The Hateful Eight (Quentin Tarantino, 2015) Movie

Neeeeed to make time to see this in theaters.

 

Finally got around to this yesterday, really enjoyed it. Was a cool movie-length bottle episode essentially. The whodunnit aspect was fun by the end

 

It was a neat movie. I guess I am just a 'Tarantino guy'. I seem to enjoy all of his movies.

 

I love this movie. I get why it's not his most well-received film, but I think it was a really incredible response to his previous two historical fictions. They were stylized and broad and huge and fun and cathartic; this was messy and cruel and confined and hard to watch and challenging. Samuel L. Jackson and Jennifer Jason Leigh were incredible. I haven't seen it since it's opening night and I'd really like to see it again soon, but it'll be tough to go to a smaller screen, the 70mm theater experience was amazing.

 

It really was. The opening shot was absolutely fantastic and the way he shot the inside carriage scenes were excellent. it'd be really hard to sit down and watch this at home after that experience.

 

I saw it twice and don't think I ever need to see it again, which is disappointing given how rewatchable his earlier stuff is. Still a really interesting and well-crafted movie though, as per usual.

 

This is how I feel. I saw the 70mm in theaters and loved it but when I saw the blu-ray at Target I felt no need to buy it and I love every film he's done and watched them all multiple times.

 

I thought this was okay. Would give it 6/10. The first 30 minutes of just Samuel L Jackson and the other two guys in the chariot crossing the snow was boring (IMO). Prefer Pulp Fiction and Inglorious Basterds

 

Finally, finally saw this and honestly I think it's in the top half of his latter filmography. It didn't strike me as much as Django on first watch, but I loved the way the tone shifts halfway from the film from a "whodunit" to a campy, bloody mess. Tarantino's characters and the worlds he builds around them are a testament to how masterful a storyteller he's become.

 

Cannot wait to check this out. Sadly, my friends put this on at 11pm months ago while I was already passing out and I was knocked out within the first 25 minutes. Finally going to be able to watch this over the weekend

 

I can't wait to see this again. It got a lot of shit but I really liked it.

 

This was the best movie of 2015.

 

Ex Machina though

and Straight Outta Compton

this was maybe my third favorite film of 2015

 

It Follows and Trainwreck were winners, too

 

The Hateful Eight does not stand comfortably next to 2015 films like The Look of Silence, Jauja, Timbuktu, or Carol. It leaves much less to process than his pre-Django fims, particularly Jackie Brown and Inglourious Basterds.

 

I don't know about that. This film's treatment of Daisy is a really interesting look at the bonds of masculinity running stronger than empathy towards a woman. As a film dealing with intersectionality, it's actually pretty fascinating. Tarantino's coming off four films that are revenge stories of oppressed groups exacting violent vengeance on oppressive groups (Woman/Man, Jews/Nazis, Slaves/Whites), and this film subverts that established pattern by establishing a familiar western texture but being a far more complicated revenge scenario. There's no one to root for, everyone is extremely racist or sexist, and the ultimate exacting of violent vengeance isn't portrayed as a victory. SLJ and Goggins laugh with each other after hanging Daisy, their shared sexism being the biggest factor in overcoming the racism between them, but they're both fatally wounded and going to die anyway. Thematically there's certainly a lot going on, and just ranking it with the rest of his filmography isn't the most interesting conversation to me beyond providing a context. Jackie Browne and Inglourious Basterds and Pulp Fiction are all incredible, what does it matter which order someone ranks them in? I'd prefer to see engagement with each film as it stands.

Similarly, just stating that a movie is the best of the year, or stating that no it isn't this movie is, that's also not the most interesting way to approach talking about movies. If it's the best, why? Why does the film mean so much, what makes it work so well? I guess one doesn't have to write an essay whenever they want to express admiration for something, but an actual delve into what a film is doing is more interesting to me than just making a simple statement of worth without any reason.

 

I provided more reason than the guy who just said it was the best movie of the year. If you were not at the new forum, you will see that I write more extensively about film than anything else. My critiques of The Hateful Eight were lost in this same forum/new forum purge.

The argument about men banding together in their hatred of women has been a popular one, but it is not supported by what is in the film. It does not fit with the fact that four men are in that location with the sole desire to save her, and the gender angle leaves out the fact that she is a wanted criminal. Samuel L. Jackson and Boyd Crowder band together because they are on the other side of the law, a bounty hunter and a sheriff. If Daisy had happened to be a man, the bounty hunters and the sheriff would have treated her fairly similarly. Men are not allowed to get off easy; Samuel L. Jackson shoots the Mexican and allows him to suffer before literally blowing his face up.

We see a stronger argument that the opposite is true; Tarantino is enjoying torturing a woman for the audience. Compare Daisy to The Bride in Kill Bill; The Bride is shot, cut by sword, beaten, shot with salt, beaten by Pai Mei, and then shot with a tranquilizer by Bill. However, her struggle is our struggle and we identify with her and root for her; when Budd gets the jump on her you actively worry about her well being. In Daisy's case, it is played for laughs that she is beaten and blood is vomited upon her and her teeth are destroyed and she gets parts of her brother's brains in her hair. Tarantino is no stranger to mutilating his characters, as we see Stuntman Mike beaten to death and Marsellus Wallace violently raped. However, both of those are contained within scenes, whereas The Hateful Eight has three hours of physical violence upon the only woman in the film. Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight are very similar in that the white male audience is gleefully enjoying the disparaging ways black people and women are treated, even if most of it is in the vein of shock at how dark it is. It is a bad look for Tarantino, and he gets the benefit of the doubt because of how feminist almost every other film of his has been.

