The Hateful Eight (2015) Reviews

Quentin Tarantino é sem sombras de dúvida um dos maiores diretores e roteiristas de todos os tempos, e aqui temos um exemplo de seu talento, um filme de quase três horas de duração com quase unicamente diálogos e que em nenhum momento se torna monótono ou tedioso, mas sim com uma tensão constante e progressiva durante a narrativa inteira. O dom que o diretor possui para criar diálogos é algo de outro mundo, tudo soa tão natural e crível, aumentando assim a nossa conexão com o universo dos personagens e o investimento do foco no mistério estabelecido pela trama.
Com diálogos tão bem escritos, os atores se sentem mais confiantes e mais confortáveis em seus papéis, nos mostrando atuações excepcionais durante todo o filme. Todos estão bem, sem exceção, com destaque para Samuel L. Jackson que entrega de longe uma de suas melhores interpretações da carreira. Com show a parte também da trilha sonora excepcional do filme, que não a toa seu compositor levou o oscar pelo trabalho, tornando a obra mais emocionante e tensa.
A cinematografia do filme também é outro ponto de destaque, o filme foi rodado em 70mm dando uma forma mais achatada e ampla a imagem, mostrando paisagens magistrais em alguns momentos, mas que não possui esse único sentido para sua existência, mas sim o de nos colocar na mesma situação dos personagens, tendo que prestar atenção a tudo que acontece à nossa volta.
Até que chegamos a alguns defeitos do filme que me incomodaram, iniciando por sua duração, que poderia facilmente ser reduzida para umas duas horas e quarenta, com cortes mais dinâmicos e retirada de certas exposições do roteiro que não eram necessárias. Mas não apenas isso, o ponto que realmente mais me incomodou foram as coincidências empurradas goela a baixo do público, com entrelaçamentos nas histórias dos personagens que parecem ser mais um atalho do roteiro para mais exposições, do que realmente soluções inteligentes para progredir naturalmente a história.
Além também da quebra da tensão que estava presente até o capítulo quatro, que era de paranoia e suspeita de todos, nos fazendo pensar junto com o que nos era apresentado, mas que foi abandonada completamente com a conclusão do mistério que chegou a ser brochante. Mas apesar desses defeitos que acabaram me incomodando, The Hateful Eight é sim um dos melhores filmes do Tarantino que vi, e uma aula de roteiro e direção. Recomendo a todos.

After the first few minutes of the film, with all that snow, that Christ in the foreground taken while the 70mm movie camera gets up to make us see the arrival of the direct coach at Red Rock and the incredible music of Ennio Morricone There goes very well in the ears to make us understand that it is indeed a western, but also a horror, maybe that's the Quentin Tarantino version westerns of Howard Hawks' the Thing and the Thing John Carpenter, we already knew this the Hateful Eight won. He won.

And when we see the figure of Major Marquis Warren, even as the director Charles Marquis Warren, played by Samuel L. Jackson who feels Lee Van Cleef, which stops the carriage where they travel bounty killer John Ruth Kurt Russell and his very bad Daisy prey Domergue (even as Faith Domergue) Jennifer Jason Leigh, who then would be the daughter of Vic Morrow, do not forget to Sledge director, old spaghetti westerns that I love, and the three began to talk, because even the largest is a bounty killer, we are already fed up with a film that has just begun.

The western fans, of course, immediately begins to build its web of references. Of course there is John Ford's Stagecoach-Stagecoach, that Quentin does not love, but Ringo John Wayne stops the carriage just like Samuel L. Jackson, then there is the coach of A Fistful of Sergio Leone, and that of hundreds and hundreds of small western. Not to mention the American TV series 60. But above all, there is the carriage in the snow of the convicts transported from Robert Hundar with his daughter Emma Cohen in the great western horror Spanish Condenados a vivir (or Cut-Throats Nine) Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, perhaps the most similar movies thematic and violence at what she has in mind Quentin. But that movie or many movies in his head Quentin simultaneously? Meanwhile, there is a fourth passenger for the carriage, the neo-Sheriff Chris Mannix, ie Walter Goggins, the most talkative, last scion of a family of Southerners rebels, ready to confrontation with Major, who is black and has a letter Lincoln's personal with him.

Mannix brings to the film a key from the show, as the name indicates, but also brings the timeliness of an America not pacified six or seven years after the end of the Civil War, which will be the whole of the film policy key, the a clash never finished within American society, that only fiction can quench. But when the action moves and will remain there for all the film, in Minnie's Habedashery, the cursed inn where the sheriff Mannix, the two bounty killers with their prey, Daisy Domergue, who should be brought to Red Rock to be hanged, and the four come together with four other very strange characters, an English dandy, Oswaldo Mobray, Tim Roth, a general old Southerner, Sanford Smithers, that is, the heroic old Bruce Dern, a strange cowboy who tells him to go to his mother, Joe Gage, that is, Michael Madsen and Bob the Mexican Demian Bichir, also able to play the piano, but none of these has anything to do with the old owners of the inn, the Indian Minnie Mink and her husband Dave Sweet, it is clear that the film takes another turn. That is, we are in the realm of stageY westerns, usually very rare, more suited to the western TV series, because he is poor, that the true western, although Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead by Giuseppe Vari, written by Fernando Di Leo, with Klaus Kinski as bad, but all are fake and bad there, it's what you have in your head Quentin.

