The Hatefull Eight (2015)

Though filmed in 'Glorious 70 Millimeter', as it goes out of its way to tell you, Quentin Tarantino's second western (though I suppose Django Unchained is technically a 'southern') is set largely in the interior of a stagecoach and a one room way station in the snowy Wyoming frontier some years after the Civil War. This 'intimacy in cinemascope' is effectively like making a Delbert Mann movie in the style of David Lean. Taking the now largely unused film stock of an earlier era, as well as appropriating the now octogenarian composer Ennio Morricone, (whose work is synonymous with the Leone spaghetti westerns of the 1960's) to do the music, auteur Tarantino is right off signing his intention to take the tried and true tropes of his chosen genera and run them through his personal filter (and what more could we expect or want of him).

From Kurt Russell doing a damn fine job of channeling John Wayne, to Bruce Dern, himself a former cowboy actor, playing a decaying former confederate general. From Walter Goggins as the new sheriff in town, Michael Madsen as the largely silent stranger, Tim Roth as the (very) eastern dude, to Jennifer Jason Leigh as a very spunky gal indeed. We've seen these folks before, just not quite like this. Samuel L. Jackson breaks convention the most as the black Union veteran who is very no nonsense, yet he's also a cartoonishly skilled gunslinger, something we've seen many times before in westerns. All these variations on well known character types are stuck together for the greater part of three hours more or less just hating on each other.

Tarantino is a skilled craftsman of cinema, in his way with form and subverting it one of the finest perhaps ever. This is an elegantly crafted film, filled with sharp dialogue, wide ranging characterizations, and an atmosphere you can just soak in. Yet it's also probably his most unpleasant movie. Of course his taste for extremely bloody violence is well known, but here it is unusually droll, and either cruller then usual, or it just feels like that because all these characters are really pretty unlikable. The film lacks in its over the top violence what for want of a better term I'll call a kind of joy that is present in the directors other works, though I think you can start to feel it draining in this movies immediate predecessor Django Unchained. More then anything there is one certain scene in this film, and you'll know it if you ever see it, that is so awful, cruel and mean spirited that its just uncomfortable to sit through. All that being said I can't deny the films its artistry, no one makes a movie like Tarantino, though by the end of this movie I was wondering how much longer that will be enough. ***1/2