The Hateful Eight

A deeply conflicting version of fun.

Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is a lot of things. Boring, of course, isn't one of them.

This is Tarantino. And it's very entertaining, even when it's entertainingly vile, which happens a lot in this overlong movie's extended third act.

The film is pointless, even as entertainment, because it builds to nothing more than a comic book blood bath.

What was it about this cramped, underdeveloped parlor drama -- the majority of which takes place on one set -- that caused Tarantino to think 70mm?

The Hateful Eight is too extreme, too ghoulishly violent, too besieged by its ensemble's overriding villainy, to feel like anything but a dark chamber piece.

Incendiary off-beat Western.

These characters are, as we are told from the outset, all hateful... and they aren't interesting or dynamic enough to overcome that fact.

The Hateful Eight often feels more like a sadistic stage play than a movie. [Full review in Japanese]

For some years, [Tarantino's] movies have felt less like great films, more like exacting punishments to be nobly endured in the name of Cinema.

Quentin Tarantino has offered up his hellish mind to the world, and TH8 is one of his most thrilling, cynical, subversive and narratively transgressive exercises to date.

The movie isn't one of Tarantino's fantasties correcting historical atrocities, it's about American history *as* an atrocity. The declaration of an angry political consciousness from an artist I never imagined having one.