He has in his head, of course, also the great silence of Sergio Corbucci, another western with snow with Klaus Kinski bad, Jean-Louis Trintignant dumb and Vonetta McGee black presence. And let's also great movies of the '30s and' 40s, such as The Petrified Forest Archie Mayo or as John Huston's Key Largo, which are the basis of every great black comedy whole set in one set apart from the world. Yes, because you will have to destroy these four characters in search of some kind of truth in the night they will spend together. And, of course, no one is what it claims to be. The only truth that is given us to know is that there is a red candy hidden in the floor. Sign that something unpleasant has happened recently in the inn, and that the door was broken. Everything else I do not say.

But I tell you that it is a film in which Tarantino plays with itself and with its cinema, not only with the one he loves. Use the spaghetti western to give greater strength to his characters, but he thinks deeply about the American cinema, by Howard Hawks in Delmer Daves, and American society today, to his violence. Not at all a peaceful film, but a film where you do not make concessions to anyone. Even in the violence, as usual, you will save not irony and found almost classic cartoon, Tex Avery. It is an ensemble film, where no actor is really more important than the other. It is also a very free movie, to the point that at the end of one of the six chapters, do not tell you who, the same goes Tarantino with his voice on the field, he tells how things are and says with a flash back sosa really happened. And to make matters worse at this point the film becomes a real yellow. But not at all. It is always and only an American disguised as spaghetti westerns westerns that hides a science fiction horror depth on the type of the thing, that the music of Morricone, partly recovered from that Carpenter's film, exalts. But the end is also something deeper and even more free. For this more difficult to win the Oscar. But it's a great film.

Hateful Eight is an enjoyable film on several levels, but like Death Proof and Inglorious Basterds it's also very self-indulgent on Tarentino's part. It's not QUITE as self-indulgent as those movies, but it definitely tried my patience a couple times. When Tarentino made Django Unchained either he (or the people around him) were able to reign in his more ridiculous impulses which enabled him to craft a movie that told a story brilliantly and was still a lot of fun. That was a return to form and I was hoping Hateful Eight would be more like Django Unchained and less like Inglorious Basterds. In the end, it split the difference.

Kurt Russel and Samuel L Jackson deliver amazing performances and are equal parts menacing and hilarious. Much like his first film, Resevoir Dogs, the story of Hateful Eight is a crime caper with one primary set; only this one takes place in the late 1800s. It's ironic that Tarentino tries to fill his movies with interesting / quirky characters and often focuses on them and their dialogue to a fault, when the best characters in this movie were the set (the "Habberdashery") and the blizzard raging outside. His non-human characters help set the mood perfectly and lend the film a feeling of authenticity while the human characters, however funny and impressive in their own right, often make the film feel ridiculous.

The movie simmers for an hour and change before any real action takes place. I consider myself a pretty patient guy but the older I get and the more great works of film I'm exposed to, the more tired I grow of films that are needlessly wordy. The Hateful Eight contains too much exposition and you could easily cut a half hour from its running time and lose none of its impact. This is the "self indulgence" of Tarentino I mentioned earlier and it was so prominent in Inglorious Basterds that it literally put me to sleep the first time I saw it.

The film is scored by the legendary Ennio Morricone and Tarentino tries to emulate the audio cues of old spaghetti westerns with various degrees of success. He also inserts a narrator a few times which was a bad decision that feels jarring and completely unnecessary.

Despite its flaws, the film is a visual feast and I'm glad I saw it on the big screen. It's a movie with a straight forward plot and obvious themes that doesn't necessitate repeated viewings, so I doubt I'll watch it again unless I want to get another look at those beautiful landscapes and the amazing set. Good, but far from his best.

I’m not sure what about this particular script screamed 70mm to Tarantino, but it’s there, and only of benefit in the outdoor sequences. The claustrophobic set, or well it should be, looms too large, and like many things throughout this movie, is far too in love with itself. This has been a frequent problem of mine with Tarantino, a deep love affair he has with his own writing, an inability to edit, and a preference for coded racial language and hyper-stylized carnage. Sometimes this can be fun, like both volumes of Kill Bill, but The Hateful Eight takes three hours to say vague things, and uses one character as a literal punching bag.

 

The Hateful Eight is something of a confirmation of my opinions of Tarantino’s art, which is that of cartoonish, emotional stunted violence wrapped in a specific language. The film is more like a play in that it is nothing but a series of drawn out monologues and passages upon passages of dialog. A sense of the creator looking down upon his dialog and gleefully thinking it was the greatest thing ever written.

