce those things, so tacking on ten more minutes would kind of suck. However, I still feel it would be worth the cost.
Sorry for the partial derailment, but this is a cause near and dear to my heart. Or, to some internal organs, at any rate.
Saw this yesterday and found it boring - the editing and pacing were a disaster from where I was sitting. Moreover, I had this constant 'why am I even watching this?' feeling.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, I had seen The Revenant the weekend before and enjoyed that - set in a similar location at a similar time, equally nihilistic and arguably lacking purpose but the craft there was, for me, so much more succulent and the idea of that film actually connected.
I don't have much to say about this movie, other than I liked it more than Django and I agree with the 8/10.
ReplyDeleteI do have something to say about intermissions, and that's that I'm all for them, as long as the director wants one. I do not think that any movie longer than 140 min should just have an intermission stuck inside it at the halfway point. I feel the same way about plays. Intermissions can be great dramatic devices, but if your play/movie is going to be better without one, don't put one in! As long as the movie isn't insanely long, the audience will be able to handle it, as we've seen from all the massive success of the Transformers and Hobbit movies.
WBTN - I'm with you about the "1 or 2 of them might be working with Domergue" line, it did seem to be a really abrupt and paranoid leap for him to make. Then again, I'm a notoriously inattentive filmgoer, so I may well have missed something tipping him in that direction. Unless of course the general blank shiftiness of Joe Gage and the Mexican were tipoff enough.
ReplyDeleteBrian - That was EXACTLY my thought, and I was thinking that the only reason Waltz wasn't there was that he probably couldn't pull off a british accent. Though midway through the film of course he switches from playing "Christoph Waltz" to playing "Tim Roth", which brings me to my major problem with the film.
I enjoyed very much of The Hateful Eight, basically everything up until Channing Tatum's appearance. Because that's when the film shifted from
1) A highly metaphorical confrontation between symbolic characters that Says Something
to 2) A typical Tarantino talk-em-up where a bunch of people with conflicting agendas basically negotiate with and occasionally shoot at each other until one party is left standing
The first type of film demands a certain narrative economy: Since every action is laden with symbolism, the actions must be deliberately paced and chosen to work within the metaphor. But the second type is the exact opposite. The narrative convolutions and excessive details and switch ups are half of the fun.
I don't think these two types of movies sat well together at all. It bothered me that the first half of the film was devoted to shading in characters in really cool ways, but that eventually several of them are revealed to not really be characters at all, just slots in a roster of gang members. Tatum's character especially comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, serving a purely narrative function. The whole flashback interlude accomplishes nothing not better done elsewhere.
My immediate reaction following the film was "Well, that was unpleasant". But as a longtime fan of the works of Refn and Noe, I think that has more to do with my disliking the film on a narrative level than the actual unpleasantness of the material. The final scene certainly packed a wallop, but nowhere near the punch that it might have if the film hadn't alienated me 30 minutes earlier.
I kinda like Bruce Dern in it. Quite subtle and yet still enough to fit the tarentinoesque universe
ReplyDelete@David Greenwood: "It bothered me that the first half of the film was devoted to shading in characters in really cool ways, but that eventually several of them are revealed to not really be characters at all, just slots in a roster of gang members." YES. I think I liked the movie overall, but this bothered me, because I found the first part a lot more fascinating than the mystery plot. That first style is the part with the ideas, the part that challenges the audience, but then it throws that aside for action mechanics, before in the last scene or two getting back to the interesting symbol dynamics again.
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ReplyDelete