The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino)

[Wryan]

Oh man...this is so fucking cool. Love it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...-a6854921.html

Is this sarcasm by chance? I think that's terrible, and terribly stupid. How unfortunate to let that happen, imo.

[number8]

Yeah, I get really sad when I read about things like that happening.

Something similar happened in Battlestar Galactica. No one told Edward James Olmos that a model ship they used in the admiral quarters was on loan from the maritime museum, and he smashed it to pieces when he improvised a crying scene.

[Scar]

Is this sarcasm by chance? I think that's terrible, and terribly stupid. How unfortunate to let that happen, imo.

I hope it's sarcasm. Your thoughts mirror my own.

[Spinal]

How do you put an antique guitar into an actor's hands and not tell him what it is? Something doesn't add up here.

[Skitch]

Why the fuck would they have such a priceless item on set like that? I've played guitar my whole life, let me tell you, that didn't look any different than any ratty old acoustic that couldve been easily replaced and no one would've noticed. There was no reason for this accident to occur in the first place.

[Lazlo]

How do you put an antique guitar into an actor's hands and not tell him what it is? Something doesn't add up here.

Quentin wanted Leigh's reaction to be impacted? Someone made a mistake? Everyone knew and just lied to the guitar people? Those are the only reasons I can come up with?

I mean, was there supposed to be a cut in the scene and it plays as one shot in the movie because that's the only take they could get? Weird.

I don't care a lot about the guitar, the story is fascinating though.

[number8]

How do you put an antique guitar into an actor's hands and not tell him what it is? Something doesn't add up here.

They didn't, though. They put it in Leigh's hands, who did know it was the real thing. Russell grabbed it from her hands.

Why the fuck would they have such a priceless item on set like that? I've played guitar my whole life, let me tell you, that didn't look any different than any ratty old acoustic that couldve been easily replaced and no one would've noticed. There was no reason for this accident to occur in the first place.

There's an extended shot of her actually playing a song on the real thing from start to finish. That's what they wanted to capture. They did make several replicas of the guitar to get the other shots of it being handled, but Leigh was still holding the real thing when Russell just went ahead with the next action, thinking it was a copy.

[Skitch]

There's an extended shot of her actually playing a song on the real thing from start to finish. That's what they wanted to capture. They did make several replicas of the guitar to get the other shots of it being handled, but Leigh was still holding the real thing when Russell just went ahead with the next action, thinking it was a copy.

I understand that, but theres zero reason to have a priceless guitar for that song.

[Grouchy]

So I've finally seen this one. Having read the script when it leaked (am I the only one here who did that?) I was beyond being surprised by the slow pacing, the lenght of the scenes or the viciousness of the characters. I was a bit surprised by how on my read I'd missed the themes of the work, which become apparent when you add the mise-en-scene. I consider it another Tarantino movie about race relations, although a lot subtler than Django or Jackie Brown and adding the dimension of dealing with misogyny a bit. Amongst the things that were a lot better than the pictures I saw in my head are the series of shots of Sam L. Jackson telling the cock-sucking story and the continuing subplot of the Lincoln letter. The poison scene was also pretty intense. Like many of you, I'm not a fan of the penultimate chapter. It has a couple of good character moments (Roth switching accents, Tatum telling Dern to be cool) but it delays the resolution unnecessarily when it has already reached a dramatic climax and, really, it tells the audience almost nothing new. Unlike other Tarantino digressions like the Superman speech or the exploding cinema explanation, I don't think it really worked.

I still love the movie, though. Those 70mm vistas at the beginning are the best argument for keep working on film I've ever seen. And the acting is beyond reproach - Leigh is particularly excellent, I love her maniac faces. Goggins was also killer. Really, when you gather a large ensemble of character actors and your weak link is Bruce Dern, you are doing something right. I also can't help but love the premise because in the surface it's very similar to the first script I ever wrote, which also featured a band of wanderers getting stuck in a house during a storm.

I think the reason QT fans are rejecting this (or at least in my circle of friends) is because it's a middle step on an evolution by Quentin. We've all seen those types of films from other filmmakers but, usually, the Tarantino product is a lot more polished when it finally comes out. This time around, I feel like he's investigating a new direction but he isn't quite there yet, for all his accomplishments. I might be wrong but that's my prediction.

The guitar thing is moronic, though. I'm irked a museum collector like QT wouldn't appreciate the need to care for that guitar. Also, like Skitch says, the scene could have featured any goddamn guitar and still work the same way.

[transmogrifier]

If I was a museum curator, I wouldn't be lending out guitars worth 200 grand to movie shoots.

[Dukefrukem]

[ContinentalOp]

This movie surprised the hell out of me. Great dialogue, characters, plot (an effective mystery), Tarantino's best cast since Jackie Brown. His best movie since JB. And it's a great hangout movie featuring actual moral ambiguity. Can't get enough of that in movies. Only nitpicks are the unnecessary narration and some of the over-kills.