 

But what is the point he is trying to make here? Is it about racial tensions? Is it about revenge? It’s all so vague, and it goes nowhere very slowly. Bodies contort and fly as ribbons of blood fly out of them, but to what end? For us to just scream “Fuck yeah!” in mindlessly entertained fashion, I suppose. A director like Martin Scorsese uses violence to illustrate points, not merely for shock value or entertainment. Scorsese makes bullets look painful, Tarantino makes it look like gleeful play acting.

 

Even worse is the obsession the various male characters have with beating on the lone female, who has been made the focus of a good deal of violence. Daisy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has no agency, no memorable personality, and is most likely to linger in your mind for the excessive amounts of violence she’s subjected to. No matter how great Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into the role, and she is fantastic, going all in on her character’s spitting, manic laughing, and indulging in the subhuman wraith-like characteristics, what exactly did her character do to get singled out for the most amount of violence?

 

Quick deaths happen for many characters in the movie as bullets rip their bodies apart, but Daisy get a series of punishments. Within the first fifteen minutes she’s sported a black eye, been pistol whipped, and punch in the face. As the movie the progresses, she’ll get her two front teeth knocked out, get blood vomited on her, her nose broken, have the viscera of a character’s exploded head smother her face, and get the most horrific death in the entire film. Other characters are far worse, and deserve more karma aligned fates, but Daisy enters the film chained to her captor, and she exits the film in a similar manner. Daisy is never let off of the chain for long, and even when she is, she’s at the mercy and machinations of the men orbiting her life.

 

The only character who is as memorable as she is, and equally for questionable reasons, is Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren. He’s the smartest character, the closest thing we have to a moral center in this nihilistic hellhole, and yet…. Tarantino gives him a monologue, which Jackson tears into with gusto, about the rape and murder of another character’s son. Repeatedly forced to use the word “dingus,” which I guess is to make us laugh at a black character’s description of his genitals, the whole monologue just feels ugly, and childish. Tarantino is well-known as a lover of racial questionable language, his scripts are peppered with the word, but it sometimes felt as if it had a larger point. Here he just feels like empty provocations, made all the more glaring by Jackson’s delivery of the line about black folks only feeling safe when white people are unarmed. Even worse, so many of these provocations don’t feel like they’re building to a larger point, but simply stoking the fires towards reactionary moments.

 

I said I didn’t know what Tarantino was building slowly towards, and I still don’t, and The Hateful Eight plays out like a series of interconnected set pieces. The scenes become formulaic after a while. We know they’re going to play out with large passages of dialog, then erupt in violence, go back to being calm, then more dialog, another kill, stillness, and repeat until end credits. The pacing is off, and it wanders all over the place.

 

Which is a damn shame because there’s a few things to admire about the whole thing. Sure, the choice of 70mm, which is great for a large scale outdoor epic, is odd, but his production designers, costumers, and makeup artists brought their best work. Even better is Ennio Morricone’s first original western score in decades, and it plays everything for dread and creeping violence. And some of the performances, even if the characters are half-baked in the script, are truly wonderful, Leigh and Jackson are the standouts, but Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, and Tim Roth all delivery great work.

 

I’ve long felt that Tarantino was nothing more than a pastiche artist, more inclined to sensationalism and knockout set pieces than making truly great films. He makes nice entertainments, but he didn’t earn any of his provocative word play or scenarios in this one. The swagger is there, but this is just ugly and hateful, spinning out gore and profanities to not greater point. Much like Daisy’s monologue in the final chapter, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all one long bluff, a mask for an angry, dark work trying to say something. But I don’t even think it knew what it wanted to say.

STORY OF JULES WINNFIELD'S GRANDFATHER

I think its only a proper to start this year's cinemas for one of my favorite directors of all time, Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.

My first impression of the movie was OK. It wasn't as good as hes previous work Django Unchained. The dialogue was awesome classic Tarantino, characters were interesting and well acted ecpecially Jennifer Jason Leigh. I think she was eating the scenary everytime she was on it. Even Samuel L. Jackson gave slightly different performance than hes usual acting jobs are. It was also good to see Tim Roth (who was awesome in this movie) and Michael Madsen together in Tarantino movie after Reservoir Dogs. Action was gory and violent like in Django and the music was great. Glad to hear Morricone's work in a western after forty years which he master best.

I think the main problems that i had with this movie was, that it was too long and the reveal of the murder plot was too easy to guess. Normally i don't have almost nothing bad to say Tarantino's movies. I think those are perfect on their own way, but the problems rised up when the script leaked in the internet and Tarantino needed to change it so much that he has to leave the best parts out. I know it's a challenge to place entire movie in a one room, but some scenes seemed just filling the length of the movie.
The way i saw this movie coming out, was a murder mystery in a wild west. So of course i was waiting twists and jaw dropping reveals, but those were easily predictable.
This wasn't Tarantino at his best but it wasn't a bad movie either, because there is no such a thing than a bad Tarantino movie. It definitely deserve those three Golden Globes nominees. If you are hardcore Quentin fan like me, you should definitely check it out!