The Hatefull Eight is an unintentional parody, mishmash that people are holding up as something meaningful...
Wrong, it was obviously intentional: The title, “The Hateful Eight,” is a perversion of “The Magnificent Seven” (the remake was in production at the same time). The latter celebrates the noble and heroic whereas this movie
parodies the base and odious. Tarantino is poking fun at our petty hostilities that separate us based on race, gender, sectionalism, faction-ism, envy and rivalry. Furthermore, men divided by hatred of culture and race can unite in hatred of something else, in this case misogyny.
The excellent opening with the figure of Christ dying for our sins keys off the theme, which is humanity’s fallen condition and dire need of redemption.
The context of these profundities is a dialogue-driven Western black comedy, which is genuinely amusing if you can roll with the outrageous excesses and exaggerations, which -- again -- are
intentional.
If you can't roll with it you'll hate it.
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Renovatio (2990)
6 years ago
That is exactly my point... it parodies, unintentionally, the movie geek referencing culture that tarantino and his fans among critics admire so much... All of the references you mention are there, but they do not add up to anything meaningfull, in fact it shows how trivial an attempt it is, because such references only matter to those who are in on the references in a nerdy way and do not mean anything in of themselves...
Compare this to actual satire like Starship Troopers and you begun to see what I mean... it goes beyond empty pastiche... Hatefull Eight is more like the 21 Jump Street or the Deadpool movie in terms of satire... Empty pop satire for the sake of having the audience feel superior to something in a trivial way, rather than to highlight the true, yet absurd nature of a situation, or to criticise and unfair power dynamic, etc... It's partly the choice of who is being satirised... Anarchronistic civil war bounty hunters? Under cover cope shows? Superheros? How meaningful is this satire?
At least with the flawed Django Unchained and Inglorious Bastreds there was some semblence of something real being satirised even if it was the cliche villains of the past, Nazis/Hitler and slaveowners, so safely far removed from any contemporary dynamic... So while it wasn't as empty and trivial as Hatefull Eight/21 Jump St/Deadpool in it's choice of satire target it is the easy route to choose such clear and remote iconic evils of the past... Might as well have satirised the "devil", althought that would be more meaningful in an absurdist way 😉
Compare this to Starship Troopers or Gamer which both satirise real and meaningful aspects of contemporary society... These movies hit hard and resonated
Anyway, I'm sure his next movie, the Manson movie, that is somehow not supposed to be a Manson movie, will have the critics & fans genuflecting in pavlovian admiration... Personally, I find his filmmaking stale and empty... But if we all agreed it would be boring 👍
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Wuchak (8203)
6 years ago
I appreciate your insightful response. I just disagree that the film lacks substance or meaning. It entertains on the surface as an amusing black comedy with the exaggerations thereof and the excesses for which Tarantino is known. But it also offers food for thought on the human condition, our desperate spiritual need for some kind of regeneration, while amusingly poking fun at our stoo-pid hostilities based on ethnicity, gender, sectionalism (e.g. North and South), sectarianism, covetousness, jealousy and competition. Look around and you’ll observe these kinds of hostilities and the corresponding divisions every day. The movie shows how idiotic they are… and also offers a solution.
I find his filmmaking stale and empty
Speaking as someone who’s
not a Tarantino devotee, the above shows that “The Hateful Eight” is hardly an empty parody. As far as “stale” goes, his movies have his unique style and are the furthest thing from conventional “blockbusters” and yet they kick axx at the box office. I call that originality and success.
Regarding “Starship Troopers,” I get what you’re saying, but the flick gets redundant in the second half with the soldiers constantly shooting bullets into the colossal insects. And, since we can't take the story & characters seriously, the movie is unable to sustain attention at 129 minutes. It would've been more effective at around 90 minutes. The last third of the film is decidedly meaningless and empty. I’ll take “The Hateful Eight” over it.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
I think one of the problems is that QT made this film and really refused to talk about why he made it. He tied it into the Black Lives Matter police shootings movement and left that as his rationale for making it.
But its a lot more incendiary than that.
Bruce Dern's Southern general had black Union troops slaughtered along with horses because "neither mattered."
Samuel L. Jackson's black Union officer burned down a prison and killed both white Southern jailers AND white Union prisoners (In other words, his prejudice wasn't North/South, it was black/white.)
Jackson contends that Minnie wouldn't let Mexicans into her place(the flashback seems to disprove that, but Jackson himself seems to hate Mexican Bob)
At the end, Southern White Walton Goggins and Northern Black Samuel Jackson join together to hang Woman Jennifer Jason Leigh because...she's bad but also (it seems) because men will unite to destroy women.
So that's a pretty hateful bunch: North/South, black/white, black/Mexican, men/women...and QT never really engaged with any interviewer to get into all that hate...and tended to steer away from the film's brutality towards its female character, almost dismissively -- he was "telling like it is" about how men beat women.
I can't say QT is the man who should be making these observations, but he knows a lot of 70s exploitation films, and they got into black/white AND women/men and other sensitive subjects all the time. Try those interracial women's prison movies, for instance.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
The point is that the worst case analysis of QT's vision is America(and the world) right now. The racial divisions(in Los Angeles, African American/Mexican American turf battles have arisen), the man/woman divisions(men ARE beating women up, and raping them), North/South perhaps transformed into Trump's World versus "the elites." Its a very ugly and depressing time to be an American -- if you buy into all the hate.
And maybe this movie was meant to show you why you should not...
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
i dont understand how people over the age of 20 can still like his films.
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Actually, though I think that "age is just a number" and intelligence maturity exists across the spectrum from 8 to 80, depending on one's mind -- I think QT is well attuned to the likes of older people.