1. Pulp Fiction- ****
2. Jackie Brown- ****
3. The Hateful Eight- *** 1/2
4. Reservoir Dogs- *** 1/2
5. Inglorious Basterds- ***
6. Django Unchained- ** 1/2
7. Kill Bill Vol. 2- ** 1/2

8. Death Proof- * 1/2
9. Kill Bill Vol. 1- *

[Grouchy]

9. Kill Bill Vol. 1- *

The fuck?

[Dukefrukem]

It's so funny how we are all over the place with QT rankings.

[Grouchy]

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Reservoir Dogs
4. Kill Bill Vol. I
5. Jackie Brown
6. Django Unchained
7. Kill Bill Vol. II
8. Death Proof
9. The Hateful Eight (needs rewatch, though)

[Ezee E]

Rewatched today, and my thoughts don't change. In fact, now that the surprises are known, it kind of gets worse by a little. It's still interesting to see the actors working with each other, but there are some overlong parts, especially in the revelation of the Lincoln letter. It's almost the same exact dialog repeated.

[Sycophant]

I'm struggling a bit with this film after finally watching it last night. In truth, I think I need a second viewing to better assess it, but I can't see that happening any time soon. For now, I'll spit out some thoughts. Negative or hmmmmm stuff first.

I'd agree with many that Tarantino's ear for dialogue is a bit off this time. It often seems delivered or framed as more clever than it comes off.

The voiceover bit, clearly a Godard-inspired choice, might be really clever or really unnecessary. Of course, Tarantino's long played with inconsistent aesthetics and framing devices, and in the more anarchic, boundary-flexible pastiche cinema of a Kill Bill, I find it thrilling. After a normal movie's running time of somber, grim Hawks-and-Carpenter's-Thing staged for a theatrical allegory about the lie of post-racial, post-sexist America (I think that's what this is), it felt off.I couldn't help remembering reading Tarantino's earlier scripts where that's exactly the kind of voice he uses in the his narrative descriptions. It's kind of neat. The selection of Tarantino himself for this is I'm sure a nod to this, but I'm not sure the distancing effect fit with everything else the movie does.

Tarantino often seems to be trying to tell us about ourselves by reflecting on our popular arts. Here, is he trying to tell us about ourselves by trying to draw us in our popular arts?

I would be in the camp where Kurt Russell often seems to be a bit too cartoony. So much so that I wondered if he wasn't the biggest phony of all from the start (brilliant misdirection or a slightly tone-deaf performance? the latter, I'm sure)--a lot of his lines sound like voiceover for a wild west video game (again, often, not always--his feeling of betrayal at the Lincoln Letter was a high note).

Moment-to-moment there are some amazing sequences. The performances are typically really good, and I respect the particular, idiosyncratic ugliness of the movie. It's a bold and maybe necessary--if not entirely satisfying--critique of America. The resolution is something I'm still trying to unravel, and I wonder if it's too thorny and ugly and in need of unraveling for its own good.

There was a live staged reading of this after the script leaked, right? I actually think this has excellent potential as a stage production, if one were to cut out the voiceover tricks and the entire flashback.

[Grouchy]

There was a live staged reading of this after the script leaked, right? I actually think this has excellent potential as a stage production, if one were to cut out the voiceover tricks and the entire flashback.

I actually could see the flashback working better on live theater. Don't ask me to explain it, though.

[Sycophant]

I actually could see the flashback working better on live theater. Don't ask me to explain it, though.

Interesting! I'm inclined to disagree, but I'm not too up for explaining my thoughts on that either.

[number8]

Non-linear staging and the aside is more of a tradition of theater than film.

[DavidSeven]

Since Kill Bill, I've approached each of Tarantino's eccentric genre pieces with increasing trepidation. I'm not exactly sure why since I've enjoyed them all. His most grounded film -- Jackie Brown -- is probably his worst, as it is so beholden to someone else's purely functional plot that it loses the exuberance inherent in everything else he's made. But I guess I've always expected that he would hit a breaking point eventually. A point where the story becomes too referential to genre, the dialogue becomes too stylized, and the whole of it becomes too far removed from anything resembling reality apart from cinema.

I won't pretend that this film doesn't skirt that edge, but I was utterly engrossed by it nonetheless. While perhaps not as structural masterful as Death Proof, as thematically cogent as Inglourious Basterds, as raw and powerful as Reservoir Dogs, or as straight-up exhilarating as Pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eight continues and expands on the Tarantino lineage of unforgettable scene and sequence building. And I dare say this is his best acted film. Trapping these actors -- inhibiting these characters -- in this single setting was like incubating a master class. I enjoyed every performance, scene-chewing and all. It is, however, an aggressively mean picture. My tolerance for that is generally high, but, even for me, the unpleasantness gets ratcheted up to a degree that sometimes doesn't feel useful or warranted. Sometimes I miss the low budget Tarantino, who was forced to only "suggest" his most disturbing violence by moving it off-screen.

Anyway, quality stuff. Loved the performances. The brutality becomes a bit much, but not enough to topple the film or unwind some breathtaking sequences built almost entirely on dialogue and performance.