Tarantino spent the first half of the movie building up a sort of Agatha Christy / 10 Little Indians sort of vibe, where you’re wondering who is really who and what their motivations are.
In the second half, he got bored of that, and it’s just 60 minutes of people killing each other and talking about how evil and convoluted their past was.
Really, once you got the Ennio Morricone music playing over the scene of the carriage cruising through the snow, you exhausted the best part of the movie.
Great cast, not a great movie. Some violence, some swearing, a quite a bit of gore, and too much of the N-word in the dialog, which Tarantino feels compelled to overuse. If you’re interested in seeing Kurt Russell destroy a priceless 145-year old guitar, Hateful Eight has that too.
Halfway through Hateful Eight? So you only made it to Waspish Four?
I like the movie quite a lot, myself, including the ending. With one arguable exception, every single character that appears on screen, including flashbacks, ends up dead or dying, and not off-camera like one of those end-of-the-world flicks.
Everyone dies way later than expected, seeing as how Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character was so beating-tolerant she was obviously Jessica Jones and could have ended things much earlier.
Personally, I consider it a Masterpiece. But de gustibus non est disputandum, so here goes a quick summary:
Samuel L. Jackson goads Bruce Dern into drawing his revolver first by telling him a story about how he killed after sexually abusing Bruce Dern’s son. Kurt Russell dies unexpectedly of a mysterious poisoning, leaving Jackson as the new Main Character, because why not. A narrator appears our of nowhere in the middle of the movie because of course it does, and explains how all the characters except for Jackson, Kurt Russel and Walton Googins were part of the Domergue gang, killed the actual patrons of the Minnie’s Haberdashery only allowing Bruce Dern to remain since he was about as rotten as the outlaws, and, surprise, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s brother, played by Channing Tatum was also there, hiding in the basement. The narrator disappears for the rest of the movie. There’s a shootout of which the only sort of survivors end up being Jackson and Goggins, mortally wounded. The End.
I get how the whole Tarantino worship by us, the fanbase, can get pretty annoying, but he set out to make a movie mixing John Carpenter and Sergio Leone while adding his own randomly meta touches, and it worked for me. Leone couldn’t have done it better. Sorry.
I see the film as an interesting attempt at one of those ‘this changes the meaning of everything you saw before’ twist films. I don’t think it really came off. Good cast, though.
I still want to know (a) where the hell all that artificial light was coming from, indoors and out, and (b) how come it was so warm inside with a raging blizzard blowing through all the chinks in the walls (and the broken door). :dubious:
Okay I read the information offered in this thread and I read the Movie Spoilers recap. Knowing that the remainder of the plot and knowing it was shallow nonsense actually made it easier to tolerate the rest of the movie. I didn’t have to pay very close attention to it.
I can’t say I am improved by having seen it but I felt obligated from a cultural awareness standpoint to know about it, because the director and the cast are all so famous.
What really annoyed me from the start was the feeling that the director thought he was being so clever setting up this bottle story. The stage theater aura permeating the whole thing felt so pretentious. The comment that it was like a half-assed attempt at an Agatha Christie story abandoned halfway through was right on the nose.
I also read the stories about the guitar. That’s tragic. And Tarantino was apparently surveying the scene with a shot-eating grin. I wouldn’t be surprised were it to turn out that he did it on purpose. What a dick.