2016 starts with a bang: Quentin Tarantino´s The Hateful 8.
The Hateful 8 is the 9th feature film directed by Quentin Tarantino, mega pop culture vulture and one of the top reasons for excitement in the film world today.
The Hateful 8 portrays the mutual bloodbath of the eponymous 8, in a series of unfortunate events surrounding a botched attempt at rescuing a death convict (Jennifer Jason Lee) from a bounty hunter (Kurt Russel) on his way to deliver her to her place of execution in 19th century Wyoming. It starts like Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), then continues like (or rather, for obscure reasons reminded me of)The Petrified Forest (Archie L Mayo, 1936) and (spoiler alert) concludes very much like Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1993), with the few characters not dead either painfully or fatally wounded.
Quentin Tarantino carries a heavy burden with every new release, as precedent inflates expectations to absurd levels. In The Hateful 8, he undisputedly succeeds. The film doesn’t have the magnum opus aura the Kill Bills,Inglourious Basterds, or Django Unchained acquired, but it displays all the traits of the director's style at their peak: a propensity for dipthycs (The Hateful 8 could, with a bit of fancy, be considered a sequel to Django Unchained), a musical use of American English in dialogue (here in the Hollywood version of Western drawl), masterful direction of closed space sequences (about half an hour inside a stagecoach, reminiscent of the car scene in Death Proof, and another 2 hours in Minnie's Haberdashery – has to be seen to be believed), dramatically virtuoso use of flashbacks to turn the plot upside down a few times, a Freudian fixation on real (bullets to balls) or symbolic (severed arms) castrations, a Shakespearean approach to multiple protagonists and amoral characters, a Hawksian pleasure in telling a story for the sake of telling it even if, or especially because, there really isn't much of a story to tell.
The Hateful 8 hasn’t received the praise I think it deserves and awaits – and will certainly receive – an exegesis of more consequence that the perfunctory lines above. And it has enough quotes for at least a decade on The MacMahonian best quote list. Most are better heard than read but Ill leave you with just one, which I feel sums up the films ethos: “You only gotta hang bastards, but bastards you gotta hang”.