Movies
12-31-2015, 06:25 AM
Hey, we don't have a movies thread anymore. This is the movies thread.
I just got back from The Hateful Eight in 70mm and I really loved it! It wasn't really even a Tarantino film — that is to say, there's no clashing pastiche, no close-ups of feet, and it's chronological but for one flashback — it's just a classically-made Western and taut pressure-cooker mystery-thriller, but hard R and allowed to directly mention dicey social issues. A real model of restraint to convention, with fantastic results.
Its only quirk — and likewise its only flaw — was the existence of two narrated scenes, which both succumbed to a fatal case of Tell-Don't-Show and could have been elegantly directed around so seamlessly you wouldn't have even known it, because it would have been competence. Instead, you get two sore-thumb narrated scenes in the last half of the film that emerge from no perspective at all, emerge from nowhere at all since narration neither opens or closes the film, undermine the reality and mood of the film, and all in the service of naked script spackle.
I love me a good western, and despite the above this was one of the best I've ever seen — right up there with the likes of The Searchers and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. (Nowhere near as beautiful as those two, though. They didn't even really try. It's a writer's movie.)
(Whoops, I let the post sit in a tab for three hours and now the part where I said I just got back was a lie.)
I just got back from The Hateful Eight in 70mm and I really loved it! It wasn't really even a Tarantino film — that is to say, there's no clashing pastiche, no close-ups of feet, and it's chronological but for one flashback — it's just a classically-made Western and taut pressure-cooker mystery-thriller, but hard R and allowed to directly mention dicey social issues. A real model of restraint to convention, with fantastic results.
Its only quirk — and likewise its only flaw — was the existence of two narrated scenes, which both succumbed to a fatal case of Tell-Don't-Show and could have been elegantly directed around so seamlessly you wouldn't have even known it, because it would have been competence. Instead, you get two sore-thumb narrated scenes in the last half of the film that emerge from no perspective at all, emerge from nowhere at all since narration neither opens or closes the film, undermine the reality and mood of the film, and all in the service of naked script spackle.
I love me a good western, and despite the above this was one of the best I've ever seen — right up there with the likes of The Searchers and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. (Nowhere near as beautiful as those two, though. They didn't even really try. It's a writer's movie.)
(Whoops, I let the post sit in a tab for three hours and now the part where I said I just got back was a lie.)