 

Not everyone wants to write an essay in these threads, and that's okay too. Sorry if that doesn't interest you, but there's no reason there isn't room for all kinds of discussion.

 

I'm assuming Morrissey is Tetra?

 

What I said about that wasn't about you specifically, just the last few posts in the thread, sorry if my only quoting you gave the wrong impression. I know you from AP, you've long been one of the most engaging writers about film on that forum.

I need to rewatch the film, I haven't seen it since theaters, but I think the film's mission statement is absolutely that while hate divides us, it also darkly unites us. It's right there in the title. I remember feeling that the film was effective in that, and that the gratuitous torture of Daisy was the point: the characters don't give a shit about it, the audience cheers it. Tarantino is an extremely smart filmmaker, especially in regards to understanding how people will view his films. He paints a scene in Basterds of horrible people cheering on violence in a theater, then blows that film up to create an audience reaction of people cheering on violence in a theater. By making Daisy an extremely horrible person, he's toying with audience empathy and the ideas of characters being relatable and likable. He asks why any film character has to be any of those things to earn our empathy, and by making Daisy so awful, he tests how far an audience's empathy extends. He does the same thing with Samuel L. Jackson's character, for the first half of the film he's the closest thing to a moral center the film has, he seems okay, and then he's revealed to be just as detestable as anyone else, maybe worse. The film doesn't have to make every man in the film against Daisy to still comment on how men hate women, especially since the film is making its characters far more nuanced than that. The people there to rescue Daisy are still horrible and racist, they just have different alignments. This set of characters, all hateful in many of the same ways but divided in others, stuck in a room together offers a lot of interesting angles to further explore.

 

I thought a sort of goal of this new site was to foster more discussion than just binary statements of good/bad. It's certainly not my place to say though, and I hope that my hoping for a little bit more discussion doesn't come off aggressive or anything. It's just, where does a conversation go from someone saying a movie is the best of the year, and then someone saying it isn't? It can get into comparing movies that can be very different from each other and holding them side by side in an attempt to judge which one is "better". That can lead to arguments and people taking things personally, in my experience, when ideally talking about movies is interesting and challenging.

Of course, again, it's not my place to judge how people should express how they feel about a movie or anything and no one owes a forum thread an explanation for why they feel how they feel. I just don't want to see threads turn into one or two sentence judgements of a piece of art's worth and then just a back and forth of disagreement.

 

The decision for Goggins and Jackson to side together to finish off Daisy is based off two factors: their moral code and the reality of their injuries. If Daisy had been her brother or any other man, they still would have killed him because he is a wanted fugitive and he led to all the violence in the film. There is a moment in the film where Goggins seems to be considering siding with Daisy and killing Jackson, but that is not realistic because he is going to die anyway. If he was not injured, does he make the same decision? He would have loved the opportunity to kill a black man, especially one who just gloated about his treatment of the Confederate General's son before killing him.

The treatment of all women is obvious in the ways the characters speak, but the reverence some characters have for Minnie suggests something more complex. They are certainly sexist, yes, but they are also racist. They are also divided among Confederate/Union lines, law enforcement/criminal lines, and anything else they can find. Their hatefulness is deep.

Tarantino knew what he was doing; he knew that he could manufacture controversy with a film like this, and he has done it before. The burning of the movie theater in Inglourious Basterds and the mowing down of Hitler is cathartic because those are just about the most hated people in history, but in the case of Daisy her crimes occurred before the film and her decision to poison the coffee is almost justified given the treatment that Kurt Russell is giving her. Too often in the film, it feels like Tarantino is using the dialogue and the action to needle at the audience and their modern, politically correct sensibilities.

The extremely strong craft and pacing is enough to make the film worth watching, still. It just seems to be a meaner film than he has ever made. From Jackie Brown to Django Unchained, he has focused on wronged people or groups getting their revenge, but here it seems more provocative for the sake of being provocative.

 

There seem to be some insightful reactions ITT, so I'm wondering...

What do you think Tarantino is asking of the viewer who watches H8ful8? Is he posing the challenge to the audience of trying to find good in these characters? Is he giving the viewer a cathartic space to laugh off the stress of the hateful climate in the country today (strong anti-BLM voices, comment sections on the internet, misogyny, violence/police brutality, the more problematic aspects of law enforcement, etc) by putting a bunch of toxic clowns in a room and watching them react to each other like the cinematic version of collecting a bunch of spiders and putting them in a jar to watch which would live, die, get webbed up, etc? There is definitely a lot going on, thematically, with how he explores a time period of when some roots of modern racial tensions and institutionalized injustice started to take form, and uses the events and characters in the film to illuminate how it affects us in the present. I get all that. I'm just curious as to what he wants the audience to take away from this. I've always felt that his main goal as a director with his past movies was to make something capturing the zeitgeist that portrays flawed characters in an honest way and, above all else, results in a good time at the movies. With H8ful8 though, it seems like he's trying to accomplish something more ambitious, subversive, political and controversial. The movie feels like horror at times, not unlike a Tarantino version of Green Room, and seems more concerned with making the audience feel uncomfortable and question their reactions to what is shown than telling a story with characters you want to spend time with again and again. But I don;t think I can put into words the entire scope of what he wants to do here. Thoughts?

 

Finally watching this again. Really, really excited.

Side question, has there been any recent news or rumors as to Tarantinos next film?