The obvious example is Jackie Brown, in which the partners-almost-lovebirds are a decidedly middle-aged couple -- Jackie Brown(40 something) and Max Cherry(50-something.) Jackson and DeNiro are 50-somethings; Michael Keaton(then) 40 something? In the main cast, only Bridget Fonda is a true "youth"(and thus it is interesting that she hangs out with the older Sam and Bob.) In any event, that film has "the viewpoint" of aging as its thrust.
But if you leave that specific example, you often end up in movies where QT elects to have his characters talk quite a lot and in often philosophical or thought provoking ways-- from the guys in Reservoir Dogs through Jules and Vincent(together and with others) in Pulp Fiction; to David Carradine at the end of Kill Bill(2); even psycho Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) in Death Trap, and HIS character is "old" too(he notes that his audience of young women have no memory of TV shows he worked on .) These characters, whatever their age, raise arguments that would seem to require some patience and thought on the part of the audience to "digest." Young people can do that...but older people maybe have more patience for it.
Take Django Unchained. What the film has to say about Samuel Jackson's "house slave" Stephen is sophisticated, sad...and horrifying(he has literally "become white" and hellbent on punishing and torturing fellow members of his own race.) And then Leo DiCaprio gets that long, cracked speech about blacks having "indentations in their skulls" that render them subservient to whites. ( Yeah, tell that to Muhammed Ali and the Black Panthers. )
Or Chris Waltz's opening discussion and interrogation of the farmer in "Inglorious Basterds"(which I actually find too long in his canon; but others don't), and how it flips back ad forth from French to English to German, with Waltz slowly revealing his horrific and murderous anti-Semitism.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
I think QT actually presents fairly mature philosophical material -- for the older viewer to consider -- wrapped in the sensationalism of "youthful genres"(crime, action, horror...the Western.)
You could say that a lot of movies do that today -- MCU, Star Wars and Star Trek franchises have many fans over 40(over 50, over 60.)
But QT's world is far less "family friendly."
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
Anyway, I'm sure his next movie, the Manson movie, that is somehow not supposed to be a Manson movie, will have the critics & fans genuflecting in pavlovian admiration... Personally, I find his filmmaking stale and empty... But if we all agreed it would be boring 👍
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Absolutely. I've liked QT since Pulp Fiction, and I came to him somewhat older and now I'm considerably older but...what I liked about him hasn't ever really gone away.
He's a great writer of dialogue that nobody else can write. We have so FEW of those today.
His endless tributes to obscure indie and foreign films are not necessarily for "nerds" and "fanboys" to know and discover. Simply people with another level of film knowledge.
I myself have seen each and every one of his films with NO knowledge of his source films. I go for the dialogue. I go for the actors. I go for the cinematography (Robert Richardson now, going back how far? HE's an auteur -- he MADE Oliver Stone in later years.)
SPOILERS FOR JACKIE BROWN:
I don't know if QT or Elmore Leonard wrote the following dialogue between Sam Jackson and Robert DeNiro in Jackie Brown, but I loved it the first time I heard it, and I love it every time I hear it again. (Paraphrased)
Jackson: What happened to Melanie?
Robert: I.well..I had to...I shot her.
Jackson: You SHOT her?
Robert: Yeah.
Jackson: Is she dead?
Robert: Yeah...well, pretty much. Yeah.
Jackson: Don't be tellin' me she's not dead, if there's one b-ch we don't want talking to the police, its her.
Robert: She's dead.
Jackson: You couldn't just hit her?
Robert: Ah...no...I ...no.
Jackson: Where'd you shoot her?
Robert: In the chest and in the stomach. Here and here.
Jackson: Well...you had to.
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
And after that dialogue, Jackson finds out that he's been ripped off on his money and...after making DeNiro pull the car over and after THINKING about it a long time(Roger Ebert loved that, so I can use him here)...Jackson realizes that he's been ripped off by Jackie Brown and Max Cherry.
And then he wonders if DeNiro killing Melanie(Bridget Fonda) is CONNECTED to that. I think ultimately he figures out it isn't -- DeNiro is too dumb -- and then we get the killing we've spent the whole scene waiting for, and the end of a partnership that seemed to be cool for most of the movie.
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I linger on this Jackson/DeNiro scene in Jackie Brown because that's what I come for at a QT movie. I don't come as fanboy, or a zealot or (intentionally) a nerd. (Sticks and stones, ya know.)
But I think I could make the same case for Jackson's opening dialogue with OB the stagecoach driver in The Hateful Eight, and then Jackson's dialogue(at a distance) with the shotgun-pointing Kurt Russell, and then Jackson's dialogue in the stagecoach with Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Others found that boring, I guess -- I loved all of it, start to finish.
That's what OT brought me with Pulp Fiction(I caught up with Reservoir Dogs later), what he brought me with Jackie Brown, and that's what he brings me with The Hateful Eight. He keeps making the big bucks because the suits(no longer Harvey, now somebody else) knows how rare QT's talent for writing is(and he can HIRE people to make the rest of his movie great.)
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ecarle (14979)
6 years ago
The Manson Movie(with QT's most all-star cast ever, IMHO) has looming over it the "taste factor" of the Sharon Tate murder(and others.) We will have to see what QT does with it. It looks like he's going to come out OK..given that TWO OTHER Sharon Tate murder movies are being rushed into production that I expect may be worse in content and style. (Though one has involvement from Tate's sister.)
I will be interested to see what QT does with 1969 after movies set in the 1800's and WWII.
Mostly, I am interested in what Leo and Brad and Margot and Al and Kurt and Burt are going to...SAY.
With QT, its always the words....
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