Apparently they did waive the embargo early - all the major trades were contacted and given the green light to publish their reviews about a week ago, and soon after everyone else jumped in.
My memory of this film isn't that fresh anymore - watching at least a dozen of films in the interim and the fact I didn't like it really didn't help - but I still remember my impressions pretty well, if not all the specifics.
The film is broken up into two parts by an intermission, something studios should consider re-instating for any 3-hour epic. Honestly, a 10-minute break makes a big difference, I was grateful for that. You come back even more focused.
The first half was surprisingly boring, the material just never ignited. It "looked" excellent, the cast was fine, the wall-to-wall dialogue also carried you along, but it kind of felt like a less-than-interesting pastiche of Tarantino's past work. The style was there, but it just wasn't compelling. My disappointment grew when it came to the first half's closing payoff,
where Samuel L. Jackson baits Bruce Dern into attempting murder, thus giving Jackson a barely-passable legal excuse to shoot him down.
The intent and the outcome is completely telegraphed as soon as
Jackson places that gun next to Dern.
I didn't mind that it was predictable because what really mattered to me was the story he was about to tell.
Instead, the goading payoff - that he had Dern's son give him a blow job at gunpoint - was just stupid.
I love the juvenile jokes in Tarantino's films because they're done with wonderful panache, but in this case it had the inspiration of a typical middle schooler.
There were a few interesting bits.
Jackson's fake letter from Lincoln opened up some discussion on what something like that does for a black man, but I don't think it had the profound implications some of the film's biggest champions have claimed. It was appreciated, but honestly, I felt like the ideas had been given much better explorations in many other Westerns.
One thing that did bother me a bit was
the repeated physical violence towards Jennifer Jason Leigh's character. I'd have to revisit all of his films again, but this may have been the first time where I was bothered by something like this in his movies. The intention seems clearly - they're supposed to be humorous moments - but the execution this time around bothered me. Maybe it's the way it plays out when you're first introduced to this woman - before you even know who she is, you see her with a really battered face. It's implied she's a terrible criminal with a huge bounty on her head - you aren't told why, it's pretty much given she's a horrible human being, but she's then repeatedly beat up right in the face by these cool, swaggering, boastful men, and the whole thing just rubbed me wrong way. Later on in the film, the violence becomes ridiculously cartoonish as it involves someone vomiting an unrealistic amount of blood into her face and other things of that nature, and at that point I was able to accept it as over-the-top farce, but in these less ludicrous early scenes, it did get under my skin.
With the second part of the film, things did pick up, and I did start to enjoy it
from the start of the second half to Jackson getting ambushed by a hidden Channing Tatum.
I can't remember, but it may have been at this point that the running gag with the door did get funny for a while after a very slow start (though it did get really tiresome again).
But things took a turn for the worse when we jump back to the past. For a while, one of the most enjoyable elements of Tarantino's films was their chronological structure.
Pulp Fiction is still the best example of this. But with this film and his last film,
Django Unchained, he's made these jumps in time that haven't worked at all. With
Django Unchained, it felt really clumsy, and at the time I wondered if it had something to do with the loss of his great editor, Sally Menke - that film felt unusually flabby as well. This time around, my reaction was different.
After Jackson's ambush, we go back and see how the place got taken over. In general, this whole sequence felt completely unnecessary - I don't think the film would've missed anything that was truly vital. I really wonder how the dynamic would've been had it been omitted altogether, because having it in does dispose of any mystery remaining in the film from that point on. Far worse is that it did play in a way that felt very distasteful. What really sticks out is the dynamic created by this scene's chronological placement - we're just waiting to see these people get brutally slaughtered. It's really the whole point of this jump back in time. We know they're going to be killed from the very start, it's only a matter of when, and it just made every second feel like disgusting forced voyeurism. It was suggested earlier that hey, that's the point - we don't flinch from this stuff, we're going to see how terrible these killers are. It didn't really play that way for me - even if it's not the intention, it felt pretty sadistic and left a bad taste in my mouth. It actually recalled for me one of the most problematic shots of Inglorious Basterds, which I'll discuss a bit later. The killers in The Hateful Eight may be terrible men, but we just spent a few hours getting to know these people as cool and charismatic individuals, and as the music swells up, they swagger over, looming over the camera before brutally blowing away their victims. Again, the same people we've been waiting to die for the whole scene, and of course the last time we see them alive is sniveling and crying in immense pain. I would like to argue that this is an intentionally horrific perspective at a terrible moment, that it's a brilliant display of a cold, brutal killing that really says something about violence, but that just didn't get across for me. I just felt repulsed. Why are you guys really showing us this?
And this brings me to another problem with this film that again recalls
Inglorious Basterds (and for that matter a lot of Tarantino's more recent work). That problematic shot I mentioned was the close-up reaction of Eli Roth as he's firing an assault rifle from a balcony, gunning down the audience in the movie theater, like a mass slaughter of cattle. The saving grace is that they're Nazis. I actually thought that film was very good, and there was much about it that I thought was great. But
Inglorious Basterds still bothers me as a film that put a lot of stock into revenge, in that case trying to match or even top the Nazis when it came to sadism. Revenge is more than plot motivation, it's been the general point of his most recent films, and it just feels really empty to me. He may change the context each time out, and I would like to say that doing so made a profound difference in his last three films, but I don't think it has. They all feel centered on the same narrow philosophy, and it isn't edifying to me.
Some reviews are boasting that the movie is making some great statement on U.S. history and race relations, but that really seems like a stretch. If it does well, at least it's a film that was done by an auteur without compromises - that's very rare now, especially for a film of this budget and scope. And it's now the poster boy for saving celluloid. I really wish the film itself rose beyond the level of these causes.
Poor Quentin
