And it’s this sensitivity that makes me wonder to what degree The Hateful Eight is an awful, miserable sit on purpose, while knowing full well that this is a dog-chasing-tail argument. It’s this ability that’s allowed him to remain so popular. 1 seems born from that early aughts moment of global cultural proliferation. In his other films, he’s proven himself a kind of voracious cultural sponge that locates and soaks up latent tendencies from the ether and repackages them-see how he condensed the Clinton era’s hunger for anything resembling the countercultural ( Pulp Fiction) and the mainstreaming of fascination with black culture ( Jackie Brown), or how Kill Bill Vol. Tarantino’s had a spotty record, at best, in this regard, seeming most adept through his career when he’s purposely unpacking and diagramming the machinery of the movies themselves (his two best films: Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds) than anything at work in society at large. Now, noting that these are elements in a film is quite a different thing from arguing that they’re marshaled toward a designed end. In this world, guns are everywhere, authority is fleeting, the profit motive reigns supreme, memories of the Confederacy loom large and an absent Lincoln, unable to defend his legacy, is just left twisting in the breeze. Though set during the Reconstruction, it’s a readymade Cliff’s Notes of shitty late-Obama America: Whites hating Blacks Blacks hating Whites both hating on Latinos and all feeling pretty ok about abusing women as well. Why haven’t I been able to let this bloated, torpid, sort of sickening whale of a film just drift off to sea? Perhaps it’s because that at the tail end of a just-god-awful year here in ‘Murica, in which indignities and horrors were manifold, and our society, at least as refracted by our news media, seemed strained in every direction, The Hateful Eight washed up on shore at 2015’s end with a thud and seemed to encapsulate it all. On this very website, Reverse Shot lifer Nick Pinkerton referred to Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering as “a bloated, torpid, and largely graceless piece of work.” Another longtime RS contributor, Adam Nayman, said of the same film in the pages of Cinema Scope: “ The Hateful Eight may really be sort of terrible.” And at Vice, RSer Ashley Clark called it “a sickening experience three-plus hours marooned in front of the projected fulminations and fetishes of an untrammeled egotist.” I can’t say I much disagree with any of these very smart gents, which is why I’ve found the regular drift of my thoughts back to The Hateful Eight more than a little perplexing.
#Kill bill cast oi movie#
Movie of the Moment (for Worse): The Hateful Eight
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